"The Hope of Advent" | VJ Sathyaraj | December 14, 2025

Greetings to you on this blessed third Sunday in Advent. The significance of the birth of Jesus and the good news of the gospel gathers strength and comes into sharper focus as we prepare, in the midst of the harsh realities of the world, to be renewed and transformed in the kingdom of God. If there is one word that Advent brings to our consciousness, it is the word hope. Jesus is the hope of humanity, the hope of God’s creation, the hope that we can replace the helplessness we sometimes feel with the radiance of this Christmas season, the joy that it brings, and the impetus to think of others with kindness and generosity.

The huge number of musical events even in this city, where people prefer to be known as spiritual rather than religious, points to the contagious joy that Christmas brings. But there’s a jarring note that we heard in our gospel lesson today. John the Baptizer, the advance man for Jesus, now wonders if Jesus is really the Messiah. How can this be? Does Jesus have to prove himself to John? What’s going on here?

We have to remember that the writing of this gospel came at least 50 years after the time of Jesus. And in the chaos of that time, the emerging church needed evidence that yes, Jesus was indeed the Messiah. The great temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. The persecution of Christians and Jews was underway, and their dispersal all around the Mediterranean and beyond. And living through this terror, they must have wondered, where is God? Was Jesus really the Messiah? What is the good news?

It seems blasphemous to suggest that Jesus was not the Messiah, but that’s what some people concluded then and continue to think even now. And so they are still waiting for the Messiah to come. The problem is that Jesus did not conform to their understanding of what the Messiah was. They expected somebody to combat earthly rulers and restore justice and peace with victorious cosmic force. Where is the good news if nothing changes politically and evil is rampant? they must have wondered.

The message of John did not bring good news with his unwavering call to repentance and his plain language calling out hypocrisy, calling people a brood of vipers. But what is the good news that Jesus brought? How were people’s lives better or more hopeful? And then Jesus, in response, not only points to the signs of the kingdom of God all around, but concludes, after building up John, to say, “Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

This is the good news. God, in Jesus Christ, calls us to a new understanding of ourselves, our purpose, and our possibilities. God brings transformation through individually experienced miracles such as healing or peace, even in tragic circumstances. The good news can never be understood by holding on to a materialistic understanding of the universe. Advent calls our attention to something far greater and more exciting.

Jesus calls us to recognize that beyond this world that we can see is this other world whose light is sometimes glimpsed by us through the manner in which we find our calling or vocation, sometimes through the people who enter our lives, sometimes through transformational synchronicities, and always through feeling God’s presence in undeniable ways. Without these experiences, including our own experience when we gather as one body in Christ to receive the Eucharist, Christmas is reduced to good feelings that are open to commercial exploitation.

The good news is about receiving God’s love to become a new person, in the manner in which love is awakened by the mere sight of a tiny little baby. This powerful feeling lies dormant or suppressed by the noise and intrusion of the world around us so that we forget what our created purpose is, which is to manifest God’s love in serving others. Only then can we live lives of joyful purpose and not be dedicated to gratifying our own desires and egos. This is the hope of Christmas.

From this perspective of hope, the work and vision of a single person is mighty in its effects. The kingdom of God advances each day by the work that individuals do in actualizing the good news of the kingdom through feeding the hungry, helping to heal the sick, nurturing the young, and caring for the helpless. God does not have a cosmic force with which to annihilate evildoers. God has us, if we can recognize who we are or who we might become.

In this year of celebration of 175 years of Trinity, we look back in gratitude to those whose dedication and reverential generosity gave us everything that we see around us today.

What new directions do the opportunities of the second quarter of the 21st century present to us? What might Trinity be in 2019 when it celebrates its bicentennial, and what will our contributions be? Let’s look back to understand the forces and circumstances and energies that brought us to where we are now.

The cornerstone for this building was dedicated by Bishop Benjamin Worcester Morris, the second bishop of Oregon, and that was done in 1904. His inspiring example gives us an example of how God works through the lives of individuals. Born in 1819 in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Morris grew up in a devout family. His father served in Congress. He felt called to the ordained ministry and answered it, and after seminary and his ordination served in a variety of parishes until he ended at St. Luke’s in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He was there for many years serving under the rector, the Reverend John Rodney, who eventually became Morris’s father-in-law.

Morris was eventually called to be the next rector of St. Luke’s, but only a year later he was elected missionary bishop to the Oregon territories, and so he had to resign from the rectorship. Being called to Oregon was not a plum job then. And the first candidate called turned it down because he did not want his family to move to Portland, which even then had the reputation of being a wild and dangerous place.

But Bishop Morris accepted the call and was consecrated during Advent of 1868. As a priest, he had gone through the trauma of ministering to people during the Civil War. He took blankets and food and wandered among the dying after the Battle of Gettysburg, which took 50,000 lives in three days. We have to wonder that as he walked through the stench of decomposing corpses and carcasses of animals seeking to help people, what his thoughts must have been about purpose and destiny and the future of this republic. Could the republic survive such catastrophic loss and such extreme expressions of hate that brought people to the point of killing each other on this massive scale?

And five years later, as a new bishop, what might his thoughts have been about rebuilding and reaching out in unknown parts of the United States?

But it was not the bishop alone who would travel to Oregon. He was accompanied by a group of admirable and formidable women. They were his wife Hannah and her three sisters, Mary, Lydia, and Clementina, and the bishop’s own sister, Rachel. These women shared the vision of the bishop. They were all well educated. They were teachers and musicians, and they came with a vision to educate women. They could see that the future of this nation lay in the education of women, not only their intellectual development, but as women who would be dedicated to advancing the kingdom of God.

So this party left New York in April of 1869, and they arrived in Portland on the 2nd of June in 1869, having sailed via Panama and San Francisco and Astoria. It was on the boat ride to Astoria that Bishop Morris celebrated his 50th birthday, being violently ill in his cabin.

And yet this group of people managed to open the school St. Helen’s Hall in September of that year. That school would become what is called today Oregon Episcopal School. The diplomas that were awarded in those early days had inscribed on them a vision of rebuilding expressed in Psalm 144, that our daughters may be as the polished pillars of the temple.

The bishop and the Rodney sisters understood that God’s grace and imagination and hard work could accomplish mighty things. The bishop in his time eventually founded 18 new churches. He was the last bishop to be responsible not only for Oregon but also for Washington and parts of Idaho. He traveled on horseback, traversing perilous trails, sleeping on kitchen floors, celebrating the Eucharist outdoors, and he even climbed Mount Hood.

It was in 1872 when he laid the foundation for the second building of Trinity to the west, and he also buried a box of mementos. These were opened in 1904 after that building had burned down. And this building, the plans for which were drawn up by members of Trinity and supported by their generosity, came into being. And it was still Bishop Morris who was in office, now in his 80s. And according to the story in The Oregonian, he is described as being the most alert and lively person in the room during that dedication.

He would die in office in 1906 at the age of 87, his pleas for a bishop to replace him unanswered by the main church.

The Rodney sisters also remained here, working for 27 years at the school with no salary and no leave, and putting their own inheritance into the development of that school. One of their early students records an incident where the bishop invited members of Trinity, wealthy members, to loan their carriages to the girls of the school for a field trip. And so the girls piled into the carriages and were driven from where the school was on Fourth and Madison to a clearing in the forest. And it was there that the bishop laid the foundation stone for Good Samaritan Hospital.

There is much more that we will learn through this year of celebration and rededication. This is a story not of the past, a story of the present. This is the story that now includes you and me and what we might do, and all the families who through the decades have built up this congregation.

In the meantime, may this season of Advent bring hope, joy, and a clear sense of calling for each of us gathered here and online to know what our part may be, not only in the church but in this nation, and to know what we are doing to advance the kingdom of God, where the least is greater than John the Baptizer. Amen.