Hopefully, Advent

A homily for Advent II
Isaiah 11.1-10, Romans 15.4-13, (CW Matthew 3.1-12) (BCP Luke 21.25-33)



Advent is all about waiting in hope, a word prominently used by St Paul in today’s reading from Romans 15. By our steadfastness and the comfort of the scriptures, we will receive hope, he assures us; praying also that the God of hope might fill us with such joy and peace in believing that we ‘abound in hope’ through God’s Holy Spirit. It is itself a comforting corner of scripture: we would all surely welcome a little more hope in our lives. But first, perhaps, we should decide what hope is, what we hope for, and who or what we hope in.



Hope is not just another word for optimism, or a desperate attempt to make unlikely things happen. It is in fact a sort of love: ‘I hope you’re feeling better soon,’ we might say in an expression of care for someone. Or it might be a hunger for justice: ‘I hope they find whoever did this …’. Hope always sees what is the case, and responds with what should be: ‘I hope you get the job… I hope the government listens… I hope her tests are negative … ‘.



As well as being an expression of love, hope is also a sort of faith. A famous bishop used to say that

‘God is.
God is as he is in Jesus.
Therefore there is hope.’



Believing in the sort of God we believe in makes hope not only coherent but necessary! Our God is neither malign nor random, but is a God of deliberate love, holding everything in his merciful loving kindness. This can not save us from sadness or sickness or death: we are not pets, after all, luxuriously protected from the reality of life in the wild. Yet, whatever happens to us takes place within the context of God’s creative love. Even when the world finally ends, that divine love makes it completely credible to hope in God’s fresh creation, even from the ashes of the past.



What we hope for constantly is the Kingdom of God. We hope for a fairer and safer world, whose beauty is protected; where happiness and health flourish; where love triumphs; where we are so drawn into God’s loving heart that we enter his ‘new heaven and new earth’ and inherit that paradise eternally.



What we hope in is Christ, incarnate, crucified, risen; the source and subject of scripture, whose comfort and truth bring us hope. Christ is, as Paul reminds us, the prophet Isaiah’s ‘root of Jesse’ putting forth a fresh shoot as a new sort of king, descended from King David, focusing anew on righteousness and justice, and ‘the meek of the earth’. He will bring together predator and prey so that, in his Kingdom, wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, calf and lion shall live together in peace. ‘And a little child shall lead them.’



This is our hope, and although we won’t see it all by tea-time on Tuesday, it remains our Advent hope, born of our Christmas and Easter faith. We must work in that faith and hope, in steadfastness with Christ, until the Kingdom of God now ‘nigh at hand’ is known in truth throughout the earth, and become our heavenly home for all eternity.