Advent 2025: Hope

by Nick Mumejian

The Prophet Isaiah spoke to a people in exile, yearning for liberation and restoration. As we enter this Advent season, that ancient longing feels intensely present. Democracy strains under authoritarian impulses. Climate catastrophe accelerates. Wars multiply. The vulnerable grow more vulnerable. The marginalized find themselves pushed further to the edges. The church—or at least the seemingly loudest voices claiming to speak for it—too often baptizes nationalism, blesses the powerful, and builds walls where Jesus tore down dividing barriers.

So, what does it mean to hope in such a time?

The temptation, of course, is to retreat into a kind of saccharine optimism, to light our Advent candles and sing our hymns while pretending that everything will be fine if we just believe hard enough. But this is not the hope of Advent. This is not the hope that sustained Mary as she sang her revolutionary Magnificat, proclaiming that God scatters the proud, brings down the powerful, lifts up the lowly, and feeds the hungry. This is not the hope that led John the Baptist into the wilderness to prepare the way, calling people to repentance and a complete reordering of their lives.

Advent hope is not optimism. It is not a sunny disposition or positive thinking. It is something far more defiant, far more dangerous.

Advent hope is the audacious conviction that God has not abandoned the world to its worst impulses. It is the stubborn belief that the arc of the universe—despite all evidence to the contrary—bends toward justice because God is bending it. It is the prophet’s vision of a world where swords become plowshares, where the wolf lies down with the lamb, where every valley is lifted up and every mountain brought low, where all flesh sees the salvation of God together.

This hope does not ignore reality; it confronts reality with the even deeper reality of God’s dream for creation.

The earliest Christians were a people who practiced this kind of hope in impossible circumstances. They were a minority movement in an empire that demanded total allegiance. They faced persecution, marginalization, and the constant threat of violence. Yet they gathered in house churches to break bread, to remember Jesus’s resurrection, and to live as though God’s kingdom had already begun breaking into the world—because it had.

Their hope was grounded in the Incarnation itself: the scandalous claim that God did not remain distant from human suffering but entered into it fully. God took on flesh and was born to an unwed teenager in an occupied territory, among the poor and displaced. The very first witnesses to this cosmic event were not the religious elite but shepherds—working-class people on the night shift, keeping watch over their flocks. And almost immediately, this child became a refugee, fleeing state-sponsored violence.

From the very beginning, the Christmas story has been a story about a God who shows up in the margins, among the overlooked and undervalued, in solidarity with those whom empire considers expendable.

This is what makes Christian hope radical. We do not hope because things are going well. We hope because we believe that God is at work in the darkest places, that resurrection follows crucifixion.

But here is the crucial point: this hope requires something of us. It calls us not to passive waiting but to active participation. We do not simply wait for God to fix the world; we join God in the work of mending creation. We become Advent people—those who prepare the way, who make straight the paths, who work for justice and practice mercy and walk humbly with our God.

For the Alliance of Baptists, this means continuing the often-difficult work of being a prophetic voice in a religious landscape that too often chooses empire over gospel. It means championing full inclusion for LGBTQ+ persons when others weaponize scripture to exclude. It means standing with immigrants and refugees when nationalism demands walls and separation. It means confronting white supremacy and working toward racial justice when others insist that the church should stay out of politics. It means advocating for the earth when extraction and exploitation seem more profitable.

This is hope in action. This is what it looks like to prepare the way of the Lord.

As we light our Advent candles this year—Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love—let us remember that these are not mere sentiments but commitments. We light the candle of Hope not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we trust in the God who continually does new things, who makes a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert.

The prophet Jeremiah spoke to people whose world had collapsed, whose temple lay in ruins, whose future seemed impossible. And to them God said: “I know the plans I have for you, plans for welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

We claim that promise today. Not as escapism. Not as denial. But as the deep conviction that God’s love is more powerful than the world’s hate, that God’s justice will outlast every empire, that the light we light tonight will join with countless other lights until the injustice is overcome.

Perhaps most importantly, we must remember that hope is not merely waiting for danger to pass—it is action toward a future liberated from that danger, even while living in a reality defined by it. Hope feeds the hungry today while working toward a world where none go hungry. Hope shelters the homeless now while building systems where housing is a human right. Hope defends the persecuted in this moment while dismantling the structures of persecution itself. This is the difficult, faithful work of Advent: to live into God’s promised future even as we occupy a present that resists it. We do not wait passively for the world to change; we participate actively in its transformation, trusting that our small acts of faithfulness join with God’s great work of redemption.