Even when the world feels uncertain, Advent reminds us that hope is not naïve — it is the work we do together, holding space for love, justice, and joy to be born.
It is the role of faith communities to hold hope in escrow for each other. When we cannot feel it alone, when the world feels hopeless … it becomes our work to hold hope on one another’s behalf. We guard space for what can be made possible. Advent is the season where we practice that most intentionally.
I feel this aptly in Advent. Beginning last Sunday, the Christian season of Advent will carry us all the way to Christmas. And during Advent, we wait.
And wait.
As the nights grow longer and the frosty wind makes known, we wait.
As the sparkle of the Christmas Season descends upon the world, the season of Advent holds anticipation for the world as it can be. And still, we wait.
It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance, though, because the cultural Christianity is already celebrating “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night,” while the church is still singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel …” a yearning song of waiting for the hope of the world to come, once again.
The whole world spins and it seems, sometimes, like people are more apt to pretend that all is calm, all is bright … Flashing lights can illuminate not festivity, but the emptiness of a quiet house. Seasonally early Carols echo lost loved ones, unmet expectations and hopes deferred.
During Advent; we wait.
We remember. Sometimes the memory echoes the full house, the joy and the waiting, the anticipation from a wee one spilling over the brim.
Sometimes the memory goes back further, to the stories of a world reading itself for the righteous Rightening of hope being born: the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father … the Prince of Peace.
This season, hope seems harder to find. And this year too, the texts in a Christian context echo that yearning. The pattern of scripture we read — called a lectionary — happens in a cycle of three years, which begins at Advent. And so we begin again: in discomfort. We hear of a world waiting for justice, for peace, for God breaking in. The call is to keep awake, to stay tender, to prepare the way, even when we do not know when relief will come. Forgive us for this world we’ve made together and help us prepare the way of the Lord.
Hope is present, too, in the imagination of the world, as it can be, and as it is charged upon us to build in concert with each other. A glimpse of Joy offered! The promise of peace is coming. And in the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Joseph, the adoptive father of one to be called Jesus, dreams that the baby coming in his family — while not biologically his — is one who will change the world, and point us all toward a more just way. Here, hope finally breaks through in dream form: a baby not his own, yet entrusted to him, who will turn the world toward justice and Love.
This is a season where we imagine the way the world can be. Someday, at Christmas, our hope will not fail. Hate will be gone and love itself will prevail. We imagine a new world where all people are free.
I love Advent because it names where I actually am: a pastor and a queer woman, a wife and mother, part of a community that knows both joy and struggle, still trying to steward hope in a world that feels so unsure. Maybe that’s why the story of a love the world didn’t have room for feels so familiar to me. And still, God showed up.
Even as hope persists, the world can feel unrecognizable. Systems I once trusted feel fragile, and the loudest voices calling themselves Christian sometimes speak in ways that feel profoundly unlike Christ.
It’s a world where hope is hard to find.
Much like the world that the texts speak of in our holy scriptures.
So when I hear the stories of people long, long, ago, in different systems of governance, asking the same questions … I know too, that hope will come again. We’ve been here before many, many, times. The world feels as if it’s ending, somewhere, every day. Collectively, we tell the stories of faith that help equip those who come thereafter to continue to carry the hope, and the tools of care.
And each year, too, Christians imagine the world as it can be; where peace and love, hope and joy orient the way we are towards each other, and our neighbors. We imagine bellies full and homes abundant and cozy. Every Advent, we reclaim our imagination: that peace and joy will orient the way we live with one another, that everyone will have enough, that love will take on flesh again. It’s not done in perfection, but in the real world, among animals and exhaustion and hope we can barely hold.
Advent teaches us that hope is not easy. Advent insists that hope is not naïve, but it is how we survive.
Rev. Dr. Chris Davies is the executive minister of programs and initiatives at the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ. She lives in western Massachusetts, and witnesses hope in action at UCC churches in many towns across the region and beyond. You can learn more at www.findhopenow.org, or connect with Rev. Dr. Chris at jesuslovesdinos.bsky.social or on Facebook.
