Hope Burns

   

Midweek Evensong

First Week of Advent, AD 2022 A

 

Reading: Isaiah1:10-20

 

Homily:

 

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

 

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

Wreaths have been around forever, give or take a few thousand years: a simple, decorative circle, adding color and life to the house, especially in wintertime when we cherish evergreens. Lutherans appear to have been the first to associate wreaths with the Advent season specifically, though German Catholics also claim some credit.

 

The modern tradition hails from one Johann Hinrich Wichern, born into poverty in nineteenth century Hamburg. He grew up to give back. He founded hostels and schools for the poor throughout Germany, and dedicated his life to the Christian duty of care for one’s neighbor, especially the indigent, the disabled, and the criminal.

 

The story goes that in one of his schools, the boys simply could not wait for Christmas; they asked him every day how long remained before the Nativity of Our Lord. Part of this might’ve stemmed from the fact that Advent used to be a rather penitential season, one of fasting and repentance, rather like Lent. Regardless, the boys, just like us, were eager to get on to the celebrations: to the tree, the food, the games.

 

Yet Advent is a season of waiting, and of finding peace within that waiting. It isn’t simply something to endure. Advent is a time set aside by the Church to meditate upon all the ways in which Christ comes to meet us, is present with us. His is a threefold arrival, a threefold presence: in history, mystery, and majesty.

 

In history, He is born as the babe of Bethlehem, the Christ and King of all. In mystery, He comes to us in the Sacraments, in the Word of God made flesh, made tangible today. And in majesty He shall close out the end of the age, that the Resurrection begun in His rising from the tomb shall spread as the fire of the Holy Spirit, consuming, repairing, renewing the cosmos, that God at the last shall be all in all.

 

So, yes, Advent is about Christmas, about preparing ourselves for the feast. But it’s also so much more than that—as well as so much less.

 

To teach this lesson to the boys in his care, and perhaps to silence their pestering, Herr Winchern took an old wooden cartwheel and affixed upon it four large white candles with little red ones in between. The large ones each represented a Sunday, with the red as the days of the week. Thus every morning he would light a successive candle, so that the glow of the wreath would grow, counting the days to Christmas with warmth and light and flame.

 

It’s a beautiful tradition, which spread rapidly. Like most of our Christmas customs, it feels ancient but ain’t necessarily so. This one that we have here today—our modern sanctuary Advent wreath—dates back about a century. You’ll notice it now has five candles: four on the outside, three blue, one rose, lit for the Sundays of Advent; and that big festal-white one in the middle for Christmas Day.

 

Blue for hope and purple for penitence are the liturgical colors of the season. And that pink one—rose, technically—that stands for joy. A number of associations or themes have accrued around each of these candles, each of these weeks. Tonight’s, for example, that first one, is often called the Prophecy Candle, and it has to do with hope. Hope and prophecy: a man could write a thousand sermons on those two words alone. But I’ll spare you just the one.

 

A prophet is a truth-teller, which is the literal meaning of our term soothsayer: to say the sooth, to tell the truth. Prophecy, in the Bible, is not all about the future. It isn’t a roadmap for centuries to come, as so many have attempted to make it. Rather, the prophetic word is one of justice, of speaking truth to power, of giving voice to those whose voices are ignored, if not outright silenced. Prophets, in the Bible, rail against evil, especially in the halls of power, amongst priests and kings.

 

But within this present-mindedness is always an implicit hope for the future. God is angry at the pain we cause, the evils we ignore, the oppressions in which we participate, precisely because He does not will this for His children, for any of us. God does not will evil. He cannot do evil. If He could, He wouldn’t be God. And so we know that evil shall not stand. God alone is good, and God alone is eternal. Thus we know, we hope, that the vision of justice will endure, will outlast all our sin.

 

And justice, mind you, is the public face of love. So when we speak of God’s wrath, God’s justice, God’s judgment, keep in mind that this is our hope and not our fear. We hope for the day, yearn for the day, when the fires of the Holy Spirit will burn out of us all the dross of sin, all our failings and fallings-short, burn out of us everything that is not us—that we shall shine as silver purified in a furnace seven times.

 

The prophets spoke of the Day of the Lord, eternally outside of time, whence the presence of God breaks into our world, to right every wrong, to raise all the dead. They spoke of what it would look like, whom it would look like, when God and Man at last are one—one as we were intended to be, one as we all shall be again. And so, yes, all prophecy speaks of Christ. All prophecy points to the God-Man, who is both Creator and Creation, both the Alpha and Omega.

 

He is our hope, our truth, our justice and our love. He always has been, even when we didn’t know Him, even when we could not call Him by that Name. All of Scripture is about Jesus. That is the secret of the Bible for us: that it gives to us Christ and it gives us to Christ. That’s the point of everything that we read together, every prophecy, every psalm.

 

Hope is not a maybe. Hope is not a wish. Hope is the power of the Holy Spirit deep within us, driving us to that Kingdom for which we hunger, placing our trust in the promises of Christ, in the promise of the Christ, and releasing us, liberating us, that we rely not on our own strength but on the white-hot grace of God. Hope burns. And before it every shadow is banished, all miasma blazed away, and all our fears are put to flight.

 

Because, yeah, the world is broken. And yeah, our life’s a mess. But God knows. He sees. He cares. And He doesn’t just sit up on His throne aloft and aloof in the heavens; He comes down here to get things done, down into the mud and the blood, to feed the hungry, cure the sick, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant, teach the ignorant, free the enslaved, flood every crack and crevice of hell, and raise up all the dead!

 

And all of that’s already done—already and not yet. The work of Christ is complete in eternity. Only here below, with time still spooling along, does the final act have yet to play out. The culmination of salvation begins to rise beyond the horizon. There’s your hope! There’s your God. There’s your resurrection. And that fire will keep you warm on the darkest, coldest nights; because you know that our hope is love inexhaustible, and one day it will burn all the world.

 

In the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.