If you’ve ever cared for a small child, you’ve probably learned that love is more than a feeling. You can’t simply “love” an infant or a newborn and have that be enough. Our love for children, instead, is a series of actions: small ones, and big ones, diapers changed and meals fed, plans laid for the future and gentle rocking in the night; and it’s all of these actions that add up to love, that help grow our love for them and their love for us.

It’s the same when God commands us to love God and love our neighbor. God commands us even to love our enemies. How can we do this? Surely we don’t like our enemies. Surely we don’t feel love for them. But the principle is the same. To love someone is to work for their good. Not necessarily for what they think is good for them, but for what is really, truly good for them; to care for them as if they were our own.

These relationships need tending. We can’t just say we love God and say we love our neighbor. We need to love them, actively; we need to commit small acts of love.

Christmas and Advent are an opportunity to reflect on these relationships, to reflect on the many ways that God has loved us, and the many ways that we can love one another. So I invite you, as Advent ends and Christmas begins, to choose one thing, one way that you can love God, one act of care in your relationship with God that you can commit; and to do it each day. Choose one way you can love your neighbor as yourself, and do it each day.

And then wait and see how your love has grown.

One of my favorite books is the autobiography of the children’s-book author and theologian C. S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy.  It’s the story of his childhood, adolescence, and conversion to Christianity, and when he tells the story, he builds it around his repeated experience, in different times and places, of “joy.” He’s careful to say that he doesn’t mean “happiness” or “pleasure.” “Joy” is something different: a sudden longing for some enormous beauty outside oneself, a sudden stirring in the soul that catches a glimpse of eternity in the midst of this world and longs to hold onto it forever. He finds it in various places and ways—in his imagined world of “Animal-Land” and in ancient Norse myths, in the tiny beauty of his brother’s toy garden and in the awe-inspiring love of the Christian gospel—but again and again it appears in his life like a road-sign to something beyond his quotidian concerns, and then it disappears, leaving only the longing to feel it again. As he matures, he writes, he experiences this feeling of joy less often; not because he’s less joyful, but because he’s already traveling the road of joy. He doesn’t need the signs any more to point the way.

Joy, in this sense, is a kind of nostalgia. Not “nostalgia” in the way we usually mean it as a kind of sentimental appreciation of the past. “Nostalgia” in its oldest and truest sense: a kind of painful yearning to be at home; really, a kind of homesickness. When the great hero Odysseus has been away from his family twenty years, ten at war and ten wandering his way home, he’s falling apart inside and what he feels is nostalgia: literally “the homecoming-pain.”

We all feel nostalgic now, and not just in the sentimental sense. We all yearn deep in our hearts to come back home, to return to the way of life we’ve known and loved. This nostalgia is worse than ever in these strange weeks before Christmas at the end of this strange year.

But it might be worth remembering that our longing is itself a kind of joy. Just as C. S. Lewis’s flashes of joy pointed him toward a greater and eternal joy, reminding him that something existed out there beyond his own life, so our homesick longing is the reminder of joys once shared together, joys that one day we will feel again. So when you feel that longing for what’s gone, rejoice in your memories of the past; and rejoice in your hope for the great joys still to come.

The church I grew up in had a special ritual for lighting the candles in its Advent wreath each Sunday. As a family lit the candles, we’d sing just one verse of a song:

Light one candle for Hope,
One bright candle for Hope,
He brings hope to everyone;
Rejoice! Rejoice!

And then the next week for the Candle of Peace:

Light one candle for Peace,
One bright candle for Peace,
He brings peace to everyone;
Rejoice! Rejoice!

And then the next week, Joy, and the next week, Love. I always remembered these four themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love—much more pleasant than the traditional medieval themes for the four Sundays of Advent: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell!—so I thought I’d share a reflection on each one of these each week of Advent, starting with Hope.

The Book of Hebrews says a curious thing about hope. It calls it “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” (Heb. 6:19) When I think about the things I hope for day-to-day—when I hope that the weather is nice, or I hope I get a lot done at work, or I hope that my 3 year old will eat the dinner that I cook—these things don’t seem like anchors. They seem more like wishes. They are the things that can disappoint me, not the anchors that hold me steady through disappointment.

But hope, when we talk about it theologically is something different. Hope is an anchor, and it’s because our hope is not in those little day-to-day ups and downs of life. Our hope is in something greater. Our hope is in something eternal. Our hope is the response to a promise that God has given us.

I’ve always loved one part of the burial service that we have. It’s the last part, which often takes place at the graveside. In the Committal, there’s this beautiful prayer: “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to almighty God our brother, our sister, and we commit her body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” (BCP p. 501) “In sure and certain hope.” Is a hope that’s sure and certain really hope? you might ask. Is something that you’ve been guaranteed a hope? Is it a promise? It’s certainly more than a wish. But that’s the beauty of Christian hope.

It’s so hard for us to accept those promises that we’ve been given: that promise of God’s unconditional love; that promise of eternal life; that promise that all things will be made new in a new heavens and a new earth, where mourning and weeping and pain and death are no more, where we live with one another and with God in peace and love.

That’s a remarkable thing to hope for. That’s a much harder thing than getting a toddler to enjoy an ordinary dinner. But it’s that sure and certain hope that our faith gives us. We may not find it easy to hope for that every day. We may not find it easy to recognize that we are the beloved children of God. But that’s the promise that we’re given; and that’s the anchor of our souls.

“Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”
– Hebrews 12:1–2

On Monday night, I met with members of our parish Reopening Committee and the Vestry, and together we made a very difficult but important decision: to take a step back from the in-person, indoor component of our worship during this Advent and Christmas.

I’ll still be here on Sunday mornings to lead worship; Douglas will be here to play the organ and lead us in music, and we’ll have a couple of readers to read one of the lessons and the Prayers of the People. The rest of the congregation will be on Zoom.

We’ll continue celebrating the Eucharist together. After the service, in fact, I’ll bring the consecrated bread to the door of the church, where you can walk by on Devens Street to receive communion, if you’d like. It will be very different from the March and April shutdown. In a sense, it will be a better worship experience. It will be easier; we’ve done it before. In a sense, it will be harder, because… we’ve done it before.

When I was in high school, I used to run track pretty competitively, and my main event was the mile: four loops around a 400 meter track. I always though that there is a sense in which the fourth and final lap was the easiest, even though there was a sense in which it was the hardest. You had already run most of the race. Every system in your body was shutting down. Your muscles were locked up with lactic acid. You could barely move or breathe, and yet here you were. The end was in sight. It wasn’t like the third lap, when you were feeling awful and still had half the race to go. You were in the fourth and final lap.

I think many of us feel as though that’s the position we’re in now. Most of us won’t get a vaccine in the early waves, but within the next six months it seems a large fraction of our population will have been able to receive a highly-effective vaccine, bringing the pandemic under control. As spring and summer come again and vaccination continues, the virus will recede. It is not the end, but the end is in sight, and so there is a sense in which we’re in that final lap: exhausted, barely upright, but almost there.

The most important thing we can do right now is to finish well. Not to fall down, as my father-in-law says, on the wrong side of the finish line. Not to run the risk of having to quarantine a whole church full of people, let alone the risk of infection, serious illness, or death for one of our members.

Online worship is difficult. It’s sad. It can be hard to engage with. I imagine you’re as tired of it as I am. But it won’t be forever. We will be back here together. The season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of waiting in a difficult time for a brighter future, and there’s no year when Advent will ring truer for me than this one.

But before Advent begins, we still have Thanksgiving tomorrow. It’s hard to be thankful this year. And it’s very hard to say you’re thankful for online church. I have to say, though, even ten years ago this all would have been impossible. We simply couldn’t have seen one another, Sunday after Sunday, in church, because we weren’t all walking around with cameras attached to supercomputers in our pockets or on our desks. It’s a gift for us, this year—as sad and difficult as it is to only be together online—to be able to be together at all. So I give thanks, today, for that gift of seeing one another face-to-virtual-face. (Even if our faces are pixelated and a bit small.)