November 30, 2025
Is There Room for Hope?
Mark 13:24-37
I have two email addresses that are both, somehow, subscribed to New York Times breaking news alerts. So, every time there’s “breaking news,” it arrives twice—ding, ding—five or six times a day, whether anything is actually breaking or not.
This just happened. Now this. Now this.
Maybe you know the feeling: that low-grade drumbeat of alarm that follows you around all day.
It’s not just the news. There’s social media. You look at it, at first because you’re bored, and then it hands you an entire platter of anxiety.
And there’s so much in our world to feed it:
Political decisions that harm real people and especially the poor.
An affordability crisis. A climate crisis. Global and economic uncertainty.
Many of us have losses that are personal, a terrible diagnosis, an early death, heartbreaks that are small in the scheme of the world but are huge to us.
Is there room for hope in a life like this?
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, these four weeks leading to Christmas. In the culture, these weeks are about shopping and holiday events. But in the church, Advent invites us to reflect deeply on waiting for Christ.
Before the joy of the angels and shepherds at Christmas, Advent invites us to stop and notice that we are called to wait. Not to drift, or to stall, but to wait.
As the people of Israel waited for the Savior to be born, we are called to wait for the Savior to come again.
And waiting, as every human being discovers sooner or later, is never passive. Waiting is something we do, and it does something to us. Waiting forms us: sometimes in wisdom, sometimes in worry.
This year our Advent theme is Making Room for Christ at Christmas.
Each week we’ll explore a virtue for people who are waiting: hope, peace, joy, love, lament, light.
Today we begin with the question beneath all the others: Is there room for hope? Especially in times of crisis?
Here’s what I notice in me in a time of crisis—maybe in you too: When life is in crisis, we become human calculators. Scanning and planning. Scanning and planning. What do we do if…
I realized the other day I was checking my phone while brushing my teeth. I’ve become so efficient at scanning and planning I can multitask it.
And into that mindset comes today’s Gospel reading from Mark 13. Honestly, this is not the reading you would expect for this time of year when Christmas trees are on cars and decorations are going up.
Sun darkened. Stars falling. The Son of Man in the clouds. It sounds apocalyptic, because it is. This is known as the little apocalypse in Mark.
The disciples ask Jesus the same question we want to ask: When? When will this happen? What are the signs that the world is ending?
They want a timeline. Certainty.
And Jesus says something that’s sort of surprising if you think about it.
Verse 32: “But about that day or hour no one knows—neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Not even Jesus knows.
Let that sink in for a minute. The Son of God himself doesn’t know the timeline. There is not a date circled on the cosmic calendar. Jesus cannot give the disciples—or us—the certainty we crave even if he wanted to.
But he can help us understand how to wait.
Here’s what I want us to see today: Hope is not knowing when. It’s trusting in whom and working at what. That’s a posture of faith Jesus offers.
God doesn’t give us a timeline. God gives us a way of being. Jesus changes the question from “When will this end?” to “How will you live in the meantime?”
Understanding how to live in the meantime requires that we understand what hope actually is.
Eight centuries ago, a theologian named Thomas Aquinas said hope has two enemies. And when I read this, I thought, this is the culture we live in – these are my friends, this is me, toggling between these two enemies.
The first enemy of hope is presumption—it’s a shallow optimism that says, “Don’t worry, everything works out.” We’ve got this; or, it all works out in the end. This kind of shallow optimism usually rides the news cycle looking for good news if events are going my way, or looking for distractions if events are going the other way. This enemy of hope is presumption.
The second enemy is despair. That’s the doom scrolling. The constant refreshing of the New York Times app. The paralyzing anxiety that can make us passive observers of our own lives.
We toggle between presumption that says, “it will all work out somehow,” and despair that says, “nothing will work out anyway.”
Hope, Aquinas says, stands between them. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not giving up. Hopes charts a middle way.
Hope trusts in God’s promises while engaging in the work that correspond to those promises. Hope has hands and feet.
In the 1990s a psychologist named C. R. Snyder confirmed what Aquinas was talking about.
He said hope isn’t a feeling, even though we say something like, “I’m feeling hopeful.”
Hope is actually a way of thinking that involves two things: First, seeing a pathway forward. Second, believing your actions matter on that path.
Jesus gives us both of those in this story.
The path forward is daily trust in God, believing that God is faithful even when we can’t see the whole picture. We don’t need to know when. We need to know in whom.
And the actions on the path? That’s your faithful work. The post where God has placed you. The work you’ve been given to do today.
Hope is not knowing when—it’s trusting in whom and working at what.
Listen to what Jesus tells us to do. Jesus repeats himself four times in this passage.
“Beware, keep alert” (verse 33).
“Keep awake” (verse 35).
“Keep awake” again (verse 36).
“What I say to you, I say to all: Keep awake” (verse 37).
So what is Jesus saying? Keep awake.
And then he tells a story to show us what he means.
A master leaves on a journey. He puts his servants in charge. Each one has assigned work. The doorkeeper has special responsibility: be on the watch. The master could return at any time: evening, midnight, when the rooster crows, at dawn. When he returns, the household needs to be ready—so the doorkeeper must keep watch.
Here’s what matters in this analogy. The doorkeeper isn’t pacing by the window, checking the road every five minutes: “Is that him? No? Okay, maybe now? No?”
The doorkeeper is trimming lamps. Oiling the gate latch. Making sure there’s bread for whenever the master arrives. He’s doing his job—so when the knock comes, he’s ready. Not because he predicted the timing, but because he was faithful at his post.
The servants, likewise, are not sitting around speculating about when the master will return. Each one has his or her work. They are doing their assigned tasks.
Being awake means staying faithful at your post.
Keeping awake is not doom scrolling. It’s not compulsively checking the news or email obsessively. That’s anxiety with WiFi, not keeping watch.
Keeping watch is being faithful at your work. Active engagement. Let me show you what this looks like.
Today, Loaves and Fishes Alternative Gift Market is happening downstairs. Twelve great organizations have been invited to participate this year. Some are familiar and a couple may be new to you.
As I was looking at the names, I thought about all they’ve been through in the last five years – their staff, their directors, their boards. A global pandemic. An economic recession. A hurricane that was the worst disaster in our state’s history. And they are working at the heart of some of our most intractable crises: poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, affordable housing, domestic violence.
Through every crisis, they’ve grown, expanded, pivoted and pivoted again. They’ve learned new skills and started new initiatives.
That’s keeping awake. That’s being at your post. Faithful work.
Faithfulness doesn’t require knowing the outcome. Faithfulness requires trusting that God will show up while doing the work God has given you to do.
It’s a spouse who cares for his wife through a long decline, doing the daily work of faithfulness and love.
It’s a parent who manages simultaneous crises in her parents and in her children and in herself, while doing getting kids where they need to go, and groceries in the kitchen, and planning for Christmas.
Faithful work today, trusting God for tomorrow. That’s keeping watch.
I remember a friend, years ago, named Dave. He lost his job as the primary breadwinner for his family. He had always struggled with depression, his brother had committed suicide, and it terrified him. He danced on the edge of substance abuse. How would he cope with losing his job?
He could have gone down a dark hole, but instead he dove into volunteering and helping others. He kept his sanity and his health by getting out of his own crisis to care for others while the slow work of healing happened.
That’s keeping watch.
It looks like the regular ministries of this congregation that go week after week: taking care of families in need, offering meals and friendship to those without housing, doing good work week after week even when the work isn’t new or exciting. It’s the long-term commitment of being a community that shows up, faithfully, in every season.
That’s keeping watch.
Do you see the pattern?
Sometimes we assume that people who do these things must have it all together. But often it’s the opposite. They’re struggling. They have their own crises, their own anxieties, their own news alerts and mental rehearsals of worst-case scenarios.
But they are keeping watch.
Not because their life is easy, but because faithfulness at their post gives them something anxiety never can: meaningful work that matters.
Jesus knew this two thousand years ago: You have a post. You have work. Your faithfulness matters, even when you can’t see the whole picture, even when you don’t know the timeline, even the outcome is uncertain.
Hope is not knowing when—it’s trusting in whom and working at what.
Now here’s the thing: This kind of hope—active, engaged, faithful—doesn’t come naturally to us.
We’re wired for anxiety about the future. That’s part of how we have survived as a species. We scan and plan and react.
We need practice in trustful waiting. We need training in keeping watch with hope and faith. That’s what Advent is.
Four weeks of lighting candles, one by one. Four weeks of reading ancient promises. Four weeks of saying “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
A pastor in South Carolina mistyped that this year. Instead of “O Come, O God, We’re Waiting,” she wrote, “Come on, God, we’re waiting.” That’s now their Advent theme.
We’re building anticipation week by week. Training ourselves in a different posture.
Lighting Advent candles doesn’t manipulate God into showing up. God is already here. But it trains us to wait.
Each week we practice: God is faithful. Christ is coming. Waiting has meaning. There is work for us to do.
We’re learning a different way of being, a way of keeping hope alive.
We’re not waiting for hope—we’re waiting in hope.
In my own life right now, I’m learning to keep watch by staying present.
There’s a line from Teilhard de Chardin that keeps coming back to me: “Trust in the slow work of God.”
I’m watching for signs of healing from griefs that are still close to the surface. I’m learning to enjoy the present moment rather than constantly anticipating what’s next or regretting what’s past. I’m noticing my ability to celebrate daily things in my family, in my work, at church, to be grateful for good things large and small, to be helpful where I can.
Trust the slow work of God. For healing. For light dawning. For good things that are growing, even if they are out of sight.
As I look around this congregation, I see hope everywhere—quiet, stubborn, lived hope:
People who keep showing up.
Volunteers who keep serving.
Caregivers who keep loving.
Servants who keep laboring.
Ones who are struggling themselves but choose faithfulness, choose to be found at their post, keeping watch.
I know there is room for hope.
Not because we know the timeline.
Not because we control the outcomes.
But because God is faithful and God is good.
And because God gives us meaningful work for the meantime.
As we enter this Advent season, I invite you:
Clear away the anxious speculation. Notice what fuels it for you, what feeds it—and change it, let it go.
Take up your post. There is faithful work God has given you. Go do it.
And trust that God will show up.
Because here’s the mystery of Advent:
We’re waiting for the One who is already here. Christ has come. Christ will come again. And while we wait—Christ is with us now.
Come, Lord Jesus. Come on, God.
And help us hope while we wait.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina
Asheville, North Carolina