Hope Shall Come Again

 For those who celebrate the season of Advent, you will know that last Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent.  We began the preparation for Christmas and the coming of the Christ child and all that entails, by lighting the first candle on the advent wreath.  Advent is also the celebration of the hope for the second coming of Jesus Christ the King.

The lighting of the Advent Candle is one of the ways which we can observe the season and not jump right into the celebration of Christmas which seems to be earlier every year.  There is also the tradition of the Advent Calendar which count down the days until the wonderful event when the baby Jesus arrives in the stable and is placed in a lowly manger in that small insignificant town in an insignificant country occupied by the most powerful country in the world. 

Lorna and I participated yesterday in another wonderful Advent tradition and a tuned into the service of Advent Lessons and Carols at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church in Toronto.  This lived up to our high expectations under difficult circumstances with only a quartet rather than a full choir and liturgist who acquitted themselves admirably. 

The advent wreath is comprised of four candles, one for each of the four Sundays in Advent. Each candle represents a symbol of what is represented by the coming of the Christ Child; Hope, Peace, Joy and Love.  Sunday, we lit the candle representing Hope.  We livein a world that has always need of hope; this year more so than ever. Reflecting on hope, I am reminded of the Greek myth of Pandora’s box.  Here is a summary from an on-line source as a reminder of the myth:

Pandora was the first mortal woman in Greek mythology, a sort of an Ancient Greek Eve. Following the instructions of Zeus – who wanted to punish Prometheus for stealing the fire from the gods and giving it to the humans – she was molded by Hephaestus and endowed with gifts by all the other Olympian gods. One of these gifts was a jar full of all the evils and diseases which exist in the world. One day – out of curiosity and not out of malice – Pandora lifted the lid of the jar, thus instantaneously releasing all evils and diseases into the world. Shocked by what had happened, she quickly tried to put the lid back, managing to merely trap Hope inside it. That is why Hope is the last thing that dies in man: even though deceitful from time to time, it is the only consolation humans have for all the troubles Pandora let loose on the world. The event of their release marks the end of the trouble-free Golden Age of Man, and the beginning of the Silver Age, the second of the five Ages of Man. https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Pandora/pandora.html

Hope, it seems, has been around for a very long time.  It was not invented by Christians but was recognized as one of those characteristics essential to human nature and encapsulates what is possible in for humanity as we look to a world in which God’s kingdom will be established here in this world in the second coming.  That hope is made manifest by the birth of the Christ Child – not in a castle as the prince of a world-ruling empire but of a very different kingdom based on love.

In your journey to what will be a very different Christmas for many of us, be assured that we have the Hope of a world which is different than what we have now – a world beyond COVID isolation.

Blessings on your Advent journey in preparation for the coming of the Prince of Peace.

P.S. Thanks to Lorna for the reminder that Advent is also about the second coming.