The sickness of the human soul – Advent Hope, Part 1

This week I once again welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor of 30 years who now works in international fair trade.

When I shared with my family that I was going to be preaching the first Sunday of Advent on the theme of hope, my youngest daughter, Margaret, said, “Oh, wow, dad, that is Kirk Marks CORE.”

I thought that was really cool, after I Googled it and found out what she meant. Google Translate will translate Gen X into Gen Z, and back the other way. I have to do that in my house.

Margaret was observing that the theme of hope is deep in my heart and thus very, very important to me and the ministry that I’ve had the privilege of serving in over the last thirty years.

So to begin Advent, I would like to share with you a bit of my journey with the theme of hope. Then in future posts, we’ll talk about what exactly we mean in the church by hope, which is somewhat different than the way we throw the word hope around in our culture today, such as “I hope it doesn’t snow this week” or “I hope it gets warmer.”

We use the word hope that way, but we’re talking about something very different when we talk about hope in the church and what the scripture tells us about hope. And then we’re going to look at a prophet of hope from the Old Testament who gives us a hopeful message that speaks to us in this Advent season.

My personal journey with hope really begins when I started in pastoral ministry back in the early 90s. I served my first church in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.

My wife Debbie and I traveled there, and our daughter Emily was just a baby. I began to see very quickly that people I was ministering to were dealing with a sense of hopelessness and a loss of hope.

Some of that came from the economic hopelessness of the area and the times in which we were living. The coal regions of Pennsylvania were an area that thrived and boomed because of the coal industry, which for over a hundred years brought lots of jobs, opportunity and flourishing to the anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1960s, that all began to wane.

By the time I got there in the early 90s, the coal industry was depressed, people had lost jobs, and families had been fragmented. There was a lot of economic hopelessness. That hopelessness bled out into other areas of life, as there were terrible problems with drug and alcohol abuse and family fragmentation. These problems were rooted in people having lost hope.

There was also at that time discussion that coal might come back. Those jobs might come back. Coal mines might reopen. While it didn’t seem very realistic to me, I realized that people put their hope in the possibility that the coal industry would come back and save them.

Into that context, I saw a tremendous opportunity to preach a different message of hope, to share with people the hope that they could find, not in an economic plan, not in an industry, but in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I soon found that it wasn’t just the area’s economic struggles that were the problem. As I talked to colleagues ministering where people were in different economic situations, and as I got to know pastors in other countries and cultures, such as Mexico and Japan, I learned that hopelessness was pervasive. It seems like it’s the sickness of the human soul.

A loss of hope is a terrible, terrible thing.

Yet, the gospel message has an answer and a promise through its message of hope. I found tremendous direction for ministry in sharing the hope of the Lord Jesus Christ with people. In the next post, we’ll find out how.

Photo by Pars Sahin on Unsplash