Hope at Christmastime

Note: Advent is a time to ponder.  To ponder the world's needs and our own expectations.  It forces us back to God's appearance in a manger.  In that appearance lies our hope for all the years to come.  They may be long, they may be violent, they may be dark.  They always have been.  But God has come among us.  To comfort us.  To walk with us.  To help us walk in step with him. To carry us when we collapse.  To lead us to the light.  To save us.  To keep our hope alive.

Emily Dickinson's poem (in italics) has reminded me of the astonishing quality of hope and how inextricably a believer's hope is connected to faith.
Our Advent prayer in 2012 is for faith-fulness and unswerving hope.

 

We live by hope.

It’s the song deep within that is never silent,

the song of “the promised land.”

 “Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul.

It sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all.”

Hope is audacious and is constant.

It does not fade but brightens when
storms flatten the farmer’s fields of grain, when
recessions wipe out one’s savings for old age, or when
one’s prayed-for child becomes untracked.

 “And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.”

Hope lived among the stumps and shacks

of those who, more than a hundred-fifty years ago,
sailed across a treacherous ocean to “the promised land”
of hunger, hardship, and disease.

 

Hope lived among the starving in the Warsaw Ghetto,
where one left this inscription on the Wall:
“I believe in the sun, even if it does not shine.
I believe in love, even if I do not feel it.
I believe in God, even if I do not see him.”

Hope lived on Robben Island within Mandela’s heart.

Hope lives among the Tutsis and the Hutu,
it lives among the exiled families of Syria,
it lives within the ghettos of our own land,

and even among the laments of Newtown, Connecticut?

“I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”

Hope never wavers, but is steadfast like a star.

It looks beyond what is, toward what is to come.
The ancient hope of Abraham, Isaiah, and Simeon.
The ancient Advent hope of all at Christmastime:
when the hopes - and fears - of all our years
are met in God’s gift of love, his Son,
our Hope for all the years to come,
into the perfect promised land.


                                                                          -emily dickinson