Did hope in God get us through the pandemic?

Advent, the start of the church year,  has two different themes a) the Second Coming of Christ and b) His First Coming. 

The first theme falls on the first two Sundays of Advent and the second theme falls on its second two Sundays.  Hence carol services (which in the UK would normally clash with the World Cup Final at 3pm on the 18th December) celebrate the First Coming. They are held on the last but one Sunday of Advent. (Christmas Day itself falls on a Sunday this year).  Throughout Advent, the communion table remains purple.

Yesterday was about prophecies of the Second Coming. The set Lectionary passages remembered John the Baptist prophecying about the Messiah being "greater" than himself and Isaiah prohecying about lions lying down with lambs and children playing with nasties which are now harmless.  

There is hope delivered via prophecies and hope is a integral to faith which is why hope is mentioned numerous times in the New Testament.  What is hope but holding fast in the dark before dawn when all you have is prophecies and promises?  It is how the church has held on, through the ages.

One thinks back to the pandemic.  Did we have sufficient hope in God - or any hope? Did we hope, at its start, in early 2020, that by its third Christmas  i.e. 2022 we would again be gathering around Christmas tables and singing in church, alongside the elderly.  Probably not, as we were under the false impression that it would all be over in three weeks. One lady in our ad hoc carol choir on 18th December is 94. 

Omicron dawned on the world last Christmas and it has literally freed those sitting in chains and walking in the shadow of death (except, it seems, in China).  Did the world thank God for it?  I did not hear it. However, I am confident that millions of prayers from the start of the pandemic were for God to "weaken" the virus and that they were mercifully heard. 

Maybe this Christmas we will all realise how precious hope is and how we must consciously cultivate it, in all circumstances. 

On top of that is the blessed hope of a better world, the unseen eternal world, lit not by the sun but by the presence with his people of The Lamb.

December 2022