Hope springs

A homily for the Third Sunday of Advent, December 12, 2021

Zep 3:14-18a, Phil 4:4-7, Lk 3:10-18

They go together like Snap, Crackle and Pop:

Faith, Hope and Charity (or Love).

And they’re both the best way to start the day, every day.

Of course, one of these indispensable triads is a lot holier than the other.

But while the three components of Rice Krispies are easy to understand, I have trouble grasping the full meaning and significance of the middle theological virtue — Hope.

Which is doubly challenging this weekend, because what we celebrate with rose vestments and candles on the Advent wreath and (old-school) shouts of “Gaudete!” has a lot to do with Hope.

And like the notion of Divine Mercy, the parameters of Hope in God can defy easy description.

Faith, for example, is belief in someone or something outside our usual senses. We no longer can see Jesus in the flesh, hiking or hitchhiking from town to town with his radical notions of caring for the least among us, but we believe that he is present in the Eucharist and in every person we meet, that his words are truth for every time and place, that all of his promises of salvation and everlasting life will come true for all who believe and follow his Way.

We have not seen Jesus’s Father/Mother, the first person of our Triune God, the person we recognize as Almighty Creator, Infinitely Intelligent Engineer,  Fair and Wise Law-Giver and Judge, but we believe God set this universe in motion — and perhaps an infinite number of others — and sustains everyone and everything in it or them. We believe that everything makes sense in the grandest scheme of things, even if we cannot tap into the Mind of God. Even if we cannot understand why bad things happen to good people.

We believe that the Holy Spirit inspires us to think, feel, imagine, act for the good of all Creation.

We believe the invisible Spirit inspires us to Love.

Which brings us to Love-slash-Charity.

Though one word or the other may appear interchangeably in Scripture depending on the translation, Love and Charity differ by a hair’s breadth as they manifest themselves in the world.

Love and Charity both deal with our delivering the greatest benefit to every fellow traveler on Earth as we head home to God’s embrace.

But more often than not, Charity puts out the right-now fires of financial need, of hunger and thirst, of homelessness or unjust incarceration, of illness or death. Charity treats the symptoms — and they must be treated — while Love wrestles with the systems that cause those needs. Charity is a hug that cures; Love is broader action conceived and energized by Justice. Love is inoculation. Love is eradication.

Charity gives someone without a cloak one of yours, or without food some of yours, as John the Baptizer says. Love drives out the extortion that caused poverty.

Love guides humankind to God’s kingdom and all the joys therein.

Faith is head. Love is head and heart and hands.

So where does that leave Hope?

The Concise Catholic Dictionary defines Hope as

The theological virtue which is a supernatural gift bestowed by God through which one trusts God will grant eternal life and the means of obtaining it providing one cooperates. Hope is composed of desire and expectation together with a recognition of the difficulty to be overcome in achieving eternal life.

Mmmm-hmmm.

Yeah, that clears it up.

Webster’s Dictionary’s secular definition is similarly muddy:

Essential Meaning of Hope: to want something to happen or be true and think that it could happen or be true.

And yet…

Combined, these two definitions tell us to expect a silver lining in almost every cloud.

Combined, these two definitions suggest that somebody somewhere (God, we hope) is telling us to, “Hang in there, Baby!”

In this impatient era of a lightning-paced world, Hope asks us to stay calm and ditch our cynicism.

Hope asks us to look to the horizon and expect our ship to not sail over the edge of the Earth.

More practically, Hope asks us to determine what we want out of life for ourselves and for our neighbors, and then to act with Charity and Justice because we have Faith that God keeps her promises, especially big ones like salvation and eternal life.

Hope, then, is head and heart, bridging the headiness of Faith and the head-heart-hands of Love. Hope is imagination and the power to cling to it, the power to preserve it, the power to cherish it.

Today, we celebrate with rose vestments and a lightness of spirit amid Advent preparations because we hope to see our Newborn King again soon, and we hope to put our Faith and Charity into action in his footsteps and in his name.

Postscript

I’m still not a hundred percent on understanding Hope, but I’m a lot closer than I was.

And Mercy? Still light-years away from comprehending that.