Hope

Advent begins this Sunday.  It is the church season of practicing waiting.  It’s a time of expectancy.  We are training ourselves to see the ways that Christ comes in to the world all the time.  It’s one of my favorite seasons of the church year because we are filled with wonder as we celebrate what God did, does, and will do.  There are so many seasonal traditions and ways of reminding ourselves of the beauty of our faith.

The first Sunday of advent we focus on hope. We’re looking at Isaiah, and the suggested reading for the day is Isaiah 64, but somehow when we were doing worship planning for the winter, I dropped off the 4, so our reading is for Isaiah 6.  And you know what?  It’s perfect.  It is this story of how Isaiah was called to speak to the people in a time of chaos and uncertainty.  It is a passage filled with incredible imagery of angels and God’s magnificent mystery.  It is also super confusing because God sends Isaiah to a people who won’t understand or believe.  Why would God play that game?  This is part of what makes this passage such a good fit for us, because there is something to wrestle with here.  It’s not just a happy, easy, pat on the back that God will always offer us hope.  It’s more complex than that, we in fact don’t understand why God would want us not to understand.

One of the most beautiful things about this parish model is all the ways we get to engage with the story of God. There’s bible study on Tuesday, the weekly email, worship with a sermon at Trinity on Sunday, and a lively discussion of the scripture at SFC Sunday night.  By the time we go through all that we are asking better questions about who God is and who we are called to be. And this fills me with such hope this season and beyond.

-Eilidh