Monday, the Fourth Week of Advent - Living With Hope

It’s the final week of advent.  

On this Monday, I am thinking of some friends in our fellowship who have lost a loved one – a grandmother – just these few days before Christmas.

When I was 14, just 2 weeks before Christmas, I walked into my house after delivering the morning papers in my small town.  Standing in the kitchen was my mother, and she was crying.  She looked at me and said, “Grandma died this morning”.  I wept.

That Christmas presents were opened and some of them were from Grandma who had knitted and sewn presents for her family all Fall long.  It was a Christmas I’ve never forgotten.  Years later I can picture the solemnness of receiving gifts as they were passed out.  Tears flowed instead of grin to grin smiles and exclamations.

I read this story this morning about the poet Robert Wadsworth Longfellow.  In 1863, as the American Civil War was dragging on, Longfellow’s son joined the army against his father’s wishes and was critically injured. On Christmas Day that year, as church bells announced the arrival of another Christmas, Longfellow picked up his pen and began to write, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

The poem begins pleasantly, lyrically, but then takes a dark turn. “Accursed” cannons “thundered,” mocking the message of peace. By the fifth and sixth verses, Longfellow’s desolation is nearly complete. “It was as if an earthquake rent the hearth-stones of a continent,” he wrote. The poet nearly gave up: “And in despair I bowed my head; ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said.”

But then, from the depths of that bleak Christmas day, Longfellow heard the irrepressible sound of hope. And he wrote this seventh stanza.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep! The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men!”

The war raged on and so did memories of his personal tragedies, but it could not stop Christmas. The Messiah is born! He promises, “I am making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5).

My friends, we celebrate family and life on most Christmas days, but occasionally we have to remind ourselves of the hope of the Gospel – that all things will be made NEW because the one who came at Christmas, will come again and all things will be made NEW.