The Gift of Hope - An Advent Message

Throughout Advent I have been thinking about the gift of hope. Strangely enough, my musings about hope have led me to consider for the first time in a long time the days that followed my mother’s death. The connection between hope and my mother’s death surprised me at first – what could the two possibly have to do with one another? But what I have observed in my musings is that a lot of my own hope for today and for the future is rooted in this time of extreme grief and loss and the process of healing that has unfolded since that time.

Most if not all of us know how unreal the first few days following a loved one’s death are. The fact of that person’s death is slowly beginning to sink in but you’re so incredibly busy making arrangements for the funeral and the burial and the reception and taking care of all the other details that must be attended to when someone dies that it’s easy to forget that this person you loved is gone.

Up until the moment that we were standing by the grave for the committal service following mom’s funeral I had pretty much been lost in the surreal quality of everything that was going on around me. I had cried a little off and on through the visitation and funeral but it wasn’t until the committal service was over and my mother’s casket was being lowered into the ground that the fact of my mother’s death, the reality of what this meant – came crashing in on me and all of a sudden I lost all control. I began to wail and cry like I never had before and haven’t since.

Someone grabbed me and led me away from the grave side and back to the waiting limo. I could barely walk through the sheer and utter bodily grief. I was 17 years old and the bottom had just dropped out of my life. The last little threads holding me in place were cut and I was adrift, lost and alone in the world. My mother was dead. I wasn’t ever going to talk to her on the phone again. She wasn’t going to watch me grow into adulthood and teach me what she knew about being a woman. She wasn’t going to be there for me when I needed her. My mother, the one who birthed me from her womb and loved me the best she could – was dead. Where was God? Where was Hope?

For a long time I thought God was completely absent from those moments. I was angry, confused, hurting and I believed God had abandoned me. What I have learned is that God was and is in the midst of it all. God is in the pain and the sorrow and the endings of life. God is in the grief and the pain and the regrets.

But what does it mean to see God in the midst of the brokenness of our lives? How can we begin to see God giving the gift of hope from the pain, sorrow, despair and brokenness of our world. Can we train our eyes to recognize Jesus standing in the midst of the end of the world as we know it beckoning us to hope, to love, to peace and to joy?

Perhaps this is what the season of Advent is about - training our eyes and our hearts to see Jesus all the time, everywhere, in every desperate situation, each hope-filled action, every ending and every beginning, and each expression of care. In Advent maybe our task is to learn how to accept God's gift of Hope no matter what and then find ways to be hope in a world that is desperately in need of such a precious gift.

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote the following about what he tried to do in his book Theology of Hope; “I tried to present the Christian hope no longer as such an ‘opium of the beyond’ but rather as the divine power that makes us alive in this world.”

Even when the world collapses around us, when the bottom drops out, when all that we thought we could rely upon has gone up in smoke, we can trust in God’s faithfulness. We can depend on God remaining watchful and alert, prayerful and humble, in the midst of the world as we know it and in its ending.

It’s taken me 22 years to feel like I’m approaching some kind of peace with my mother’s death. But as I’ve put the pieces back together I’ve finally come to the point where I can give thanks for my mother who gave me life and for all the things she taught me and for the beautiful person she was despite her shortcomings.

And perhaps most importantly as I move through this Advent season of preparation, waiting and watching for the coming of Jesus and the return of Christ I am aware that my ability to look at the world with love and my firm and tenacious grasp on hope is rooted in this most awful experience of my life. When I look back at that moment in the cemetery and at all that’s happened since then I can see the hand of God, the presence of Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit breaking in and out and all over the place through the people and circumstances and situations that have been such a blessing to me over the years.

There has always been enough love. There have always been women to teach me about being a woman. There have always been lessons to learn as the pain healed. There has been a deepening of compassion for the pain and sorrow of others and a strong desire to act quickly to find resolution and forgiveness when things go wrong. And perhaps most important through it all has been the abiding presence of our Christian story of birth, life, death and resurrection which gives me the greatest hope of all.

God can do anything – create this amazing, limitless universe, form a people, save them from starvation, bring them out of slavery, rescue them from the wilderness, restore them after exile, hold them together when the Temple was destroyed, limit God’s self to be born a helpless baby, heal, perform miracles, right wrongs, restore people to community, suffer and die an unwanted, unjust, awful death, conquer all of the powers of death by the power of the resurrection and live on in us and with us forever. If this isn’t a reason to have hope even in the most awful moments of our lives, I don’t know what is.

Through the most awful experience of my life I gained one of the greatest gifts of all – the gift of hope. I know there is nothing I can’t handle, even death. I know I am never alone. And I can see the Chosen One coming more and more clearly in this community, in our world, in my own life, in the midst of the anguish, and the grief and the fear.

Jesus tells the disciples; “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Luke 21:33) We can lose everything, indeed we will lose everything but we will never lose God’s Word, Jesus words, the promise of a life forever in God’s loving care. This is God’s promise to us. It is real and it can be trusted.

And so I invite you and I urge you to receive the gift of hope that comes in unexpected ways. Embrace the idea of hope. Point to hope in your life, with your words and actions. Be a person who lives in hopefulness. Share the hope you have from God with the world.

See, Jesus, Emmanuel is coming – in you, in me, in us, in the joys and the sorrows of life God is doing a new thing. Let us all perceive it. Thanks be to God. Amen.