The winter solstice is just around the corner. The longest night of the year. For many in my community and congregation, this season is one of the most difficult times of the year. Sappy seasonal songs do little to compensate for the loneliness and isolation that rub hard at the underbelly of holiday cheer. It is easy to get lost and fall hard, often with the faint echo of Joy to the World within hearing distance. Many songs saturate this season. And yet few of them speak to the hurting, helpless, lonely and lost. This song spoke to me when I first saw it performed. There is a wonderful Advent message contained in this song. One day at a time. May the one greater than all of us, the higher power of healing and wholeness, recovery and restoration be present and real in all of our lives this season. Sola Deo Gloria.

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Last week, I got a new shipment of books in to add to my holiday reading list, which includes several of the books that arrived via my summer reading list. (Busy book lovers will understand). One of those books is the recently published, just translated into English autobiography of Jurgen Moltmann entitled A Broad Place. Along with tracing many of the self-identified high points of his life, Moltmann writes about the unexpected and overwhelming success of his book, Theology of Hope, a theologian’s version of today’s best selling anecdotal theology of hopeful optimism, Joel Olsteen’s Your Best Life Now.

Several of Moltmann’s comments have been very helpful for me on my own Advent journey. I share them hopeful they will speak to you as well.

He writes,

“Hope alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it.” (Moltmann, A Broad Place, 103)

Reflecting on this reminds me that Advent is counter intuitive and counter cultural. It invites us to wait, then moves us. It invites us to watch, then blinds us with light of love reborn. But most meaningful of all, Advent invites us, borrowing words from T.S. Eliot’s East Coker, No. 2 in his Four Quartets, to “be still and still moving into another intensity for a further union, a deeper communion…”

It is this deeper communion of Advent that I find myself longing for, hoping for these days.

And this is where Moltmann speaks to me most deeply.

He writes,

“The foundation of hope is not utopia and the exploration of unknown future possibilities; it is the new beginning and the beginning of the new, her and now, today: incipit vita nova – a new life is beginning.” “It is not for nothing that the First Epistle of Peter uses the phrase ‘born again to living hope.’ With birth, a new life comes into the world. That is reason for hope. With rebirth, a life that has become old becomes young again. That is a reason for still greater hope. And in the end what begins is eternal life. And that is the ultimate foundation for hope.” (Moltmann, A Broad Place, 105)

Reflecting on this, I am reminded that Advent hope is a hope for life reborn, your life, my life, our shared life together. It is also a hope for trust reborn, not only trust in the future, but also trust in our ability to be participants in God’s future, a future born in love, grounded in eternity and possible right now.

The invitation of Advent is Incipit vita nova – enter a new life now.

Maybe Joel Olsteen is on to something after all….