Hope

by Ken Kelley

In this year of 2020, the world anxiously awaits the coming of a vaccine for Covid-19. We heard it proclaimed that the vaccine would “be here by Easter,” and ever since, that it’s “just around the corner.” Now we have hope and reasonable expectation that, right in the middle of the Advent season, the first vaccine(s) will be approved and given to those in healthcare followed in due time by the rest of us.

I’m not sure exactly how the vaccine will be distributed, but many of us remember standing in line in the 1960’s to receive a sugar cube containing the polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin. In 1955, the year before I was born, people began to receive a polio vaccine invented by Jonas Salk. These two people, along with the help of many others, found a way to prevent a disease which irreversibly paralyzes its victims leading to the death of 5% to 10 % of them. They had the audacity to dream of a solution to a worldwide epidemic and believe that they could make a difference. Jonas Salk put it this way, “There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.”

This Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, we will concentrate on hope and celebrate our hope by lighting the first Advent candle, the candle of hope. Our hope is for today, tomorrow, and for all eternity. We anxiously await Christ’s birth in anticipation of the hope He brings to each of us and our world collectively.

We look backward at the arrival of the Christ Child for the first time and forward to Christ coming again to save us from ourselves. For our hope is more than just the hope that Salk expressed for us to live into our best selves. Our hope for the present is represented in the words in the last verse of “O little Town of Bethlehem” that we often sing as we celebrate Christ’s birth:

“O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide in us, our Lord Emmanuel.”

Christ will only live in us if we invite him in and open ourselves to God’s direction for our lives. Only then will we allow Christ’s light of hope to shine in and through us as we serve as God’s vessels to bring God’s hope to those around us. We manifest this hope through our acts of kindness, words of encouragement, and by refusing to accept injustice in all its forms toward any of God’s children.

Although God calls each of us individually and all of us collectively as KPUMC to be catalysts of hope for our community, we must always remember the Source of our hope for today and for all our tomorrows. Sunday, we celebrate the hope of Christ coming again to fulfill all the hopes worth having that we’ll ever imagine and finally bring us to a place beyond our imagination. Stay awake! The Kingdom of God is at hand! As we wait, I pray that we will all experience a taste of that Kingdom as we share God’s hope with the world.

Ken