I can’t believe it is ADVENT! Christmas is right around the corner. As we get older, it is true, time seems to pass more quickly. Before we know it, our Christmas trees will be put up and taken down. The Christmas shopping bills will be due, and we will be facing 2024.
For Advent this year our them is a Matt Maher song called, “Hope for Everyone.” No doubt, we all want hope. No one wants to live in a hopeless world. We want to believe that life can and will get better. We want to believe that 2024 will be better than 2023. But what is hope from a Christian perspective?
Most of us hope the Phoenix Suns will win the championship. We hope our candidate, or our political party wins the next election. We buy a lottery ticket and hope to win the big jackpot. But real hope goes deeper than those things. Real hope is in Christ. Hope, for the Christian, is a virtue which moves us to put our trust in God and in His grace. Hope gives us the assurance that the all-good God wills our good and wills our salvation. Faith and hope work together as the foundation of our lives.
The theme for the first week of Advent 2023 is “Hope for Healing.” We trust that God will heal us from our sins. We know that God will heal us from our brokenness. And we have faith that we will be eternally healed from all the pains and diseases of this life. As Christians, it is also appropriate to ask God to heal us of cancer, and other infirmities of our bodies. And because of hope we know that whatever happens God will bring us to the place we need to be closer to Him.
Julian of Norwich was a mystic and a writer who lived in the 1300’s. During her life, England suffered the devasting effects of the Black Death (the plague). At age 30 she was on her death bed and during that time she received visions of Christ. She recovered from her illness and started writing from seclusion. Her most famous quote is “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” This type of Christian optimism is what HOPE really is. Even in the face of death, plague, or sickness, in Christ, “All shall be well.”
I hope we have a beautiful Advent together. On the surface, I hope Christmas is good for the economy, that we all do a good job Christmas shopping, and that Christmas dinner comes out great. But on a deeper level, I HOPE that the birth of Christ changes my heart and yours. I HOPE we are healed of all those things that keep us from God. And, I hope, ALL SHALL BE WELL in Christ.