Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday of hope and is the first day of the church calendar. The first candle we light on the Advent wreath is the hope candle. That’s where we start. Next week is peace, followed by joy, and then love. The arc of these four weeks might be akin to a sunrise.

Dawn begins in the darkest part of the night, with light creeping in with such subtlety we wonder if it’s our eyes playing tricks on us. We can’t quite tell right at the beginning of dawn. Isn’t this a bit like hope in the midst of our darkest days? Then, when the dawn really begins to assert itself, we no longer have to wonder and there’s a sense of peace as we wait for the sun. Then, with the first sun beams, there’s a little burst of joy. And finally those targeted beams, clear beams broaden to enter the shadows and crevices, filling the world with love and light. That is the movement of Advent – starting with hope in the dark, followed by peace, joy, and then love with the coming of Christ.

It’s OK to admit that we sure like love and joy more than we like hope. As necessary and beautiful as hope is, hope really only makes sense in the dark just like the faintest entrance of the dawn can only be detected in the depth of night. Hope is really only good news to those who need it even as we live in a culture that wants to deny the existence of darkness that’s deep enough for us to long for hope.

And so, I wonder where we need hope in our lives. Where are we and where are you in a darkness so deep there’s a longing for hope? Perhaps for you there is illness, grief, or financial worries. Perhaps there’s conflict in your family that never seems to end. Or is the darkness bigger than what you see in your own life but in the world? Afterall we all are witness to unrelenting poverty, domestic violence, addiction, hatred, and war.

In many of our services, after the confession and forgiveness, we sing “the kyrie”. The church across millennia has prayed kyrie eleison – God have mercy on us. Pr Paul Polumbo talks about this as being the prayer we go to in despair when we can find no other words to lean on. It’s a deep, wrenching prayer when said in these moments.

To be quite honest, I’ve rarely have felt the need to say this prayer for myself. Before hearing Paul talk about it, I’ve mostly understood this prayer as something we pray in response to our sinfulness. Have mercy on us, God!  Maybe this is one of those things I shouldn’t say out loud, but, my sins are pretty uninteresting and have yet to bring me to the point of praying the kyrie, God have mercy, with ardent passion.

However, what has inspired me to cry out the prayer kyrie eleison in all sincerity is Gaza. This destruction of a people and a place horrifies my soul and I see how powerless we have been to stop it. I know there’s a ceasefire in place, but it is thin, fragile, and Palestinians are still dying every day. Not to mention the loss of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, bakeries, orchards, water sanitation, and homes. The misery of this genocide committed by people against people, all of us God’s people, has caused me to cry more than once, kyrie eleison. God have mercy on us. We know not what we do.

Most of our major crimes and sins as people happen as groups of people, if you think about it. War is a group activity. Environmental destruction is a group activity. And so it’s appropriate that much of the Bible is written for the plural such as when God speaks in the books of the prophets. We don’t have a plural you in English (for whatever reason). So, when we say ‘you’ in English, we can mean you as an individual or you as a plural. That’s why y’all is a very useful word. It’s a 2^nd person plural which most languages have, just not English.

So, when the Bible is translated from Hebrew or Greek, the plural you’s (as in the y’alls) all get flattened into simply you. Quite often the you’s in the Bible are plural, eventhough we mostly hear them as singular. Afterall, we are a very individualistic society. So, we tend to hear ‘you’ as a singular, as in personal, like a pointed finger at each of us, when in fact a lot of the Bible is saying y’all and all y’all.

So, when we think of sin and the darkness of the world in this time of Advent, it need not be a time of personal darkness or sin that we’re waiting for Christ to redeem. For many of us, if we’re not in active crisis, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy may not be the prayer that we reach for right now. Our common prayer during Advent, ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ might not carry much resonant power in our souls if individually life is pretty good, like in the days before Noah.

While we all have sins and shame hidden in our closets, it’s often the systemic sin, the sins that we commit as a plural, as a society, or as groups that is where the big damage is done. I am not personally engaged in killing Palestinians or anyone else (thank God!), but my tax dollars are used for the “cause” of bombs and starvation. Beyond that obvious complicity though, my fellow humans are doing this. We, who share the same bodies, the same psychology, the same basic joys and needs in life, are doing this and are suffering this. We, who all wait for the rising sun for the sake of hope, peace, joy, and love in our lives, are all caught up in this madness, all of us who share a kinship as children of God.

This is where this prayer, kyrie eleison – Christ have mercy – rings in my heart. God have mercy on us, the human beings who do this to one another, the human beings who watch in powerlessness, the human beings who are confused and torn about how to feel, and the human beings who continue to make this happen. This includes all of us. Of course, this conflict is far from the only sin we participate in as a collective group, even if we really don’t want to. Our choices don’t allow us to opt out of this shared sin. We see our collective sin all around us in the ways we witness suffering and yet individually feel powerless. 

So, this Sunday of Advent, this Sunday when we begin to wait for Jesus to come into our lives anew, where do you see that we need Jesus the most? Where do you feel the need to bring that most tender of prayers, kyrie eleison? What is the collective sin that sits heavy on your heart? Also, where do you feel the need for the mercy and dawn of Christ to come this year for you personally? Where do you need hope? Where do you find yourself or us lost in the dark, needing the first whispers of dawn to come?

Please write your answers, as many as you’d like, down on the sticky notes and put them in the collection plates later in the service. These will be turned into an art project for Christmas Eve by Julie Bay and myself. The joy of Christmas, the joy of the sunrise starts in the dark and in the places needing hope.

The gospel today is about staying awake to witness the dawning of Christ’s coming. We cannot witness the coming light, the subtle shifts of dawn if we are asleep and numb to the darkness in our lives and in our world. We can indeed live in the hope and expectation that someday we truly will give up learning the skills of war. We will, through Christ, beat our tools of war into implements of nourishment and care. As Christians, we live in hope of many things coming to wonderful and triumphant ends with the beginning of God’s reign in its full expression.

Afterall, Christ has come in history, but Christ is also coming in mystery in our current days and lives, and Christ is coming in majesty in the days to come. For all of this, we can live and wait in certain and sure hope. However, we will see it begin to glimmer where it is darkest and for this we need to stay awake and be a witness of the darkness of our days, our lives, and our world to watch and witness hope that moves to peace, jumps in joy, and settles into love.

AMEN