HOPE'S STILL HERE

Reflection/Poem for the 1st Sunday of Advent               St. Thomas, Gatesville, NC

Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider                                   November 27, 202

Isaiah 2:1-5          Romans 13:11-14       Matthew 24:36-44         Psalm 122

HOPE’S STILL HERE

One night, last week I got out of bed, no longer able to sleep. I am an old man so I do get out of bed for many reasons, but that morning at 2:45 there were so many things going through my mind. I decided to do something useful and detour the mental traffic inside my skull by looking at the lessons for the 1st Sunday of Advent. My eyes stopped  at the passage from the Epistle for today in Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome: “the night is far gone, the day is near”. I had this vision in my head about Paul sitting at a table, at 3:00 in the morning after deciding that God was calling him to get out of bed and quit the cycle of worrying by writing to his friends in the community in Rome.

Like my vision of Paul, I had so many things swirling in a cesspool of worry about things I had no control over, that the only way out was to find a message of hope to live faithfully. I was reminded of the prophet Zechariah’s invitation “Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.” 

I reflected on all the things I was worried about. There were people, places and things in the past that I had no power to fix. People, places and things in the present, that I must learn to accept and live with. Then there are people, places and things looming that will come up in the future over which I will have no control.

Each of the four weeks of Advent Season has a theme: hope, love, joy and peace. I realized that the reason I got out of bed was I needed to reconnect with hope. This 1st Week of Advent week is about hope. By instinct I went to Emily Dickinson’s poem: Hope is the Thing With Feathers:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

The process of hope is to change worry into wonder. Like the heroes of Fairy tales, we move from fear into action. G.K Chesterton  wrote;” Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten,”

Too often we associate Hope with wishes. The problem with the commercialization of Christmas is that hope gets hijacked into what we want for Christmas. When we too often wish for things that we want for Christmas; we tell Santa Claus or Amazon  or some other higher power for wish fulfillment of being able to grasp more things to fill an emptimess in our souls..

When I typed out the last sentence, the computer suggested that I had a mis-spelling and it was a “M” instead of a “N” in the word “emptiness” so it was “emptiMess”. That is what psychologists call a “serendipity”- when two things happen at the same time and while they are unconnected; we ascribe meaning to it. I think my soul is not really empty- it just feels like it is; BUT- it is a mess that I need to spend more time cleaning up.

Before Jesus was born  his parents and their neighbors longed for a Messiah that would kick out and humiliate the enemies  and restore the Jewish Community to military glory. However, the hope that God gave in Jesus was not about fulfilling the wants of the people but to fulfill the desire of God to dwell in the hearts of all of God’s children; friend and enemy alike..

The hope of God was that God’s children knew that the indwelling Spirit would change their lives so much, that love and forgiveness would break out in communities. That the people would be the hands of God in comforting the broken, feeding the hungry, healing the breaches in communities, doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with each other.

Today, what is your real hope in your soul? Please pray for God to be born in your heart again.

HOPE’S STILL HERE

“Well, what do you want for Christmas?”

I’d be asked as a child and later as lover, 

to come up with a thing able to smother,

emptiness, to be cured by some business.

As ordered by suggestion; presents came,

In time to try fulfilling that empty open void,

which gifts often failed. I became annoyed,

with playing that old magic giving game.

However, suppose I gave and shared hope,

Not from a store, but from a love freely given,

And passed through one who, being forgiven,

who’s able to see with  a much larger scope.

Hope is still here, turning worry to wonder,

Amazed when God tears greed asunder.