2nd Sunday of Advent - 12/08/2024

image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay

Readings

Hope.  I have noticed that I use this word a lot.  I use it as a way of acknowledging possibilities.  I also recognize that it can sound wishy washy or pithy, as in ‘hopes and prayers.’  It can sound like it doesn’t have a lot of substance.  I learned something new about hope this week: hope is learned strength.

Researchers tell us that we experience hope when we have 3 things: 

1. the ability to set realistic goals, 

2. the ability to figure out how to achieve those goals (including staying flexible to develop alternative pathways), and 

3. we believe in ourselves that we can do it.  (We have agency) [1]

Hope doesn’t magically manifest itself.  Hope is born of struggle, of making our way through adversity and discomfort. [2]  Like when we face challenges to who we think we are or should be, what’s important to us or should be, our values, the way we think the world works, or our self confidence. Hope relies on change being possible because sometimes we cannot change social constructs.  We learn hope by trying, by working through challenges, and recognizing our learning along the way to our goal.  Those learnings are our strengths that tell us we can have hope again.

1st Sunday of Advent - 12/01/2024

Photo by Tina Francis Mutungu

Readings

Happy New Year!  I opened the Gospel book this morning and it’s a blank page on the left and the big words “Year C” on the right.  There’s always some excitement at starting a new year. We know what’s coming, whether it’s the months of our Gregorian calendar or the seasons of the church year.  We have four Sundays of Advent, then 12 Days of Christmas, which end with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6.  Of course, knowing what’s ahead, there’s a lot to do as we prepare for God’s arrival in the world, but it’s something we anticipate with hope rather than fear.

Fear is all around us, as it was in Jesus’ time, such that, “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world” (Luke 21:26).  Today’s Gospel reading is one of three apocalyptic readings in a row, foretelling the end of the world.  Or at least the end of the world as we know it and find comfort in it.  We’ll know the apocalypse by signs in the heavens and on the earth, roaring of the sea and the waves, earthquakes.  

The same kinds of disruptions will extend to human interactions. Human civility will cease, there will be atrocities of human against human, governments will no longer protect basic human rights, and we will live in constant fear of war, famine, and global destruction. Fear, and its cousins Hate and Scarcity, will dominate.