Advent Message 2025- "Hope lights our way"

Happy New Year! We are now in Advent, the beginning of the church year. The Sundays in

Advent have traditional themes going back centuries in the Christian church: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, for the four Sundays. Our first Sunday of Hope launched us into the season!

In addition, you may know that every year our church chooses a theme for Advent, which this year is “Sustaining Hope.” We might consider this theme in two ways. First of all, “sustaining,” used as an adjective, describes the hope we hold, which sustains us! In these times, so challenging to many of us and our neighbors – hope carries us through. Hope truly keeps us going! But looking at our Advent theme in another way, we ask, how are we, how is God, sustaining our hope? How does our hope continue, how does it stay constant and steady and strong, how do we live out hope in lives of faith?

We need hope these days! Without it, we really are lost. From Martin Luther, in the 16th century: “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” True that!

May we begin our Advent journey, which started on Thanksgiving weekend, reflecting on hope and light – and also on gratitude and thankfulness. In the words of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address of Greetings to the Natural World, which begins and ends the Native school week, “May our minds be one.” May we thank God for all that sustains us – all the light, all the hope, all the love that carry us through.

The Advent season is also a time of waiting – for God to be born in Bethlehem as the human

baby Jesus, and for Jesus to come again to us in the end times. This Advent business in the

church is our new beginning, about the arrival of Jesus – who, amazingly, has already come to us, and yet is still coming!

May we be inspired to lean this Advent into light, into the rainbow, into hope. God of surprises, your hope sustains us, and we are thankful! And how do we live out this hopeful light, this light- full hope? “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope,” says Luther. Welcome the stranger. BE the stranger. Such is our hope. Amen!