My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray. Eternal God of our expectant bodies, minds, hearts and spirits, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts always be acceptable in Your sight.  Our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

This last year has revealed a lot of things about our broken world, and I think if each of us thinks hard enough we can come up with our own lists, whether it’s about the economy, politics, culture, healthcare access, or the many ways in which equal rights are still not all that equal for anyone who isn’t white, male, and well-educated.  And let’s not try and say that our observations are due to the pandemic.  What the COVID-19 crisis has done is open our eyes to the many things that are around us, that have always been with us, but which on this Sunday of Advent Hope we have the opportunity to re-think and re-imagine.

In seminary I learned these types of observations have a name: “liminal spaces”.  The latin root of the word “liminal” means threshold, and so a liminal space is something that is often dis-orienting when we cross over from how we lived then, to how we are now.  But in the construction of those lists, we might just feel like the people we just read about in Isaiah.  For it was those folks who had been conquered in war, exported from their homeland of Jerusalem to Babylon, and they were now being asked to go back to Jerusalem 70 years later and rebuild their lives in a land and way of life they no longer recognized.  Everything had changed.

Has anything changed for all of us?  For most of us, everything is different, isn’t it?  We felt powerless in the early days of the COVID pandemic, and just like the Israelites, we don’t know how long this will last.  Hopefully not 70 years in exile, or 40 years wandering in the desert.  But since the announcement of a successful vaccine, we’re already ready to rush to get “back to normal” as soon as possible.

But we shouldn’t try and return to an old normal which has subjected so many to the pain and raw grief of systemic racism and economic non-opportunity.  And yet our theology reminds us that empires fall, plagues cease, and God will be with us.  But in this year of collective lament on so many levels, how can we begin to gather our Christmas spirit in a hope that awakens rather than lulls us back to the status quo?  Is hope for us a state of consciousness, or an active verb?

The ancient Israelites had to recover in the same way we are being asked to move forward.  They had to know that their world turned upside down would be OK.  They had to know, as we seek to know, that God will be with us in the darkness before the light comes.  They had to answer the questions:  What motivates us to trust God and be the servants we are called to be when we don’t know what to do and the world does not meet our expectations for peace, joy and love? They, like we, were probably feeling a little hopeless.

I understand.  And yet, it’s the Sunday of Hope.

A funny thing happens on the way to hopelessness in the human soul who sees God reflected in that soul. Our souls are liminal spaces, ones which are too fragmented and selfish until we see God’s image in which we have been created.  For God will constantly challenge us to cross that threshold from going too far down the rabbit hole, no matter what our failing spirits tell our egos who soak up all the energy with our own issues.  God has this stubbornness that splashes grace down on his people no matter what befalls us, even if it is our own foolishness and failings of faith.  God’s liminal space deep inside us insists that hope is not wishful thinking.  Hope is an obligation, one borne out of the fact that God is constant even when we (and I’m talking about all of us, all of God’s people, back in ancient Israel and today) are not.  Let me say that again:  we are not always faithful to ourselves much less God.  But God’s reflected image in our soul crosses over to keep reminding us otherwise.  We are loved by God, and needed to help make the world God’s kingdom here on earth.  That’s hope, friends, in the love that only faith can nourish.

Now, Isaiah says that sometimes during deep turmoil and struggle, we sometimes need someone to speak tenderly to us.  In a time of deep angst and despair, in a time of great loss over a loooonggg tiiiiime, we who are obligated to hope can honestly say, “Here is our God”.

And as we absorb this into ourselves even as the world of COVID swirls around us, both individualy and communally, we are also obligated to clear the path for others to experience this trust, this reflection of soul, this grace, this hope.  Or in the words of the prophet Isaiah, we are obligated to “prepare the way of the Lord”.  Or in the words of John the Baptist, “there is a voice in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord and make the path straight for him”.

God works good in our lives for sure, but let’s be clear—God doesn’t cause adversity and hardship, that’s usually us.  But God can generate good even in terrible circumstances.  There are silver linings when we live in hope in the midst of uncertainty and anguish.

We’ve had more time to spend with family.  We’ve had time to take more walks and spend less time in the car.  We’ve had time to call friends we haven’t talked to in a while to check in on them.  And we’ve had to lean more on God’s providence and wonder about our place in the order of things, which often leads us to talking to God more (some would call this praying more).  The journey of waiting and wandering in the wilderness of the pandemic can help us mature in our walk of faith, and learn more to lean into each other and deepen our commitment to build a just world for all.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts.

God promises one thing:  I will always love you and never forsake you.  But the prophet says we will need to make straight a road in the desert for God to receive God.  What the scripture doesn’t say is what that construction should look like.  But I don’t think they meant a divided highway with traffic going different directions, or with barriers to make us able to go super-fast and not even see each other as we whiz by.

For my mind, God wants us to level the road, so that all may travel regardless of their physical and spiritual abilities.  We don’t know quite what that looks like yet, but let us pray that it’s not going back to the old ways of doing things, because that crooked, winding road didn’t work for everyone.  And shouldn’t that our hope this day, after all?

Thanks be to God, Amen.