Our Advent Hope: A Letter from our Executive Director

We’re only a couple of weeks from Christmas and many of us are caught up in the busyness and hectic pace of the season. However, for those of us who observe the liturgical calendar, this is also the season of Advent. Advent invites us to a season of reflection. Yes, we prepare for the coming of Christmas and the celebration of Jesus’ birth. But Advent is about much more than that. It’s about hope. And not just an otherworldly hope that lies somewhere in the distant future. It’s a hope firmly grounded in the realities of today. 

At Emmaus House, this Advent hope leads us to take to heart the words of the prophet Isaiah:

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. (NRSV, Isaiah 5. 6-8)

Admittedly, the world that we hear about on the news each day is a far cry from Isaiah’s vision of a world marked by peace and equity. It’s a far cry from the world that I see when I look out my office window in Peoplestown or greet people in our help center. In a neighborhood challenged by material poverty and racial inequity, how does Isaiah’s vision inform our work?

I choose to see in Isaiah’s words a message of hope. Hope that our efforts are not in vain, hope that God is at work in the lives of the people that we serve, hope that the arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice. That is the Advent hope – an unwavering belief that God is at work in Peoplestown, in your town, in towns throughout the world. Hope that violence, oppression, inequity, and whatever else separates people one from the other are not the end of the story.

What hope do you find during this season of Advent? Is it the hope of a brighter, more peaceful future where suffering is no more, where all people are treated as beloved children of God regardless of the color of their skin or the size of their bank account? I invite you to join me during this season to contemplate the ways that we can make Isaiah’s vision a reality in our part of God’s world.