Come Home to Hope

by Rev. Eric Folkerth

Our Advent theme this year is: “Coming Home.”

We mean this in every way we can…

Coming home to God…
Coming home to ourselves…
Coming home to each other…
Coming home to church…

We’re making plans for Christmas Eve to be a “come home” moment for us all as we celebrate in person at both 5 and 7 pm.

Planning has been hard to do these past few years. Every time we make a plan, it feels like we are all Charlie Brown and that the world is Lucy - always pulling the ball away at the last minute.

We’ve made so many hopeful plans that have, so many times, had to be revised and changed.

It becomes dizzying and disorienting, really. Hard to find “Hope” and trust when so much feels in flux.

Nevertheless, we lit a candle of Hope this past Sunday anyway. We dared to speak words of a hopeful future for ourselves and for our world. This crazy work is our calling during Advent. We are called to speak to Hope in times when disorienting dizziness still reigns supreme.

I am reminded of the words of Cyprian, the Christian saint who lived in the year 250 AD. Cyprian lived in a time of horrible pestilence. We would call it a “global pandemic,” but they didn’t have those words back then.

It was bad. And at its height, five thousand people a day were dying in the City of Rome.

Cyprian decided that this was evidence the world was coming to an end. It wasn’t, of course. But it’s very easy to see how he might have come to that conclusion.

In my view, Cyprian let the horror of what was right in front of him obscure the true message of Hope that God invites us to embrace.

Hope, as Paul so eloquently said, is “belief in things unseen.” We trust in God’s Spirit that moves in and through all things, that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, to continue to be present with us during times when it feels like all is ending.

I’m fascinated that doctors sometimes tell folks with car sickness, “Look out at the horizon…don’t focus on the immediate turns and twists around you…but look as far out to the horizon as you can…”

Focusing on the whole picture and not our up-close dizziness can sometimes calm our stomachs in a car.

It’s also the *spiritual* dynamic with Hope. We look to our spiritual horizon, not just what’s physically in front of us right now.

Hope is beyond what is happening in the moment. Hope is far beyond the bumps and bruises of any current day. Hope fixes our gaze on the horizon and trusts that Peace, Love, and Joy are still possible.

Come home this Advent and trust again in the horizon of God’s hope for you, for our church, and for our world.

Eric