Keep Your Hopes High

What I’ve loved about the liturgy towards the end of Advent is the often-repeated phrase, “Keep your hopes high!”

Again and again, in the readings of the Liturgy of the Hours, it is as if God is saying to us, Don’t be expecting some half-hearted coming… My salvation is ridiculously, gloriously HUGE! I am levelling mountains for you! I am making rugged places smooth! Water is springing up in the desert. My salvation is never a second-best, “this is all we can expect” salvation. My salvation will blow you away.

There’s nowhere we need to keep our heads up and our hopes high more than in the maintenance church.

Anyone ever feel somewhat weather-beaten? The acids of secularism hitting you on one side, and the mediocrity of the Church on the other? Sometimes the tide of the maintenance Church can hit up against and wash over us just a few times too many. These are the drowning, hope-sucking waves of the maintenance structures, policies and attitudes that still crash up against us.

I know I’m not alone when I say, how we long for this tide to go out!

And how impatient we are for the new tide to come in!

What I love about Advent is the Lord’s glorious promise…

Keep daring to dream. All the hopes you have in your heart for a different future – all your discontent – surely this is because I have created you for something greater. How could your hopes be greater than my hopes? And your dreams greater than my dreams?! 

I will never forget you. See, I have branded you on the palms of my hands, your ramparts are always under my eye. (Isaiah 49:15-16)

I was recently challenged by this Carey Nieuwhof article. While it is easy to become pessimistic, people will rarely follow a pessimistic leader. People want to follow a leader with a passionate vision for the future. How easy it is to let your passionate visions die – to allow them to become a little less technicolored… a bit more faded, “realistic”. Dreams, optimism and high expectation come naturally when you’re 21. And they’re natural when you’re swimming in a culture of anticipation and hope. Where I work, I am surrounded by on-fire, millennial evangelicals. They have grown up in churches that are generally mission-focussed. They have been raised as disciples and mentored as leaders since a young age. In their church culture, speaking about their relationship with Jesus, what God is saying to them, or how he is leading them is utterly normal. To be surrounded by friends and community who pray and worship together, speak about God together, and serve their community together, is completely normal.

Sadly this isn’t true for most Catholic disciples who are not held up by such a culture. Lots of us endure an unforgiving, maintenance battering over many years.

And yet we know the REALITY – and it becomes beautifully clear in Advent – that he is coming, as sure as the dawn. His vision for the future – with our cooperation – is beautiful, good, and true. Greater than we can picture. And how much he needs our faith, hope, dreams – our cynicism, however justified, is not from him.

Let’s allow Christmas this year to renew our hope that he is who says he is, that he will come, he will deliver. Come, Lord Jesus!