Hope for the Cranky
7 December 2025
Advent 1 A
Notes taken from a homily preached from the aisle
Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7; 18-19
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
9 a.m. Sung Mass
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Grants Pass, Oregon
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
When I first became an Episcopalian, I was taken aback when Advent came. For me, it had always been the time for preparing for Christmas. But then, right there in the lectionary, it was all about the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord! John the Baptist preaching doom! Yikes! But a kind priest resolved my conflict. Advent is the season where we focus on, like E.B White’s Arthur, the once and future king. We focus on the then and yet future coming of our Lord. It happened back then, but it will happen still in the future. As the Gospel of John puts it, “the hour is coming, and now is.”
This matters a lot to me, especially this year.
Remember that line from C.S. Lewis? He talks about the times when our faith just doesn’t give us the lift it once did. He calls them “dry times,” when the water of life seems to have stopped flowing. Well, for about a year, I have been in one of those. It may have something to do with the direction our country has taken, enough to make anybody lose hope. I have felt alienated from my family, from fellow church members, from God. Everything in my life seemed to worry me as much as paying bills or taxes. Even my back and neck started hurting again.
I have heard some people characterize such a spiritual funk as a crisis of faith, as doubt, or the sin of despair. Others call it depression. But I realized about the end of summer that what I was experiencing was none of these. It was more akin to grouchiness, crankiness, being a curmudgeon, what my father used to call being “techy,” a vague annoyance at the world. Then when fall came in full force, in all four choral groups I sing with, we began to prepare Christmas music, with all its joy, happiness, and sense of things having been set right in the world. My first reaction was to think, “here we go again!” It’s been 2,000 years and the world is just as screwed up as it was then. What difference does it all make?
But then something happened. That music and joy started working on me. It opened my heart. I started having feelings again. Good feelings. And I realized that to no longer be a grouch all I had to do was decide to not be one. To stop blaming my malaise on others or outside things, no matter how broken and twisted they were. And my hope returned. I am so thankful.
When I was young, I sometimes heard in Church sermons on what they called the “signs of the times,” or the signs of the end-time. Most of these were disastrous indications that the world was going to hell and destruction. Some people misunderstand scripture and think that the prophets provide a television guide like prevue of coming events, and those are not good things. I only later learned that this was a gross misunderstanding of the New Testament idea of “signs of the times.”
But the prophets always talk to their own day. The prophets talk about the horrors of their own age and say these will continue to occur, and maybe even get worse. But they also see that becaue of God’s love, it will end well. They see a future where the crooked will be made straight and illness will be healed, where weapons of war will be melted down and beaten into farming tools.
So when Jesus says to the biblical literalists of his own day, “You know how to read the weather, but not read the signs of the times,” he is not saying you don’t recognize the bad things on the prophetic list of coming distractions, the rotten things that supposedly will precede the coming day of the Lord. No--he is saying you don’t recognize the good things in my ministry--the healings, the granting of sight and speech or the ability to walk on one’s own--that are signals that in Jesus the good things of the hoped-for day of the day of the Lord are already here.
It is part and parcel with the heart of our faith. We look about the world and see it is broken. We hope for God to come and set it right. That’s what “day of judgment” means, after all. In the Old Testament, the Book of Judges is not about legal court and people in white powdered wigs wielding gavels and being called “Your Honor.” It is about people like Samson, Deborah, Judith, Barak: military heroes who set things right and liberate the oppressed. That’s the basic idea of the “Day of Judgment.” Oppressed and abused people see the day when things are set right as an occasion for joy and hope. But what if we are the abusers, the oppressors? The it’s a day of doom and fear. And we all are both oppressors and oppressed. If we ask who are the wicked who might get the worse of it when things are set right, if we are honest, we see that, in the words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
And that is why the prophets give us the great call, “shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael,” “turn back, turn back, O Israel,” It’s why John the Baptist says again and again, “Change your ways, for the Day of the Lord approaches,”
Repentance is not about beating ourselves into submission and forcing ourselves to follow impossible rules. Such a bulldozer approach to our lives is a recipe for unhappiness and tension—the very kind of tension that leads us to feel compelled to engage in the very things we should turn away from. Paul several times suggests that instead we should “clothe ourselves in Christ” or “look upon the face of Jesus: to bring more and more light into our lives, and that this will change us. The Colossians passage that usually is translated, “put to death your earthly parts,” is a bad translation. The Greek is much clearer: “let the earthly parts of you die.” As we are changed by focusing on Jesus, the light he gives us actually empowers us to show love, and the bad behaviors will of themselves drop off and cease.
Paul talks about putting the example of Christ before our eyes, putting gratitude for what he has done for us in our hearts. A heart full of gratitude has little room for the selfishness that generates unjust, hurtful, abusive, and wanton acts.
I read in Tertullian this last week a great line I had never noticed before: “When a person who cares only for themselves dies, the whole world breathes a sigh of relief.” Repentance gives that relief without us having to die.
Hope is what Advent is all about. We see the world and see that, even 2,000 years after the coming of our Lord in the flesh, it is still a profoundly broken place. And, in the words of the poet, what happens to hope deferred? Does it dry like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode? For me this last year, it made me cranky.
The message of Advent, which talks about how God has come already and will still come again, is this: don’t give up on hope.
Sleepers, awake! Cast aside the works of darkness and don the armor of light. Put on Christ. And all will take care of itself.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
