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.)

Last week, I shared with you a portion of Bishop Alan’s address to our Diocesan Convention the weekend before, in which he reflected on the need for Jesus’ law of love of neighbor to guide us in our churches as coronavirus surges again this fall. He noted that there would be forthcoming worship guidance from the bishops, and yesterday we received that in a joint statement by the three bishops of the Episcopal Churches in Massachusetts and Western Massachusetts.

The bishops don’t mandate that we stop indoor, in-person worship. But they do urge, in “the strongest possible terms,” that all churches suspend indoor, in-person worship. (Click here to read the full text of the bishops’ letter.)

I’ll be meeting with our parish Reopening Committee, as well as our Vestry and Wardens, in the coming week, to reflect on what this means for St. John’s and for our worship in the time to come. There won’t be a strict switch that’s flipped from one thing to another. On March 8, we were entirely in person. On March 15, we were entirely online. And for the past several months, we’ve been somewhere on a continuum, with a handful of us worshiping together in person, in the Garden or in the church, and many if not most of us worshiping on Zoom. It’s likely that this Advent, we will shift back toward the Zoom end of the continuum, with just a skeleton crew of worship leaders—Douglas and I, a couple of readers, perhaps a couple of singers—worshiping in the church, and the rest of the congregation worshiping on Zoom.

This Sunday’s worship will continue as it has been in November, and we’ll make plans next week to adjust for the rest of Advent and Christmas.

I imagine that this news is not surprising to you, but it is probably disappointing. It certainly is disappointing for me. And it probably feels unfair. After all, every day I walk by businesses with safety regulations and practices much less stringent than ours. It isn’t fair that schools and churches are closing, while casinos remain open. It isn’t fair. But it is loving, and that’s what the bishops tried to remind us of: that love of neighbor, concern for the most vulnerable, must be our guiding value now.

It’s unsurprising. It’s disappointing. It’s unfair. I think, more than anything, it’s sad. At least for me, it is profoundly sad to face another season of the Church year, another season of holidays, without our beloved traditions; to face the prospect of Advent and Christmas without singing hymns and carols together in church. It is profoundly sad.

But our sadness is pale in comparison to the sadness of the dozens of families who are losing loved ones every day in Massachusetts. Forty, fifty a day in Massachusetts, nearing two thousand a day in our country. I will miss singing with you and worshiping with you, as we move toward a more-online format. But I know that we will do it again. And I know that if all the Episcopal churches in this Commonwealth, by banding together, can prevent just a few coronavirus cases, could prevent even one death, that would be a tremendous achievement for a few months’ work: to save just one life.

So, it is hard, and it is sad, but it is necessary. And whatever format that takes—however many of us remain in this church, however many of us are worshiping on Zoom instead—I hope and I pray that we can worship together in the spirit of love, remembering that the Holy Spirit is with us, that Jesus is with us, wherever two or three of us are gathered. Even if it’s just on a Zoom window.