Advent Week 1

Hope For Those Who Wait

Thursday, December 5

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.  

1 Corinthians 15:19

As Paul tells us elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, the three great virtues of the Christian life are Faith, Hope, and Love.  But what does this mean?  Too often, we accept this claim at face value without truly understanding it, weakening it into a pale shadow of its true power where Faith becomes mental assent, Love becomes niceness, and powerful Hope becomes vague optimism (after all, studies show that this lowers your blood pressure).  God save us from such tepid, nice, intellectual Christianity!  The truth is much harder: Faith is living the difficult truths of the Gospel in every moment; Hope is Faith cast into the future, living at every moment in the confidence of God’s continued work in the world; which leads naturally to a Love that is sacrificial and transformative.    

The result of living out the advent of Hope seriously may not be so healthy as vague optimism – it may raise your blood pressure substantially!  How would we live each moment if we were not vaguely and passively optimistic that God will work in the world, but instead accept by Faith that we must work now through Love to be part of that Hope for the world?  How much more important will every moment of every day be if it is infused with the great weight of such a Hope?  How can we bear to look at other people – and yet how could we look away? – if in every soul around us we see by Hope that this, too, is a soul of infinite worth, participating in the Glory of God when it lives and acts in Love?  Our Hope in Christ is not just for this world or in this world, it is not limited by what is possible or practical, by what will balance the budget or help our church gain a few more members – if it were, we would truly be most pitiful of all people.  Instead, Paul reminds us, our Hope is grounded in an eternal Christ, and in the glow of that Hope our lives, our work, and our world should be filled with that Glory of which the angels sang so many years ago.  Glory to God in the highest, for that eternal Hope has come to live among us and within us.