It may be my greatest fear as a chaplain.

That I will tell a family, “This will turn out great.” And then the patient dies.

Wearing a badge that implies, “This person speaks for God.”

I never want to offer false hope.

Three years ago, we looked at these same texts from Psalm 80 and Isaiah 64 and Mark 13 and I Corinthians 1. It was the first Christmas of the pandemic. Those of us working in the hospital didn’t have false hope.

We were struggling to find any hope. More people were dying here in the hospital, out in the country, around the world, than we could imagine. For the chaplains, we were a month from the heaviest month we’d ever had.

Hope is being confident in someone or something, even when we cannot see where things are going. But we were seeing where things were going. And we weren’t saying, “She’ll get better.” “I know he’ll make it.”

We were doing what we could to offer comfort. Many people stopped being hopeful.

Here we are, on the first Sunday of Advent, the one often called “Hope”. And that sense of uncertainty has lingered, I think.

Many people don’t actually long to celebrate advent. As a season in the religious calendar, it hasn’t been part of their upbringing. And so, to say “You have to do this” feels like yet another obligation.

That said, many people want to have something they can count on. Not wishful thinking, not “oh, I hope so.” I think, though I haven’t done a survey, that people actually want to have hope.

But we feel like we’ve been disappointed by others and by ourselves and by God. We’ve been disrupted by the precautions and pain of the last three years. We’re not confident about anything.  

And so we find refuge in resignation or outrage. Or predictable distractions.

I could start by looking at all the unhelpful places we turn when we’re not sure what to hope in.

I could start with the scolding sense of, “Hey. Stop that.”

I could start with the cheery sense of, “Just do this!”

I think I’d rather start with this: Why do we sing, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” and yet we keep looking?

In our disappointment, we still have a desire.