Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. – Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
More than a year after it began, the Russian war against Ukraine rages on; the anguished strife in the Middle East has uncovered rifts in our society far deeper than we imagined; and just a week from now, we will enter into the most dangerous election year in our history. Yet, we Christians have hope.
Hope is not a naive belief that we will or even can work things out. Hope is our conviction that the God of Light will triumph over the works of darkness. We do know how. We certainly don’t know when. What we do know with confidence is that God will triumph.
“All our hope on God is founded,” a hymn says. It is not founded on us, and lucky that it’s not, because over and over we sabotage the very things we claim to want the most. Our hope is founded, not on we feeble and fallible human beings, but in God.
The Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Advent — which this year is the last day in Advent — says that God comes to us in a “daily visitation.” Every once in a precious while everything lines up and we see God visiting us in our ordinary lives. Our mood, the weather, our interactions with the people we encounter by design or chance, a moving piece of news in the news: All of it lines up just so and we see God-With-Us. Those moments are rare, but those moments are the source of our hope.
We have seen and felt God’s abiding power and love, and so we have a sure and certain hope that the brightness of God will triumph over the works of darkness. And it is not just we who have seen and felt God’s abiding power and love. Our ancestors have left us records of their daily visitations with God, and we trust their witness to be true. Always, in daily visitations — some startlingly extraordinary but most startlingly ordinary — God has planted in the world seeds of hope.
On Christmas, we will gather in the Cathedral hoping to experience God’s abiding power and love. It will be there whether we experience it or not. If we are lucky, though, the stars will align, and we will see and feel and hear God’s abiding power and love. The music, the scriptural words of our ancestors, the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, and the people we will meet: just maybe they will open our mind and hearts to experience for ourselves God’s “daily visitation.” Then, our hope will be renewed.
Please join us. God will be waiting for us. God always is waiting for us. And we who call the Cathedral home will be waiting for you, hoping to welcome you into the hope we share.