by Rev. Amanda Hendler-Voss

First Congregational, Washington DC

Recent weeks have marked a change in my household. From a kitchen buzzing with the voices of public radio correspondents to mornings of checking polls and political podcasts, an unsettling silence now blankets my days. Did you know that it is possible to take a break from the news? From the lurching chaos of one bombshell after another? From trying to grind every morsel of meaning out of the day’s revelations? Now, I confess this news break will not last forever, for holding the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, that quaint notion of Karl Barth, is crucial to my faith. I also confess that the quiet can be unnerving. Although I have no appetite for the latest hot take, there are voices and faces that fill my days with a kind of companionship, a sense that we’re in this together. 

But beneath the discomfort of silence swallowing my days, a deeper truth has emerged that I want to share with you this morning: I have never possessed more devotion to the way of Jesus Christ than I do right now. My faith is more important to me today than ever before, which says something as my vocation is preaching the gospel. I don’t know quite how to explain it, this deep crevasse of tenderness that has opened up in my heart, this clinging to Jesus as a rock in a weary land, as a north star amidst the churn of our slanted world.

Suddenly, it all seems so simple. Our trust in a loving God, our covenant to walk together in the ways revealed by the Holy Spirit, are so counter-cultural to what we see in the world. And with every breath I take, I will praise the God of love. I will proclaim the way of justice; I will build the beloved community. I will walk humbly the path of mercy and grace. I will look for the least and the last and remember that God dreams of them becoming first, calls them inheritors of the earth, beloved children of the Most High. When progress perishes under the weight of perilous endings in the world, Jesus is the dawn breaking upon us, giving light to all who sit in the shadow of death. Our faith recovers the authentic meaning of the words that guide us in Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.

When I used to teach the Godly Play curriculum to children, we introduced the season of Advent like this: “A King is coming, but he is not the kind of king that people thought was coming. This King had no army and no riches. This King was a baby born in a barn. The King who was coming is still coming. This is full of mystery. A mystery is hard to enter sometimes. That’s why Advent is so important. Sometimes people can walk right through a mystery and not even know it’s there. This time of year, you see people hurrying through shops buying things, but they miss the Mystery. They don’t know how to get ready.” Advent is the time when we prepare our hearts to receive the mystery of incarnation. 

And I don’t know about you, but I am in need of the stripped-bare essence of hope, peace, joy, and love this year. So often these words get co-opted by the obligations of the season, by our own shallow longings, by a twisted theology. Hope as the superficial optimism that it will all work out in the end, so why get outraged about what’s wrong with the world? Peace as an absence of critical discourse and fierce protest. Joy as the canned laughter at a holiday party, drink in hand. Love as expressed through consumerism, through protection of “us” against the threat of “them.”

These deep spiritual concepts are turned against their true meaning. It is our task, in Advent, to recover them. It is our task, as we marvel at the wonder of Emmanuel—God with us—to enflesh hope, peace, joy, and love so fully that, once again, they point the way toward our salvation. Because this year, window-dressing versions will not suffice. This year, watered down notions of these words cannot harbor us from despair. This year, our world hungers for a sturdy, subversive understanding of the Christmas story that speaks to the story unfolding all around us. 

Barbara Holmes asserts, “At the center of every crisis is an inner space so deep, so beckoning, so daringly vast, that it feels like a universe, it feels like God.” The presence of God-with-us in crisis, in pronounced endings and volatile futures, unlocks an inner spaciousness in us. A freedom to look squarely at what is and still to risk, to hope, to root ourselves in God’s abiding love as the eternal truth and final word for all of human history. 

With God, all things are possible. About the choice to love others regardless of their actions, James Baldwin wrote, “I know what I’m asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and” African American “history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.” 

This is the hope I have tasted in recent weeks, one robust enough to sustain us in the wilderness. It is a hope that as the body of Christ, we will be trustworthy; meeting right here every Sunday, a beloved community to ward off isolation. It is a hope that we will support those laboring for justice and freedom, even if they do it from the inside of hollowed out institutions. It is a hope that though we cannot do everything, we can do something, and we will act strategically, alongside partner organizations, while setting aside time for rest. It is a hope alchemized out of lament, one that has been dashed and born again in one who will be acquainted with sorrow, the healer of nations, the prince of peace.