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 without God, relying upon our own wisdom or convictions in ways that polarize us away from each other, and which inevitably prioritize some people over others in the attempt to impose some version of utopia upon the world through the use of usually violent collectivist 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. And this is not Christian, this is not the Gospel of Jesus.
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 God through 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 Jesus.
In this season of Advent, May all 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!
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
