Advent December 2020
Prelude to conversation…

We are waiting aren’t we?
We are longing for, urgently expecting and impatiently waiting for the end of COVID.

This is not the first time that people have been longing for the end of something…urgently expecting a better/brighter day…and impatiently waiting for the moment to be over.

When our country fought the Civil War, all folks longed for the end, expected a better day and waited impatiently for the war to be over. Of course the folks who had been brought to this country to be slaves had been longing for the end of slavery, expecting a better day and waiting for freedom for more than 100 years before the war was over. Black Lives Matter reminds us that though the Civil War is long over…there are still many longing for freedom, expecting a better day and waiting impatiently for justice.

Same thing could be said for every war…WW1, WW2, Korean, Vietnam, Iraq etc. In those times
there was plenty of waiting, longing, and expecting.
Same thing could be said for the last pandemic. Reading articles written in 1918, one could think that those articles had been written this year…in regards to the longing for it to be over, the expecting that tomorrow will be brighter, the waiting for “normal” to return.

At the end of these periods of longing, expecting and waiting there was a resolution of some sort. That which we longed for…peace, that which we expected…a better day, and that which we waited for… a return to “normal”… happened, though not exactly alike for everyone, there was a moment at the end of the crisis when there was hope. Hope for peace on earth and good will for everyone. Hope for a better day when all the barriers…when all the mountains and valleys would be made a level living field. Hope that a new “normal” would exceed the old “normal”.

So… we have evidence that hope can be born, or brought back to life, even in the worst possible moments of life. We long for hope to be restored in all people. We expect that hope will bring a brighter day. We wait for the star…the light… to guide us to a stable in Bethlehem or better yet…a place in our hearts… where hope will be reborn into our world.

There is work still to do. There is a pandemic still to be brought into control. There will still be months of longing, expecting and waiting. AND while this is so…so is the assurance that God-is-with-us. Just down the road…the light of hope is becoming visible. If we follow that light…
then even in the midst of longing, expecting and waiting for COVID to end…there is hope.

Hope!

-Rev Ted Anderson