Advent, Our Only Hope
Tell me, do you have hope? I like to sift out the fools and the Christians from the rest of the populace in short order. You have to be one or the other to have any hope left. Experience drums it out of you bit by bit, and so it’s no surprise the aged usually have little remaining. My millennial colleagues and I have taken this lesson right on the chin, as the past 20 years have taught us that life is not like a Disney movie. Good stuff will happen, bad stuff will happen, and the rest is very boring. People mostly care about themselves, if only to make up for the reality that no cares about them. We nurse this wound to the ego with the flatteries of social media, desperate to persuade ourselves otherwise, but we know it’s as fake as fruit-flavored candy.
Did you forget you will die? That fact makes the above seem all the more pathetic. Yes, all the betting markets have it that you will end up six feet under. If you think you were easily overlooked now, you haven’t seen nothing yet. At least you’ll have that old Facebook account around for awhile, ripe for some con artist to copy and friend request all your old friends. What a life.
I could go on to talk about how hopeless the world seems - Jewish holocaust, “Never Again”, but how about them Uighars and all that jazz; I think you’ve heard enough. It’s enough to talk about the hopelessness of your own life.
What’s to be done about it? Well, I’m sorry to report that studies show that books with steps can’t climb you out of this hole. You can’t fix this, because you are the problem and also because the problem is way bigger than you, you egomaniac.
Your real problem is that you’ve got relationship issues. Specifically, I mean your relationship with God. Life only works if you are with God, but God isn’t with us, because we are insufferable (don’t make me prove what I don’t need to prove). Except, that’s not entirely true. We are insufferable, but 2,000 years ago God suffered us. The Son of God became one of us, he was God with us, Immanuel. Wherever he went, Jesus displayed signs of what it looks like for God to dwell with us. He brought hope.
After dying on a cross, rising from the dead three days later, and then ascending to the Father with the promise that he’d return and do the same for us, we might say that “He brought hope” is a bit of an understatement. Let’s be clear - he brought our only hope. If Jesus is just a dead Gandhi, then like Paul says, we’re hopeless and the Christian is turned into a pitiful fool. If he’s the risen King, then we have hope, because he will advent again.
Kudos to you dear realists, but take a closer look beyond your nose. You don’t need to be a fool to have hope - you just need to be a Christian.
