Advent Hope - Day 21

Reflection

As Advent nears it’s end and we are looking forward to it’s fulfillment in Christmas, I wonder how much this time of waiting is treasured. So many of us are sad today for personal reasons and for reasons that are beyond us, like world events and the general cruelty of people to each other. Yesterday, I stood and bore witness to a march on Douglas street protesting the deaths of children in Gaza, and I thought of the marches in New York by which Dorothy Day and others protested the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan during the early 1940s.  Does it ever end?

The whole world groans for the revealing of the children of God. And it is a long reveal.
Yet it seems to me that our longing is the evidence of hope and our tears of sadness are prayers.

I draw courage from Romans 8:18-26. We must not lose sight that the suffering we and the world are going through are birthing pains, and that the whole world is going through those pains. And we must not lose sight that the evidences of goodness and love that we recognise in our confusing world are the ligaments and sinews, corpuscles, nerve cells, and stem cells of new life that is being knit together. We must believe and nurture and honour these realities as much as we are aware of suffering.

That is our work as Christians, I believe, to bear witness to the new life within our midst. We are midwives accompanying the struggling world, or anxious and supportive siblings waiting in expectation and reminding fearful people that there is another way of being.  For now the old and the new dwell together, and the old is very stubborn and entrenched, and it seems at any moment the new creation will be swamped. But the message of the scriptures, the whole of the Bible, is that despite the mess, the violence, the darkness, the sorrow and the suffering, new life is present and making it’s way in our world.....and the story of the birth of Jesus tells us that it has indeed already broken in.

Franz Marc, Deer In the Forest - from wikiart

Scripture

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans. And the one who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.  Romans 8.18-27