Summer has always been a season of hope for me. Especially now as I am learning how to build, prepare and plant a vegetable garden. I see hope in everything.
Samuel Pullenger
The weather is beginning to get warm, everything is green and growing faster than I can keep up with. Summer also comes with the Christmas and New Year’s break which most of us look forward to as a time to slow down and relax.
However, summer is also a stressful time, characterised by spending on gifts, holidays and travel. Though the season itself speaks of hope, it can be so easily drowned out with all the stress and preparation that we feel we need to do before the holiday period actually arrives.
Sunday is the first of the four Sundays of Advent, leading up to Christmas.
Each of these Advent Sundays has a theme associated with it, and I find it prudent that Hope is the first of these four themes. It is also the first Sunday of the Church Calendar year.
This means that every year, the very first thing the Church does is reflect on the hope all creation has in Jesus.
Hope, though an easy enough word to define, is a strange feeling to reconcile with.
We hope for all kinds of things, from a gift we would like to receive on Christmas Day, to this existential hope that there is something more to life than what we experience now.
For Christians, that existential hope, the hope which gives us grounding in the world, is in the person of Jesus – God who became human.
Though it is not simply a hope that there will be something after this life; the hope we find in Jesus is that we will never be alone. Through all the things we face in life, both the highs and the lows, we journey them with God.
We have many things, here in Te Awamutu, that can strip us of our hope; the potential shutting down of a long-standing newspaper, the potential waste to energy plant that would bring more pollution to our town, the continual car thefts, break-ins and vandalism, the family violence, and the financial stresses of rising rates to name a few. Though, these things do not have to take our hope from us.
Hope is often found in the coming together of the community. At this time of year there are many opportunities for us to gather, enjoy being part of a community and find hope at the same time.
This Saturday evening we will be having a Carols service out in Pirongia at St Saviours Anglican church at 6pm. The Bible Chapel will, again, be holding their Walk Through Christmas. Capernwray will be having their Carols by Candlelight service. I invite you, as we enter into this busy and stressful season of holiday preparations, to find the time to join with the community in hope this year.
