Hope Comes: Advent III

The Christ-child breaks in. Hope breaks in. For even those who have their wages stolen, their dignity taken away, their lights and heat turned off, the evicted, the homeless, the poor, the rejected, the tormented - hope comes. Hope will come. It is our presence as Christians in the lives of others that is the present-day icon of Christ's love in the world.  Today when we sit around hearth and home around our own common tables, or as we gather in warm churches and sing, or as we serve the poor, give blankets, sit with the sick and the dying, as we visit the lonely, or when we calm the fear of the anxious or reassure the depressed of God's love for them and our love for them, when we give to those who cannot repay, those with no recompense - we are the hope that comes. In fact, in serving, in making humanity our business, we find that they, those to whom we are sent, those to whom we go - that they represent Christ to us. The season is the opportunity to enact the community that God imagines.