Holding Up the Light of Hope

Rev. Beth Hoffman Copenhaver

December 1, 2024, First Sunday in Advent

Scripture: Jeremiah 33:14–16; Romans 5:1–5

It is a new year in the life of the church. Advent marks this beginning. While the secular calendar has us still consuming Thanksgiving leftovers and now counting the days until December 25, the Christian calendar has turned the page towards a shiny new year filled with unknown opportunity and divine potential. Walter Brueggemann writes of this sacred season: “Advent is an abrupt disruption in our ‘ordinary time’…utterly new year, new time, new life. Everything begins again…” While this year our world feels especially weary and is in waiting and wondering rather than rejoicing, the church already steps into a different time, to begin a span marked by the powerful touchstones of hope, peace, joy and love—all in prayerful anticipation for Christmas. Bruggeman continues, “Advent invites us to awaken from our numbed endurance and our domesticated expectations, to consider our life afresh in light of new gifts that God is about to give”. That seems especially profound and necessary in these days. The season of Advent is given to us as a time to prepare, to wait, to expect—to make space in our lives to once again welcome the Promised One into our hearts, who comes to us as a fragile yet resilient baby, awaiting our care and nurture. This year our Advent theme is “Hold Up The Light” and through these weeks we invite you to pay close attention to the ways the light of hope, peace, joy and love seep in to our lives in unexpected and necessary ways. How fitting that we begin with hope.

Jeremiah 33:14–16

The days are surely coming, says God, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will raise up a righteous Branch from the line of David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be safe, and Jerusalem will be secure. They will call the land, “God is our justice”.

Romans 5:1–5

Now since we have been made right in God’s sight by our faith, we are at peace with God through our savior Jesus Christ. Because of our faith, Christ has brought us to the grace in which we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to the day on which we will become all that God intended. And not only that, but we also boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and such a hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Prayer: Open our hearts, Holy One, to the possibilities found in these sacred words, and in this day, and during this Advent Season. Empower us to hold up the light, to embrace tightly the touchstone of hope, to be open to the gifts You present us. Amen.

Last Sunday in Seth’s farewell gratitude sermon he shared with us three commitments he has made based on some extraordinary life experiences, lessons he has learned, and perspective he has gained. Publicly Seth declared he will not give up hope, he would work to respond in joy and he would express gratitude as often as he could… outloud. He then encouraged us to prayerfully consider our own commitments as we move forward, building an individual and communal life of purpose and meaning. I don’t know Seth—yours are really good. Can we just all adopt yours?

If considering your life commitments seems too daunting a task in this liminal time—where what we knew has passed and what is to come is no longer certain, then let me invite you to make an Advent commitment. Only four weeks in length, Advent invites us to really hone in on the hallmarks of faith found in the meaning of Christmas. Each week as we light another candle we offer a prayer for hope, for peace, for joy, for love. What if each of us chose just one of those touchstones to shape our practical and purposeful decisions in this holy season. Perhaps starting here will lead to a renewed sense of mission as we move into all the unknowns of 2025. Our “commitments” will be birthed from the intentionality of the practice we begin during Advent, intentions and actions that we usher in along with the promises found in a savior baby.

Jeremiah is written to a people in exile. Most of this scriptural prophetic book is taken up with themes of God’s judgment, as demonstrated by Jeremiah’s nickname: the weeping prophet. However, in the midst of the heaviness recounting the wrongs of the people, a tiny stream of hope emerges in Jeremiah chapters 30-33, known also as the Book of Consolation. Familiar and reliable scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that this text is not about optimism or history. Rather, it is the unveiling of the character of God. God is faithful. God is powerful and God is committed to these people. Three times in three short verses, Jeremiah tells us “the days are coming” and “in those days.” This text, then, invites us into a posture of waiting while looking forward—of not assuming that whatever this moment holds is the final word. God’s people live with a attitude of anticipation, of expectation. No wonder this is the assigned reading for the first Sunday of Advent!

Jeremiah 33:14–16 envisions the rise of a leader from the line of David. The imagery of these short verses underscores Jeremiah’s claim that in the future, both this leader and the redeemed people will model justice. For those living in exile, justice was not an abstract concept. Justice was then and is now a personal practice of care and attention to the needs of others, especially focusing on those most vulnerable… in biblical times this would be the widows, orphans, strangers. The leader whom is prophesied will be the agent of divine justice and righteousness leading the people into the prophets words just two chapters earlier, “a future filled with hope”.

Jeremiah’s prophesy emphasize my own understanding of hope, that hope is the knowledge that what ever the situation is now—personal, communal, global—will not always be. Shifting and change are the outcomes of hope as we strive to both live presently and look forward, trusting that whatever it is we wrestle with in this moment has the capacity, when attention is paid, to develop into something beautiful and better. Hope includes a steadfast spirit and a perseverance in prayer. Hope asks us to lean in to God, trusting that the Divine source desires to lead the beloved from any kind of suffering to healing, and joy, and betterment, and security, all rooted in love. Hope invites tenacity and grit, a determination that while we may not know what the future holds, we know God holds the future.

For as long as I can remember, the passage from the 5th chapter of Romans has been my favorite section of scripture. The words used have powerful connotations: suffering, endurance, character, hope. This particular text has provided me both great comfort and great consternation over the years, certainly dependent upon which phase of the progression I find myself within. To say we have known suffering is a trite understatement—the varieties of suffering humanity faces is vast. Each of us carry burdens, some obvious and many not, which weigh heavily on our heart, mind, body, spirit. The truth that some of us acknowledge and others do not yet realize is that it is our strength that gives us what we need to endure. A strength, perhaps found within our own will or even from our understanding of God… a strength that ultimately evolves from the understanding that something WILL change in our circumstances so as to move us onward into whatever life has in store for us next. What could be more character building? As we companion with God to move through our most difficult times, hope becomes our beacon, our lighthouse when we are far out to sea. Suffering… endurance… character… hope. While it is difficult in the midst of a particular struggle in our life to realize that if we just hold on long enough we’ll learn something from the experience, in retrospect this is most often the truth. That growth, that progress, that willingness to wait for something more—that is hope. Theologian Anne Lamott writes “We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.” Hope will not disappoint us.

Hope disrupts our status quo because it keeps us looking forward—convinced that what is right now will not always be; trusting that those changes will bring gifts and possibilities we can not even yet imagine. And God is with us… every step of our determined way.

Many times I have confessed my deep appreciation for the work of Jan Richardson, a theologian who writes the most profound blessings. In a meditation written one year after her beloved husband died unexpectedly from surgical complications Richardson wrote, “Hope is not always comforting or comfortable. Hope asks us to open ourselves to what we do not know, to pray for illumination in this life, to imagine what is beyond our imagining, to bear what seems unbearable. It calls us to keep breathing when beloved lives have left us, to turn toward one another when we might prefer to turn away. Hope draws our eyes and hearts toward a more whole future but propels us also into the present, where the Divine waits for us to work toward a more whole world now.”

Holding up the light of hope is my commitment this Advent season. Might it be yours, too? The people whom Jeremiah had to hold accountable depended on hope to keep looking towards something better than they knew presently. Jeremiah brings a message that God holds a future different from today. And that God does not work alone but needs us to fulfill the promises. Let us embrace the stubbornness of hope that will not let things be as they are but invites us to imagine the coming days as ones with peace and joy and love. As we partake in the sacrament of communion today may we know hope symbolized in the breaking of bread, in the expanse of the table and the wideness of the invitation to participate, in the remembrance of Jesus’ love to and for us. Let us bring all the realities of who we are with us as we come forward—the suffering, the endurance, the character… trusting that it is HOPE that will not disappoint us.

I close with Jan Richardson’s “Blessing of Hope”:

So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:

hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,

hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,

hope that has breath
and a beating heart,

hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,

hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,

hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,

hope that raises us
from the dead—

not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.

Amen.