Lonely Exile: A Daily Advent Devotional

Part Six: Active Waiting and Engaged Hope

“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something.”
- Barack Obama

Read: Mark 1:14-15

Mark is the earliest Gospel, the first to be written out of the four that are found in the New Testament. One of the features that makes Mark’s telling of the Jesus story unique is that he doesn’t begin with a birth story. Even though Matthew and Luke copied significant portions of Mark’s material into their Gospels, their starting points are quite different. Did Mark not know any of the details of Jesus’s birth? As far as we know, it seems no one thought much about Jesus’s birth before the time in which Matthew wrote, the 80s.

Mark begins his story with a grown-up Jesus coming into the wilderness to be baptized by John. For Mark this event, his baptism, was the catalytic experience that awakened his sense of identity and vocation. Sometime after that moment, when he had been tested in the desert and John had been arrested by Antipas, Jesus launched his own movement. The core of his message was his vision of the Kingdom of God. Think of this as a kind of shorthand for what the world would be like if God’s dream was realized—a world of justice and peace.

What separated Jesus from some other voices was his understanding of how the Kingdom would come on earth, as it is in heaven. While many were awaiting an imminent Divine intervention, Jesus understood how the Kingdom would come very differently. Imagine the Kingdom is like seeds that have been planted in the ground. They are already there, waiting to be watered and tended so they can burst forth and bring new life.

In Jesus’s understanding, we aren’t waiting for the Kingdom of God to come; God is waiting for us to bring our water cans and get to work.

This has a connection to Advent, especially to the themes of hope and waiting. The waiting we do during Advent is not a passive waiting. The hope we cultivate is not just crossing our fingers and wishing for the best. Our waiting is an active waiting, our hope is an engaged hope.

We long for a better world, and we wait for that new age to dawn by tending the seeds of justice and peace that are already here.

Similarly, hope is what happens when we show up for one another, roll up our sleeves, and begin the work of healing, repairing, and mending the world.

That invitation to actively wait and to be engaged in the work of cultivating hope is one of the greatest gifts of Advent.

Question for Reflection

What does active waiting and engaged hope look like in your life today?