Advent Week 1 // HOPE
This is the first week of Advent. Today we light one purple candle. This is the candle of HOPE.
Advent is a time of waiting and hoping. We wait for Christmas Day when we will celebrate, again, the birth of Jesus. We hope for the day to come when Jesus will return to this earth to establish God’s forever kingdom, just like He promised.
(Light the first candle)
Think of the last time you wanted something in your life to change, but you didn’t know how to get from point A to point B. Sometimes those kinds of "moments" can last for months or even years. What do we do when we can’t see a way through something? We can choose to be impatient, forcing some kind of outcome. We can choose to grow bitter, doubting there is a God who wants good things for us. We can choose to throw in the towel, and give up caring or working towards change. It can be easy to forget what hope even looks like in times like that. But we are not the ultimate authors of our lives, and so the plot points can fly by us without catching our eye. If you were waiting for a Messiah, would you have seen and known the significance of John the Baptist’s birth? The Messiah is not yet here, but look! A page is turning. The story is moving forward. It’s easy to see now that we have it all written down in Scripture, but what about in our own lives, being lived out right now? How can we have eyes to see God at work, with hope in our hearts?
Read: Luke 1:76-79
'And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways… whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ (King James Version)
Art Reflection:
The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1526. Jacopo da Pontormo
What do you notice?
What do you think it says about HOPE?
Poet Malcolm Guite wrote several sonnets for the season of Advent, drawing inspiration from antiphons which are chants or short songs sung as a refrain. He says, "The fifth 'great 'O’ antiphon (in my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press: Waiting on the Word) calls on Christ as the 'Oriens’, the Morning Star, the Dayspring, and it comes as an answer to the sense of darkness and captivity in the [previous] antiphon."
O Oriens
First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water
As though behind the sky itself they traced
The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.
Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream…
So every trace of light begins a grace
In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
"Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream
For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking".
"May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word." 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17
Prayer:
Dear God, thank you for your Son, Jesus. Thank you for reminding us that you’re our source of true hope. Help us to live from a place of hope and to share that hope with others who may not know or have forgotten that hope. Give us peace in the waiting. AMEN.