This Advent our family has been using the following blessing form at supper and one line in particular got me thinking.. It goes like this:
Leader: Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
All: Maranatha! Come quickly!
Leader: Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation.
Blessed are you in the darkness and the light.
Blessed are you in this food and in our sharing.
Blessed are you as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ,
All: For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,
now and forever.
Amen.
It was the phrase
joyful hope that caught my attention. I cling to hope all right, but often it is not joyful. The first few nights, I left out the word joyful and now have put it back in. Is it possible to still have
joyful hope even in in the midst of confusion, depression, loneliness or grief? Is it possible in the midst of conflict, division, vitriol in the public square, and the overwhelming amount of pain in the world? I wonder. Then, today, remembered this comment from C.S. Lewis on hope..
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a
continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people
think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a
Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present
world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did
most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The
Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the
great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished
the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds
were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think
of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven
and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get
neither.--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 10
The joy of this kind of hope is not, I suspect, related to a feeling of happiness but rather to trust that God will make it right - is making it right- even though it is not visible at present. St. Paul did not live to see the Christian faith spread to the corners of the known world. Could Wilberforce and friends have imagined the degree to which their campaign for human dignity would continue to bear fruit? Perhaps the joy comes in trusting and anticipating that all shall be well. That, for me , is not a loud joy but a very quiet joy - a flicker in the darkness rather than a brightly burning flame. So, this Advent, I will claim waiting in a quiet Advent hope and trust that, in aiming for heaven, the joy will come.
