12 22 11 Christmas Blog

I am actually writing this on the very day of the winter solstice—the shortest day of the year. Writers often depict winter as a symbol for life when it is bleak, cold and hopeless. And why not? Local food crops simply cannot grow in an Alaskan winter. At our house, down in one of the deep valleys created by the Chugach Mountains, the sun does not even make it above the mountain peaks for another month. It is cold, it is dark and, apparently, desolate.

Yet, winter really should be the season for hope, not hopelessness. People who live with the land have always known this. Winter is the season for making plans for the spring. Farmers are gathering seed. Builders are designing the homes they will build in the not-so-distant future. Hunters and gatherers are restoring their tools and getting ready. This is a season of waiting, but waiting in a way that prepares for a wonderful tomorrow.

It is easy to lose track of hope. We live in a moment of history where people seem to have three choices. They can see the magnitude of the problems facing

our existence and fall into a wintry despair. They can see the magnitude of the problems and either deny that they are real, maybe as claiming it all as a part of God’s plan and therefore deny that we need to take action, or they can join together in faithfully living into the change God is bringing, the future that is coming.

This, of course, is the heart of a Christian understanding of faithfulness. We build it into

our common life as a community of faith. Beginning four Sundays before Christmas, as the darkness and cold of winter descends, we celebrate the season of Advent. In this season, we recognize that the problems of the world are real, and we must face them with a mature (or at least maturing) faith.

The problems of the world are real. In fact, there are any number that deserve attention: overpopulation, economic bubbles, carbon emissions, addiction and strife—among others. If that is not enough to get our attention, what is? We are living in a time of either wintry despair, blind denial, or something else.

Christians are called to live out of that something else—something called hope. Christians have always insisted that hope is real. In the birth of Jesus Christ, a real human being, God got involved in history. Knowing that this is who God is—the One who is with us and is engaged with us in the face of it all—empowers a whole different life than that of denial or despair.

Because of Jesus, we know that real and effective hope is always available to us. Hope calls to us from the future to take hope and be active in the present. In fact, the Christian witness is that we nearly always go through all three of these realities.

• We go astray, but insist for a while that we are OK: denial.
• Our eyes are then opened, and we realize that we are not only off-track, but probably incapable of solving it.
• We hear God’s call from the future, and realize that something bigger than ourselves is at work, and that we can be a part of it.
  
  

Winter is that season of recognizing that God is with us now, and then of hearing the possibilities of the future. It is a time of rethinking what we thought the plan was. It is a time of allowing God to capture us, and to reshape our imagination. It is a time of becoming ready to join-in on the new thin

g that will be born.

Yet, if this winter-hope is to be real hope, it requires that we become ready to move and take action when the time is right. God does make changes, but the biblical account describes the changes as taking place when God gets involved in history with real people and real events.

If Advent is about waiting with expectation for the birth of the Savior—and it is—then faithful living now, two millennia after that birth, is about joining-in

on what God has been doing since and will be doing into the future. Faithful living that has real hope means that we, the people who are alive now, will listen for God’s call from the future and join together in living for that future.

Yes, we are in winter right now. Good or bad, this is where we are. I hope that we will

choose to understand winter as a time of hope. I hope we will look at the problems listed above choose to live for a future that has seen these problems addressed. The problems are big, but God is bigger. There is a lot of inertia behind the status quo, but God can bring us all together to put our combined weight behind the call for change.

The question is where to start. We will all have to work together to bring change. On the other hand, starting is a very personal thing. As for me, I am starting with winter. This is a season for examining my own heart, recognizing that I am as much a part of the problem as the rest of my generation. This is a season for asking God to change my heart. All future action will have to come from there.

[Pictures: Flying over Nuiqsut Alaska, Dec. 6, 2011 at noon.

Presbyterian Chapel, Nuiqsut, Alaska