The God of Hope

Sermon — December 7, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
(Romans 15:4–13) Amen.

I almost want to end the sermon there, with Saint Paul’s beautiful words, written to the members of the early Christian church in Rome. He had never met them, but you can feel the love and compassion in his words. What a beautiful way to mark this Advent season of hope. In fact, it hits three of the four Advent themes that I learned as a child, when we were taught that the four Advent candles symbolized hope, peace, joy, and love. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace,” Paul says. And in this dark season, who doesn’t need some of those?

But peace, hope, love, and joy are not the only Advent themes. Advent is a season of contrasts: of hope and warning, peace and chaos, joy and fear. It’s a season that’s suspended between the First Coming of Christ at Christmas and the Second Coming on Judgment Day. Advent is a season of “duality.” And for me, nothing symbolizes this better than the fact that there are actually two different sets of themes that have been assigned to the four Sundays of Advent: while many of us may have learned the four themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, there is an older, traditional set of themes for the four Sundays of Advent: those were death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Two rather different moods.

Our readings this morning are born out of that duality of Advent, that disconnect between Advent as a season of joy and hope and Advent as a season of judgment and repentance.

The prophet Isaiah describes the hope of a new and transformed world of peace, a world that has been freed from violence so completely that even the predators have become vegans. “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,” Isaiah says, “and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.” (Isaiah 11:6–7) The prophet envisions all the nations of the world united at last. Rival nations who in our world only meet one another to make war will come together in prayer, instead, and “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” (Isaiah 11:9) The world that God proclaim through Isaiah is a world of justice and peace, wisdom, knowledge and love. This vision feels beautiful, and safe; maybe even cozy.

The world of John the Baptist is anything but cozy. John’s a wild man, a figure of chaos and judgment, who embodies in his own appearance the radical nature of his ministry: he lives in the wilderness, he’s clothed in camel’s hair and leather, he eats locusts and wild honey. (Matthew 3:1, 4)

And the roughness of John’s appearance is matched only by the sharpness of his tongue, because the tone of his message isn’t much like Isaiah’s “Peaceable Kingdom.” John doesn’t encourage his people to hope; he commands them to repent. He doesn’t tell them about a beautiful world where little children will play over the dens of vipers; he calls them a “brood of vipers!” He doesn’t reassure them with the message of peace to come, he asks them, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7)

(…You did? Five seconds ago? When you said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”)

John’s message is a message of judgment and warning and repentance. It doesn’t matter that you’re the children of Abraham, John says—God can take these stones and raise up children of Abraham. What matters is what you do, not what your ancestors did. “Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the tree,” John says. (3:10) Don’t make Jesus chop you down! Oh yeah, he’s coming, and he’s going to be way more powerful than me. I just baptized you in water, and that was pretty good, right? He’s going to baptize you, too, and it’s gonna be fire…I mean, literally, he’s going to baptize you with fire. He’s got his winnowing fork right there in his hand, and he’s going to gather the wheat into his barn… “but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Matt. 3:12)

(Show of hands: Who would rather hang out with Isaiah than with John?)

These two readings seem to capture two poles of Advent, the duality of the season’s traditional and modern themes. The prophet Isaiah may lean today toward peace, hope, joy, and love, but John the Baptist wants to remind us about death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

But that’s not exactly true. There’s a distinct note of judgment in our wonderful world of Isaiah: the Peaceable Kingdom in which “they will not hurt or destroy” comes only after the Messiah will “kill the wicked” with “the breath of his lips,” (Isaiah 11:4) although that may be metaphorical, a matter of persuasion, not violence; he’s not a dragon, after all. And there’s plenty of hope in the prophecies of John. The images of baptism and pruning and winnowing are not about destruction, but about cutting away that which isn’t serving its purpose any more, enabling transformation and new growth. John’s language is extreme because that process of redemption might require radical change, quite literally; “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning “root,” as in, “the ax is lying at the root of the trees.”

Beneath the apparent contrasts, there is a deeper unity here. The core distinction of Advent is between what is already “now” and what is “not yet,” between the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry and its culmination. In Advent, we await our Christmas celebration of the First Coming of Christ, when he began to establish his reign of peace. We await that Second Coming at the end of time when the Peaceable Kingdom will finally be made complete. And we acknowledge that we live somewhere in the middle, where things are a bit of a mess.

John’s words aren’t harsh because God is harsh, and wants to judge a peaceful world. John’s words are harsh because the world is harsh, and the distance between the life of our world and the dream of our God is vast.

I’ve been struck by the scale of that distance especially this week, reading the newspaper, and thinking about American military strikes on boats in the Caribbean. The scope of the debate itself reveals the distance between our understanding of the world and God’s. What’s been striking to me this week is that what finally brought Congress to discuss what’s going on was not the steady stream of attacks in which the US government acted as judge, jury, and executioner for alleged drug smuggling, but the question of whether it’s crossing a line to go back for the survivors of a first strike. Both political parties, for decades, have agreed that the President can order such attacks, anywhere around the world. And I’m not a lawyer or a national security expert. There may be good reasons they could give for these attacks. But the distance between the world in which we live and the world in which “the wolf lies down with the lamb” seems vast to me.

And, to step back from current events, that distance isn’t only there in the geopolitical realm. It’s there in our own lives: the world of the Peaceable Kingdom, the world of love and joy, in which suffering is no more, can sometimes feel very far away from the reality in which we live.

But that’s not a cause for despair. An imperfect world is exactly what we should expect, in these “now and not yet” times. The very fact that our hearts break at the violence of our world, or the suffering of the people we love, or our own failures to love them as we should, is a sign that God is working in our midst; that the Holy Spirit is here, pointing us back toward the example of Christ, the Prince of Peace. God came among us, once, to show us a very different way of life. And God is with us now, working to reshape us and our world.

The “repentance” John proclaims is the long process of turning away from the road that leads to destruction to follow another way. That process of change can be hard. It may feel like we’re being baptized with fire. And it’s a lot of work to get from here to there. But God doesn’t leave us alone in that work. God is here among us, with a winnowing fork in hand. That little child born in Bethlehem is leading us toward the kingdom of peace. It can be hard to believe that we will ever get there. But giving in to despair leads only to inaction. And so I join in Saint Paul’s prayer: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.