Restore Our Hope

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Isaiah 2:1-5

    My parents and I had the opportunity to visit Bath, England on my sabbatical this summer, where we visited the Roman Baths for which the town is named.  As you walked through the structures, they projected images across the actual ruins of what they thought the original temple and baths looked like back when the Roman Empire had an outpost there in England.  With those projections, you could actually see and imagine what the people in Roman times experienced as they came to Bath:  large stone pillars, beautiful colored mosaics and paintings outside and inside created for worship as well as rooms for physical exercise and relaxation similar to a modern-day spa.  With this restoration work, you could imagine what it would have been like to be a Roman visiting or living in Bath centuries ago.
    If you have ever had the opportunity visit a site with restoration work, whether an archaeological site or even simply viewing a famous painting restored to its original vibrancy, it is an amazing, painstaking process to witness.  Restoration work helps us understand what it might have been like to live in that time period, and to see what the original beholders of that art saw.  Our theme for this year’s Advent season is “Restore Our Hope.”  We come to God this morning seeking restoration and renewed hope.  
We acknowledge that restoration work is difficult, time-consuming, and even risky.  In the art world, invaluable works of art have been inadvertently destroyed because of failed attempts using harsh chemicals that have damaged instead of restored the artwork.  Hope, too, can be risky and difficult.  We might truly wonder if our hearts can bear believing and trusting that God’s promised future for us is better than what we are experiencing right now.  We may be afraid that we will be disappointed.  And so we come to God this morning praying fervently for restored hope.
    Does your hope in Christ need some restoration work today?  Like an old painting, does it need a delicate touch to carefully revive its vibrancy and former brilliance?  And what encourages you to still hold on to hope, despite what’s going on in the world around us.  I’ve noticed that in our culture, we speak with certainty about the future being worse than our current reality.  Things just aren’t like they used to be!  Families are going to suffer this next year with healthcare and food costs rising, headlines warn.  Churches continue to struggle with attendance, and the percentage of people who identify as Christian continues to go down.  Peace in places we have been praying for a long time seems long off and almost impossible to imagine.  We tend to look at the future fearfully with anxiety, with dim hope.  We may even take what Jesus is saying in our gospels as negative – that we should be concerned about the coming of the Son of Man – hearing “keep awake!” as a threat.
    But if we look closely, our scripture readings are full of God’s good news promises for the faithful that urge us to look forward to the future with anticipation!  Christ is coming to restore our hope.  “The night is far gone; the day is near” Paul encourages us, in our second reading from Romans.  The Son of Man is coming, Jesus says, to encourage us!  And we have this famous prophecy from Isaiah, that all nations shall stream to the house of the Lord for instruction, and we will walk in the light of the Lord, with a world at peace and whole.
    The words of the prophet Isaiah come to us today as timely as ever.  Isaiah encourages us to hold on to hope even when the future looks bleak.  Isaiah son of Amoz is serving as a prophet during a time of war and uncertainty in Judah in Jerusalem.  Judah is in the midst of the Syro-Ephramite war, and Judah is losing.  The Assyrian Empire is looming to take over.  Preaching a vision of peace the faithful in Jerusalem, with the idea of people from all nations coming not to fight with each other but to worship the Lord in the temple would have seemed unrealistic, wishful thinking, just as it may seem to us.  Yet, Isaiah insists that this is the word of the Lord.  Confirming this is a promise from God and not Isaiah’s idealistic pacifist dream, his contemporary, the prophet Micah, recites the exact same words in the rural areas of Judah, in Micah chapter 4.  Both Micah and Isaiah share this vision that the Prince of Peace is coming, and in response, people will turn their military instruments of war into farming tools – in the future, believers will be using their time and energy to grow food to sustain life, rather than studying war to take life.  I think the people of Isaiah and Micah’s time had to be as skeptical as we are today to struggle to believe this is the word of the Lord, and this promise of peace – shalom, well-being for all nations, is coming.  We need, still, a lot of restoration work.  Hoping for peace is difficult to believe, sometimes.
    And so we come to God this morning praying for more vibrant peace and hope in the face of war and troubles in our world and in our lives today.  We are in a holiday time where the cheer and lights around us may help us hold onto hope and look forward to the future despite the challenges with more anticipation – Santa is coming!  Jesus is coming again, too!  This time is also a time where many people struggle to fight demons of despair.  Walking in the light of the Lord, we move forward with faith instead of fear.  We acknowledge the sadness that we may feel during this time, but we still through our faith look for the restoration of our hope in a beautiful, more vibrant tomorrow.  
Isaiah does not want to let us be resigned to the idea that peace is too idealistic and unrealistic to hope for. Is that the alternative to a hopeful vision of swords beat into plowshares?  Aren’t we called to be people who offer God’s good news and trust in the word of the Lord, walking in his teachings?  If we don’t visualize it, if we don’t hope for it and pray for it, if we can’t articulate it alongside Micah and Isaiah, who will?  Without hope and faith in God’s promised peace, we fail to trust that God can actually make peace happen and that we can be partners with God in bringing about peace.  Like an ancient painting, once faded with most color lost, Christ’s Advent hope comes to give color, light, and restored hope to our future, so that we look forward to the future with anticipation, so that our prayer, “Amen” might actually be true – let it be so, Lord.  Amen, and Amen!