The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

© 2021, Dr. Tamilio

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  Well, it was when I wrote this.  I wrote the first few sentences of this sermon in North Conway at my in-law’s house where we went for Thanksgiving.  This sentence was written the night before the meal.  So was this one.  And so was…you get the point.  Cindy and her mother are in the kitchen cooking.  Our nephew is in the living room talking to his grandfather (Cindy’s father) about his senior year at Mass Maritime Academy — Carl Lindquist’s alma mater.  I am writing this sentence.  And this one.  (OK, I’ve exhausted that joke.)

Anyway, someone just said, “Hey, put on some Christmas music.”  I shouted “NO!  It’s not Christmas or Advent yet.  We can start playing Christmas music the day after Thanksgiving, not a moment too soon.”  They said, “Go back to working on your sermon.”  So, now I have headphones on to block out the Yuletide tunes.

Now we are here — on the first day of Advent.  This is the day of hope.

If you read my Thanksgiving message that was sent out through Constant Contact and was posted online, you caught the opening: how I was at Starbucks and heard the person in front of me say that there is very little to be thankful for this year.  I didn’t hear why this person felt the way she did.  I don’t know if it has to do with the Coronavirus, the racial unrest that we hear about in various cities across the nation, or the fact that the political divide is getting wider and wider in America.  Maybe it was about the rising gas prices.  Maybe it was something personal.  For all I knew, she just lost a loved one or came back from a doctor’s visit where she received some bad news.  Maybe it is all of these things.  Maybe it is a combination of them.  Maybe it is none of them.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that she is not alone.  Lots of people find it hard to smile right now.  It isn’t necessarily for the reasons I just mentioned.  Some people find it hard when the holidays roll around, because it may be the first anniversary of the loss of their spouse, or maybe a child.  Even when you talk to people and ask them how they are doing — how they are really doing — the conversation (more often than not) will turn dour.  Maybe that’s just human nature: we focus on the negative.  We like to talk about our aches and pains, for example, because they are ever-present.  We can’t escape them.

But today is not about despair.  It’s about the opposite of that: it is about hope.

Advent marks the season before Christmas, specifically the four weeks when we prepare for the holy day that is one of our two most sacred celebrations (the other being Easter, of course).  Over time, the Church has given names to the four Sundays that bring us to the manger: hope, peace, joy, and love.  These terms define the coming of Christ — what it means that God chose to become incarnate in human form.  That changed everything.  It changed the world as we knew it.

Maybe the best way to think about the hope that is ours as believers, let’s look at the opposite view.  Imagine if God did not exist.  Imagine this life being all there is.  You’re born.  You go to school.  You have to deal with puberty and experience the feelings you will never feel again for the first time: love, heartbreak, friendship, betrayal, joy, sorrow — the whole gamut.  You graduate high school and maybe you go to college, or you enter the workforce, or the military, or you get married, or a combination of the above.  If you went to college (and maybe graduate school) you start working after that.  You work for years, decades.  You spend at least a third of your life working and a third sleeping.  That only leaves a third for all the other stuff.  (No wonder why life seems to go by so fast!)  You purchase a house along the way.  You have children and grandchildren.  Then you retire.

You spend the last twenty to thirty years relaxing — or at least trying to relax.  My Dad used to say that he never knew how he had time to do all things that he had to do (especially around the house) when he was working, because, when he retired, he said he was even busier working.  Then the aches and pains creep in: arthritis, loss of sight, hearing loss, having to go to the bathroom five times a night.  The golden years can be pretty rusty from what I hear.  But you get there.  It’s a long road, but you get there.  We all do.

And then you face the end.  Maybe it’s at home if you’re lucky.  Maybe it is in an assisted living facility or a nursing home.  Maybe it is in hospice.  Then the lights go out — and that’s it.

Is that what it is all about?  For some.  I can’t imagine, because even though I experience all those things, I see purpose in them — as does the atheist.  However, my purpose is tied to a hope he doesn’t have: it is a hope in the life everlasting, and I am experiencing part of that life right now.

God chose to break through the gulf that sin created between us and him.  He did so by becoming a human being himself through his one and only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.  As the Early Church Father Irenaeus once said, through the incarnation, “He [God] became human so that we may become what He is.”  Some translations read, “God became human so that we may become divine.”  We will never be divine the way God is, but we will one day be more complete; we will one day be what God intended us to be; we will one day be with him.

That is the hope that Christ brings.

Let’s go back to Thanksgiving for a moment.  I wrote these words the day after Thanksgiving.  And these ones.  I ran downtown to North Conway to get a cup-of-joe at one of my favorite coffee shops, the Met.  On my way back to Cindy’s parents, I stopped at the food store to grab something.  Outside the store, standing in the rain, was a young man collecting money for S.A.N.E. (s-a-n-e), which stands for Stop Addiction New England: a Christian organization that helps recovering addicts.  I gave the man a dollar.  He thanked me and asked if I knew anyone who was suffering from addiction.  I said no.  He proceeded to tell me how their program works: everything from transportation to counseling is absolutely free.  He then gave me his card and said, “If you know anyone who could benefit from our services, please give us a call.”  He added, “God bless you.”

I drove away thinking that on one hand, this young man is a sort of an exorcist: he and his organization help exorcise the demons that some (those who struggle with drugs and alcohol) carry on their shoulders.  This is also an example of the hope that the Church (in various ways and forms) brings to a world engulfed in grief, engulfed in pain, engulfed in suffering, engulfed in despair.

Jesus came to make all things new.  Thanks be to God for the hope that is our — and ours to share — this Advent season.  Amen.