Essential Hope
In Essential Hope, Pastor Doug Scalise opens Advent with Isaiah 2:1–5, reminding us that Christian hope is not sentimental or decorative—it is necessary for facing a fearful and anxious world. This sermon highlights Isaiah’s bold vision of nations streaming toward God, weapons transformed into tools for life, and people walking in the light of the Lord. True hope is practiced: nurtured through worship, Scripture, community, and daily acts that turn us toward God’s future rather than our fears. As Advent begins, we are invited to hold onto God’s essential hope—the kind that sustains us, strengthens us, and helps us believe that with God, even the seemingly impossible can become possible.
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Essential Hope
Today, we enter Advent, and the Christian year begins, with a single candle flickering against the dark. We begin the Christian year in a place that feels familiar: a world that’s aching, anxious, straining under the weight of everything it’s carrying. And into that world, Advent comes with a quiet word: hope.
But the hope of Advent isn’t a soft or sentimental word. It’s not the kind found on greeting cards or in holiday ads. Advent hope is Essential Hope — the kind of hope that’s not decorative, but necessary.
Essential hope is the hope that keeps you breathing when worries press in. It’s the hope that names fear honestly, instead of pretending everything is fine. It’s the hope that dares to trust God for the future, even when we can’t yet see it taking shape. It’s a hope that believes with God, even the seemingly impossible might one day be possible.
This is what we hear in today’s passage from Isaiah 2:1-5,a passage that dares to proclaim the hope that one day people will have an overwhelming desire to learn God’s ways and walk in God’s paths.
“The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!” (Isaiah 2:1-5)
Alexander Pope wrote,
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
Hope is quite a word. Everyone – from poets to politicians to preachers – recognizes there’s power in the word “hope”. There’s so much in the world today that’s discouraging, disheartening, and disappointing. This is true nationally, globally, and perhaps in your own life.
That’s why it’s so important to hold onto hope and to believe things can be better and to do what you can in your circle of influence to make a positive difference. Christian hope is not wishful thinking, but confident expectation; it’s trusting and waiting expectantly. My mentor, Dr. Harrell Beck, liked to say,
“I used to think hope was the icing on the cake. I’ve lived long enough to learn hope is the cake.”
No matter what’s going on in your life, don’t give up, and hold onto hope.
“Hope is a skill; it requires practice. Hope is an organic thing; it requires cultivation. If you become an expert at nothing else, let it be hope” (Margaret B. Moss).
An article in The Atlantic (April 2022) titled, “Why American Teens Are So Sad – Four Forces Propelling the Rising Rates of Depression Among Young People” begins, “The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis.
From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel ‘persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness’ rose from 26% to 44%, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.”
Four of the forces fueling hopelessness and sadness in teens are also fueling them in people of all ages.
- 1. Social-media use – the more time people spend on social media, the more hopeless, sad, depressed, angry, and anxious they tend to be.
- 2. Sociality is down – the biggest problem with social media might be the activities that it replaces. Today’s teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit is displacing beneficial activities. The share of high-school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30% from 2007 to 2019. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s license, or play youth sports. The pandemic and the closure of schools made teen loneliness, hopelessness, and sadness worse.
- 3. The world is stressful – and there is more news about the world’s stressors. Stress is not a new phenomenon, but the amount of news we hear about threatening or frightening events is much greater and more vivid.
- 4. Modern parenting strategies – anxious parents, seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.
I’d add a fifth force – a lack of faith in God as the foundation for one’s life. The increase in hopelessness, sadness, and loneliness – not just among teenagers, but in all age groups – has been increasing at the same time as the number of people who say they don’t have a personal relationship with God that anchors and guides their life.
Being part of a faith community in which we find friendship, encouragement, and support; attending worship; and reading the Bible, which is filled with hope, help us to face the challenges of life.
This isn’t to say that if you’re a follower of Christ, you’ll never experience feelings of hopelessness, sadness, or depression. We all have times of trial, and we need to understand that we won’t feel happy every moment of every day for our entire life. That’s not life on this earth. However, by not having a personal relationship with Jesus, people are depriving themselves of a reliable source of hope that’s available to anyone who will receive it.
“Hope” and its siblings “hoped, hopeful, hopes, and hoping” appear 148 times in the Bible. “Hopeless” appears just once (Jeremiah 2:25). Today, in worship, we’ve heard scriptures from two of the books with the most references to hope in the Bible. The Book of Psalms has the most references to hope (26). The Psalms are the prayers and songs of the people, and they encourage us repeatedly to “hope in God”.
For example:
Psalm 9:18,
“But the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish.”
Psalm 31:24,
“Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the LORD.”
Psalm 33:18,
“But the eyes of the LORD are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love.”
Psalm 39:7,
“My hope is in you.”
Psalm 43:5,
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
Psalm 71:5,
“For you have been my hope, O Sovereign LORD, my confidence since my youth.”
The Biblical book with the second most references to hope might surprise you – it’s the book of Job. Job suffered the loss of his children, his property, and his good health. Job struggles mightily with maintaining a sense of hope in the face of such overwhelming suffering and adversity. Eventually, Job emerges from the storm of his terrible trial with a deeper personal relationship with God than he’d previously known. Hope helped to pull him through.
Paul’s letter to the Romans has the third most references to hope in the Bible. Writing about Abraham (Romans 4:18), Paul says that
“Hoping against hope, he believed”
that what God had promised him would happen. Sometimes we must hope against hope – despite the evidence we see, we cling to hope that things can be better or different.
Romans 8:24-25 states,
“For by hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
There seems to be a relationship between hoping and waiting. In Spanish, the verb “esperar” means both to hope and to wait. You hope for something because you don’t yet fully possess it.
There seems to be a relationship between hope and dealing with suffering, as Job demonstrates, and as Paul says in Romans 12:12,
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering.”
Near the end of his letter to the church in Rome, Paul returns to the importance of hope in Romans 15:4 and 13,
“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of hope fill you with all joy & peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Hope is a word that appears frequently on the pages of the Bible. Paul says the God we worship is the God of hope. As we’ve heard, there are so many scriptures that encourage us to have hope – to hold on, to persevere, to keep on believing. The joy and peace so many people are lacking is found in believing in the God of Hope.
We don’t just have a glimmer of hope, but through the power of the Spirit given to us, we may abound in hope. Reading the Bible, we’re encouraged by the steadfastness of people facing tough times who held onto hope.
Storms come to all our lives. Some are the result of our own behavior and choices. Some are not, and are due to causes beyond our control. Storms are difficult, unpleasant, and some of them can’t be outrun or hidden from.
However, hope, faith, courage, thanksgiving, and love are still trustworthy “planks” to grab hold of if the ship of our life is wrecked by a storm, and we can emerge safely on shore with our faith intact – and even matured and strengthened.
When the world says, “Give up,” hope whispers, “Try it one more time.” Writer Ann Lamott put it well,
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.”
Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit, spent seven years on her book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.
On a May afternoon in 1943, a US Army Air Force bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil and gasoline. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a talent that carried him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as the youngest member of the US Olympic Team and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.
Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond that lay a trial even greater. Zamperini would spend 47 days at sea in a tiny life raft before being captured by the Japanese navy.
From then until the war’s end in 1945, he was engaged in a brutal struggle to survive. He was imprisoned at infamous prisoner-of-war camps on Kwajalein Atoll (nicknamed “Execution Island”) and the secret interrogation center Ofuna. Murderously sadistic guards, starvation rations, and bloody dysentery all whittled away at his body and soul.
Finally, he wound up at Naoetsu POW camp northwest of Tokyo, where a psychotic prison official known as “The Bird” made it his mission to break Zamperini.
Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. Unbroken is a testament to both the utter depravity of humanity and to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
Louis Zamperini is a notable example of what actor Christopher Reeve said, after the horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed:
“Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.”
When Unbroken came out, I read a book review of it by Maria Flook in The Boston Globe. She wrote,
“Back home, Zamperini suffered flashbacks… but his new wife introduced him to the Rev. Billy Graham at a Bible tent meeting. His government-issue Bible had ‘made no sense to him,’ but ‘born again’ his post-traumatic stress symptoms disappear. He earned a living as a Christian speaker on ocean liners and ran a nonprofit boys camp. He visited a Japanese prison to forgive his jailed captors.”
The reviewer then laments that, “Finding God is an all too familiar ending,” as if Unbroken was a work of fiction, rather than the true account of what happened to a real person, whose courage and hope were beyond amazing, and whose relationship with God gave him a sense of peace and hope after suffering through torture and torment so awful it’s hard to read about it, much less to personally experience and survive.
Samuel Johnson wrote,
“Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable.”
Romans 5:2b-5 proclaims,
“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Biblical hope builds its foundation on faith. Hebrews 11:1 states,
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for.”
Faith and hope are complimentary. Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the reality of the future. Whatever your situation, circumstance, trial, or test – you can face it better with hope. Hope is an attitude and a stance toward life that you need to courageously choose and cultivate again and again.
This past week, Viola Ford Fletcher, one of the last survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died at the age of 111. She wrote in her memoir, Don’t Let Anyone Bury Your Story,
“It’s easy to be consumed by the darkness, and feel small in the face of adversity. But you are not small… hold on to hope, stay true to yourself and never let anyone bury your story.”
Practicing Hope: Turning Toward God’s Future
From conversations with people over the last couple of weeks, I know that people are already practicing hope. Someone told me about serving neighbors at community dinners. Others may be engaged in prayer, journaling, long walks, making art, lighting a candle at the end of the day, or even dancing in the living room to shake off a heavy mood.
The details differ, but the meaning is the same: A practice of hope is anything that turns your face toward God’s future instead of your fear. You don’t need a dozen practices. You don’t need a dramatic transformation. You need one faithful way to stay awake to grace.
In a world weighed down by anxiety, these small acts aren’t trivial. They’re spiritual resistance. They keep fear from being the loudest voice in your life. A prayer, a candle, a shared meal, a walk outside, a moment of creative joy — these become small Advents, little dawns of God’s presence.
They remind us that God’s not done. That goodness still grows. That the world is not abandoned. These practices don’t eliminate fear, but they keep fear from becoming our ruler.
My dad loved musicals, and in Damn Yankees, his favorite song is “You Gotta Have Heart”, which includes the lyrics,
“You’ve gotta have heart; All you really need is heart; When the odds are sayin’ You’ll never win; That’s when the grin should start;
You’ve gotta have hope; Mustn’t sit around and mope; Nothin’s half as bad as it may appear; Wait’ll next year and hope.”
Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
Without hope, life is meaningless. Without hope, life is meaning less and less.
Hope is risky. It feels safer to live without it. If you don’t hope, you can’t hurt.
But hope shapes a vision of a better future.
It gives you the ability to endure and keep going. Hope is essential.
Don’t surrender to despair. Hold on to Hope!
Blessing:
“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” (Albert Einstein)
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)
Questions for Discussion or Reflection
- Where do you notice fear shaping your thoughts, choices, or spiritual life, right now? How does Advent invite you to walk through those fears, rather than deny them or be defined by them?
- In Psalm 122, the psalmist chooses gladness simply by showing up in God’s presence. Where do you experience hope or gladness simply by practicing presence — showing up in community, prayer, or worship — even when circumstances are not ideal?
- Isaiah gives a vision of peace that feels far beyond current reality. What parts of Isaiah’s vision — nations streaming to God, weapons turned into tools for growth, walking in the light — feel especially compelling, challenging, or hopeful to you today?
- Paul’s call to “wake from sleep” in Romans 13 is about spiritual awareness and integrity. What does “waking up” look like in your life? What might God be nudging you to become more aware of, or to act on, as this Advent begins?
- The sermon describes hope not as a feeling, but as a practice — a choice to turn toward God’s future. Which practices of tangible hope (from the list or from your own life) help you stay grounded, open, and spiritually awake? What is one simple practice you want to embrace this Advent?
- Where do you glimpse small signs of hope right now — in your community, relationships, or daily life? How might naming these glimmers help you walk more fully in “the light of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:5)?