Hope

This reflection is also available as an audio podcast.

In advent we’re looking forward, and our characteristic attitude is one of hope.

I can remember once as a young lad going through an old railway tunnel with some friends. It got darker and darker, and a deep chill took over my body. Eventually we could see nothing and just had to feel our way along the wall, not knowing what was underfoot or what that slimy stuff was that we’d just touched. My eyes were fixed ahead, straining for the darkness to change, desperate for the first glimmer of light that would speak of a new, warm world beyond - one I would never complain about again. Eventually it was there, a pinprick of light. My eyes locked on to it, my flagging spirits rose, my energy returned, I stumbled towards it.

Hope. How we need it! And the Christian faith is full of it. And advent is the overture.

There are a lot of things in our world to bring us down at present, to lower our spirits. Climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change synthesized all the scientific reports last month and it makes chilling reading. Human greenhouse gas emissions up by 70% from 1970 levels, and projected to double by 2030. Temperature rise predicted as 4 deg C by 2100; and Christian Aid tells us that 2 deg C is the maximum the earth can cope with before catastrophic change sets in. And so on. One person who ought to know said recently we are on the Titanic; we’ve hit the iceberg; we have just five years to get off.

We tend to have two extreme responses to all this. One is panic. Why not? The other is denial. As in ‘Our emissions are tiny compared with China’s’ or ‘Personally I can’t wait until we have warmer summers.’ Or ‘I work bloomin’ hard, and I deserve my long-haul holiday.’ But there is another way.

I was at an excellent launch of a climate change project at St Mary the Virgin Oxford recently when Jonathan Porritt was speaking. His basic thesis was that in order to make the kind of personal and political changes we have to make (unless it’s to be endgame for the world as we know it) we need some major motivator, a profound personal lever to make us change – and the obvious one is religious faith. Faith energises us at the deepest level. 80% of us have it. We’ll live for it and we’ll die for it. Nothing else comes remotely close to motivating us like that.

And the great gift Christians have to give in this context is hope. We see the world suffused by the light of the resurrection. We always see light at the end of the tunnel because we believe that’s the truth about our condition and that of the world. We’re beckoned forward by the promise of God’s future, which is a new heaven and a new earth. How that will be, we have no idea, but that God will deliver his Kingdom we can have no doubt. ‘Your Kingdom come on earth… as it is in heaven.’

Advent is a time of big themes. We look back to God’s great promises and we peer forward into the dark space we call the future. But the whole arc of past, present and future we see in the light of a God who has everything in his keeping, and who’s always coming towards us at the speed of light. Whatever happens, whatever happens, nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Hope is a life-saver. Josie was a mission partner back on furlough from her work in India. She was telling some people about her life and ministry, and she was asked how she faced going back to such a huge task. She said, ‘Sometimes it feels like trying to dig through the Himalayas with a pin.’ Then she beamed and added, ‘but I’m going back with a new pin!’

In our current crises and problems, let’s trust God and get on with it, with advent hope in our hearts.