Active Hope in the Darkness

By Revd George Mwaura

We gather on this First Sunday of Advent, not to escape the darkness, but to name it, and to proclaim that our waiting is not a passive resignation, but purposeful resistance. The world laments. Wars rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. Hunger stalks its victims in Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Climate catastrophe displaces millions as we have witnessed this week in Indonesia and other south-east Asia countries. The darkness is not metaphorical; it is the cold reality of children sleeping in rubble, of mothers watching their infants starve, of entire peoples erased from their lands. And into this darkness, Advent whispers: Wait.

But this is not the waiting of helplessness. The Hebrew prophets knew no such passivity. Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into ploughshares was not wishful thinking, it was a revolutionary manifesto. When he cried, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,’ he was calling for an active preparation: straightening the crooked systems, levelling the mountains of injustice, filling the valleys of inequality. Understand this: Christian hope, properly understood, is not optimism. Oh, no! Optimism is the privilege of those insulated from suffering. Hope, on the other hand, is something far more dangerous: it is the defiant conviction that darkness does not have the final word, coupled with the willingness to act as if the Kingdom were already breaking in.

Jürgen Moltmann taught us that Christian hope is not about the future as mere tomorrow, but about God’s future invading our present. We wait in darkness, yes, but we wait as light-bearers. We do not idle in despair; we labour in anticipation. This Advent, our hope must be embodied: in advocacy for the displaced, in solidarity with the suffering, in resistance to the powers that profit from war and environmental destruction. We light candles therefore, not to prettify the darkness, but to defy it! To say that even the smallest flame is an act of theological rebellion.

The Incarnation we await is God’s descent not into gilded comfort, but into the raw heart of crisis. Jesus was born in a stable, in a country under occupation, and threatened by imperial violence from his first breath. As you can see, our hope is in a God who does not transcend suffering but transforms it from within. So, we wait. But we wait awake – eyes open to injustice, hands extended in mercy, voices raised in prophetic witness. We wait as those who know the end of the story and therefore cannot be silent in the middle chapters. Today we proclaim, come, Lord Jesus. And until you do, make us your coming.

Amen!