Tag Archives: hope

Walkin’ all over God’s Heaven

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Jesus did not just come out of the tomb; he ascended to heaven. He rose from the dead and disappeared from our sight to return to his Father and our Father, his God and our God. The mystery of his ascension completes the Paschal Mystery. In his victory of death we have his promise of a life beyond this one.

When I was a boy, I remember my father buying a record player. It was the early 1940’s and times were hard; I’m sure he broke the family bank to pay for it. For a good while he only had a couple of those old vinyl records he would play over and over.

One of them was a haunting black spiritual sung by Marian Anderson called “Heaven.”

“I got shoes, and you got shoes, all God’s children got shoes.

When I getta heaven gonna put on my shoes

and gonna walk all over God’s heaven, heaven.

Everybody’s talking bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there.

heaven, heaven.  Gonna walk all over God’s heaven.”

I still feel the hope in that great singer’s voice as she sang that song. She was singing the song of barefooted slaves who were looking for something more. It wasn’t just a pair of shoes that would wear out after awhile. These were shoes God gave you in heaven, a place of completed dreams. Once you put on those shoes you could walk freely and walk everywhere.

Our readings for the Feast of the Ascension describe heaven as our final home, where all our dreams are realized, where tears are wiped away, where sadness is no more, where wrongs are righted, where reunion with those we love takes place, where we enjoy the presence of God and all the saints.

For now, we only have hints of heaven. We only have assurances of faith. However, it’s not enough to just talk about it, we must walk in the steps of Jesus. Walking in his steps brings us, not to a grave, but to the place where he is. That’s heaven.

First Sunday of Advent

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This Sunday begins the Season of Advent, leading to Christmas.

Advent is more about the future than about the past. Yes, we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago, but we celebrate his birth because Jesus Christ changes the way we look ahead. He brings us hope.

The Jewish scriptures we read during Advent tell us the kind of hope Jesus brings.  This Sunday’s first reading is from the Prophet Jeremiah. God says to him:

I will raise up for David a just shoot ;

he shall do what is right and just in the land.

In those days Judah shall be safe
and Jerusalem shall dwell secure;
this is what they shall call her:
“The LORD our justice.”

Now, God spoke to Jeremiah as Jerusalem and Judea were being laid waste by a powerful Babylonian army that came from the north to level cities and towns, destroy crops, confiscate valuables and round up able-bodied Jews to bring them to Babylon as slaves. They spared nothing, brutally crushing everything.

So Jeremiah sees nothing but wasteland before him. The land he loved, life as he knew it was gone; everything has been uprooted.

However, God points to a shoot, a tiny sliver of life pushing up amidst the ruins. It’s a sign of life, and through it God will made Judah safe and Jerusalem secure. God will bless his land again.

It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by some great loss, some defeat, some bad situation that seems to take away all we know and love. Our world today, with all its many problems, can look like a wasteland.

The time of advent says, “Signs of hope, small though they be, are there in the midst of it all. God promises life not death in Jesus, whom he has sent. Look for those signs of hope.”

Gospel stories: Mirrors for seeing ourselves

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The gospel stories are like mirrors that help us see ourselves and what we should be, St. Asterius says in today’s readings. (Can’t find anything about him in my limited dictionaries of the saints). He’s reading the parable of the Good Shepherd, who leaves the sheep at pasture to search for the stray.

“He crosses many valleys and thickets, he climbs great and towering mountains, he spends much time and labor in wandering through solitary places until at last he finds his sheep.

And when he finds it, he does not chastise it; he does not use rough blows to drive it back, but gently places it on his own shoulders and carries it back to the flock. He takes greater joy in this one sheep, lost and found, than in all the others.”

The hidden meaning of the parable? “It teaches us that we should not look on people as lost or beyond hope; we should not abandon them when they are in danger or be slow to come to their help.”
God does not look on people as lost or hopeless. Neither should we.

Hope for Today

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I visited a friend of mine the other day, a retired banker who worked for a major New York bank most of his life. He told me he’s getting more and more depressed by the financial situation taking place in our country and throughout the world. He keeps watching the financial news on television constantly and reading the newspapers and magazines, but  he doesn’t see any evidence that things are going to get better nor any foolproof solution for the situation.

All the experts and the pundits are stumped. He talks  to his friends about the situation and they’re not shedding any light on it either.

Well, of course, neither could I. Nobody has the answers, it seems, for what we’re facing today.

I did tell him, though, that I thought he should give his mind a rest and turn the television off and think of something else. It’s dangerous when we get obsessed by problems.

When I left him,  I thought of a phrase from the story of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus. “We were hoping…” they said to the Stranger who began to walk with them.

They had put their hopes in something that didn’t turn out: a kingdom, a political order brought about by Jesus of Nazareth. “We were hoping…”  But with his crucifixion their hopes were dashed to the ground.

It”s always important when problems arise, whether personal or social, when things we put our trust in are shaken or destroyed,  that we look for hope to get us through.

That’s what Jesus did for his disciples that day on the way to Emmaus. He raised their hopes. When our hope is strong and well-founded, we keep going and are not overcome by fear.

The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, which we celebrate today, is a time to strengthen that kind of hope. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” And Jesus began his mission, hard and demanding as it was.

God said that to us at our baptism. We are his children, gifted with his wisdom and power. Who knows what we have to do to get out of the mess we see in our world today? But the hope that rests in God’s  promise  gives us encouragement and  patience to get on with the job until its done.