For Christians, the new year begins today with the beginning of Advent, the season of expectation, hope, and preparation for the birth of Jesus.
Our human family so desires to see an end to war, poverty, indignity, and deprivation. We long for a world at peace, where all people experience plenty, and everyone has a home filled with family and friends.
Sadly, we continue to try and achieve these most sacred and precious hopes in ways that polarize us away from each other, which inevitably prioritize some people over others, or attempt to impose some version of utopia through the use of force.
The Church teaches us is that there is no human power, no expression of human agency, that will lead us all, together, to paradise. We are not able to engineer our own redemption. We cannot return to paradise through our own efforts. We always, always end of sacrificing some for the benefit of others.
To whom, then, may we turn for hope? Who is faithful, and will fulfill the promises made to humankind from the beginning of ages?
We turn to Jesus.
For those who truly follow Jesus, we are not asked to build any kingdoms, or to place any hope in kingdoms built by human hands, or to labor for any kingdom that has its origins in the strength of humankind.
Instead, we are called to be heralds of what the Lord God is already doing to redeem us, to proclaim the first light of the dawn that is already breaking upon this present darkness, to joyfully announce that our hope, the desire of nations, has been born to us in the vulnerable infant Savior.
In this season of Advent, the faithful renew their identity and calling to be heralds of the birth of Jesus, of the rising of the bright morning star, and offer hope to the world through embracing a life of humility, self-emptying love, mercy, compassion, and peacemaking.
O come, O come Immanuel!
