From Your Associate Executive for Racial Justice

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” — Desmond Tutu

“Lament is not despair. It is not a cry into a void. Lament is a cry directed to God.” — Walter Brueggemann

“We are called to learn the anguished cry of lament.” – Center for Action and Contemplation

The season of Advent is upon us. Advent is my favorite liturgical season. The hymns, songs, scripture readings, and sermons are filled with hope, joy, peace, and a sense of wonder. Over the years, during this season of Advent and Christmas, I have accumulated infinite warm memories filled with love, care, laughter, dreams, and hopes, surrounded by family, friends, church family, and loved ones. It is the one season that I look forward to every year. However, during the Advent and Christmas season of 2017, I experienced a series of horrible events that marked my relationship with the season of Advent and Christmas. The spark, joy, hope, and excitement experienced during that season were replaced by darkness, fear, pain, suffering, and disorientation.

At the December meeting, Lake Huron Presbytery chose the theme of Lament for their worship service. Brenna Overland and Joseph Novak (Co-Pastors to Pastors for the presbytery) put together a liturgy of lament that invited us all to connect with our bodies and emote. Through singing, reading, and chanting of various Psalms, we were able to claim the Psalmist's cry, pain, confusion, doubt, and disconnect from God as our own. It was during this worship service that I reclaimed my joy for the season of Advent. It was at that moment of embodied tension between hope for the not yet, and pain for what was that I experienced a renewed and rekindled sense of orientation, grounding, peace, and joy.

Advent is a season shaped by holy tension—lament for what is broken and hope for what God has promised. It is shaped by the expectation of radical change while waiting and witnessing what takes place in darkness—the formation, molding, and shaping of a child in the mother’s womb. Lament allows individuals and communities to name the truth: that injustice is insidious, suffering is by design, pain persists, some wounds may never heal, some scars may be too scary to show, and systems of oppression like racism continue to harm our neighborhoods, churches, and institutions.

Advent is also a season of relentless hope. A hope that turns a new reality into being. A hope that galvanizes courage to actualize the liberation of all creation. Lament and hope empower us not only to believe in God’s coming justice, but to embody it—through advocacy, solidarity, and reparative action.

We, the church, people of faith, are called to celebrate and witness to the world the beauty and wonder of the Advent season. Lament is an act of deep trust in God. Lament invites us into an authentic and genuine prayer with the Divine. Lament calls us to be real with God by being real with ourselves. Advent invites us to pause truly, grieve and mourn honestly, resist urgent reconciliation and disingenuous apologies, and refuse to normalize the pain and suffering inflicted by systems of inequality. Lament in the season of Advent invites us to reclaim our humanity in the presence of a loving, merciful, and kind God who embraces us, hears our cries, and sends us back to each other to co-inspire life-giving spaces, moments, and systems.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Lament for a Son wrote, “I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.” Perhaps this year, 2025, God is calling us to pause during this season of Advent and see every person “through tears,” see churches “through tears,” see our pastors “through tears,” see our BIPOC communities “through tears,” see our relationship with money, success, numbers and its systemic effects on the world and nature “through tears.” Perhaps God is calling us during this season of Advent, and as we await another year to “see things, people, and God’s entire creation with tears in ways that a “dry-eyed could not see.” Do you have the courage to pause and see “through tears” this Advent season? Can you embody relentless hope to bring about a new reality that is filled with liberation, justice, kindness, mercy, and peace? May it be so, with God’s help.

Let us pray:

God of Advent light and longing, we come to you holding both our tears and our hope. Receive our lament for all that remains broken in our lives, our communities, and our world, and strengthen us to pursue justice with courage and compassion. Kindle in us a hope that does not waver, a hope rooted in your promise to make all things new. As we wait for Christ’s coming, shape us into bearers of healing, truth, and peace. Amen.

¡Paz y bendiciones de adviento (peace and Advent blessings)! 

Rev. Ruth-Aimée Belonni-Rosario

Associate Executive for Racial Justice

ruthaimee@synodofthecovenant.org

248-752-3697