"Screw your courage to the sticking-place," says Lady Macbeth to her doomed husband in Shakespeare's tragedy, "and we'll not fail." But fail they do and no amount of courage in the world can save them or turn them into heroes. Courage is a funny thing. It's a bit like happiness: the more you seek it, the more you demand it, the more you try to call it up, the less it shows its face.

Words can stir us to courage but only when they are grounded in confident expectation and hitched to unshakable values or realities. Who would not rally around the "I have a dream…" speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., in which he paints the colors of freedom? Who would not feel stronger listening to the dogged determination of Winston Churchill in the dark days of 1940: "Let us... brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour!' "

Courage, as faith's activator, is the call in Jesus' words to us today. He sits with his shell-shocked disciples in the temple precincts, sensing the profound disturbance at his words that this marvelous place of holiness and beauty will soon lie in rubble, but pointing them to a larger cataclysm that will shake the whole earth as eternity finally sears into time.

We've been there with the disciples, haven't we? Famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembered a terrible day during World War II. He was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler's infamous Dachau death camp. "We were at work in a trench," wrote Frankl. "The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces."

Frankl tells how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in "living" if, indeed, he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, no past. Only the clutching grayness of this miserable moment.

Suddenly, to his surprise, Frankl felt "a last violent protest" surging within himself. He sensed that even though his body had given up and his mind had accepted defeat, his inner spirit was taking flight. It was searching. It was looking. It was scanning the eternal horizons for the faintest glimmer that said his ?eeting life had some divine purpose. It was looking for God.

In a single instant two things happened, says Frankl, that simply could not be mere coincidence. Within, he heard a powerful cry, piercing the gloom and tearing at the icy claws of death. The voice shouted "Yes!" against the "No" of defeat and the gray "I don't know" of the moment.

At that exact second, "a light was lit in a distant farmhouse." Like a beacon it called attention to itself. It spoke of life, warmth, family, and love. Frankl said that in that moment he began to believe. And in that moment he began to live again.

Advent often reminds us of our similar need. The grayness of our bleak days is stifling. The loneliness of the moment overwhelms us. Is there a reason to carry on? Is there meaning beyond the drudgery of today's repetitive struggles? Is there hope and is there God?

With David (Psalm 43:3), we shout, "Send out your light and your truth!" Don't leave me alone. Give me some sign. Light a candle in the window and take me home.

Advent reminds us of the power in Jesus' words to his disciples. God never denies us the light we need. As Joyce Kilmer wrote:

Because the road was steep and long, and through a dark and lonely land, God set upon my lips a song and put a lantern in my hand. — Albert Joyce Kilmer, "Love's Lantern" (public domain)

Still, sometimes it seems there's no getting away from a bad thing. In the mid-1800s, Dutch immigrant pastor and community leader Albertus Van Raalte watched his little colony in western Michigan disintegrate under the ravages of disease and death. One Sunday morning, in the middle of his congregational prayer, he broke down. Sobbing and throwing his hands toward the heavens, he shouted, "Oh God! Must we all die?" Certainly there are times when each of us goes through that agony. It's one thing to experience trouble and torment when you've been living an ungodly existence. You know that you're getting what you deserve. But it's quite another thing to be close to God and still to feel such pain and frustration each day. The specter of death bumps against us in the marketplace. If we run for cover, it follows us right into the caves of refuge. Too often we wear Van Raalte's tear-stained cheeks and swollen eyes, shouting toward heaven, "Oh God! Is there no relief?"

Because we know these pressures, there is something absolutely amazing about the strength, peace, and confidence that are part of our return to Advent anticipations. We need to remember again the fundamental secret to living on the edge of cruelty, pain, spite, injury, and death. We need to learn anew that only a God who has ultimate control over all these things can make life itself meaningful. Only a God who allows the miseries for a time — as a parent might restrain a helping hand so that a child can grow through the struggles of development — can finally bring all things into his larger plans for peace, joy, and harmony.

There is a powerful scene in Herman Melville's great epic, Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab stands peg-legged on the deck of the Pequod during a violent storm (ch. 119). His obsession with the white whale has carried the craft and crew to exotic and frightening locales, and now it seems as if divine providence might be unleashing furious anger against this ill-fated quest. But Ahab is a ?ghter, and with clenched fists, amid the lightning bolts and against the raging thunder he yells a taunt at the Creator who chastens his cause: "I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance."

Yet even Captain Ahab, torn by his demons and captured as much by the whale as he seeks to capture it, knows that there is a need greater than victory and a power more tenacious than brutal force. He falls to the deck in a tormented confession: "But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee…." He almost pleads with God to stop the awful battering of antagonistic powers and descend in kind humility so that the passions of love might be reborn and rekindled again.

This, of course, is a marvelous bridge between the bellicose prophecies of the Old Testament and the juxtaposed incarnation of Jesus that emerged out of them. God did indeed come down, like God had done in the times of Moses and the Pharaoh. But this time God chose the suckling child rather than the plague blasts as the means of arrival and encounter. We who marshal our forces for good or for evil are suddenly caught up short — the one who could "rend the heavens" and "set twigs ablaze" and "cause water to boil" and "cause the nations to quake" and "make the mountains tremble" slipped in as a helpless child, and the world knelt to kiss him on a starry night in Bethlehem.

This is the language of Advent, the renewed language of confidence in God, the crisis of these times, and the anticipated next act of divine intervention in human affairs. But it all begins with the faithfulness of God upon which our own faith and faithfulness can be pinned.

Advent is, for the church, a solid hook in the vast, uncharted chaotic voids of space, allowing us to tether and take our bearings from at least one point which is neither shifting with the currents nor dependent on our own powers to establish it. Advent is the place where Archimedes can set the fulcrum of his lever and move earth and the planets in a meaningful way because there is a critical unmoved position from which everything else is to be measured. Advent is a date on our calendars that was penned in by God, not us, indicating a promised encounter we might often doubt but it cannot be erased from the pages of time.

We once promised one of our daughters that we would visit her, over 5,000 miles away from where we live, at a certain date in the future. She counted on our arrival and made plans to greet us, house us, feed us, and show us around her world. How could she be so certain that we would be there when we promised? Because she knows our character. She has learned to trust us and trust in us. True, the "fickle finger of fate" might raise all manner of obstacles and perhaps even void our plans, but not if we could help it. Our word is as good as gold with our daughter. She trusts us. She was confident we would be there. She arranged her life by that promise.

How much more should we expect God to keep promises? In the spare evidence of these days, when we are roiled by circumstances and challenged by materialistic denials of any first cause, religious trust seems foolish. Except… except that God made a promise. And we have seen God's character in creation and in the divine affairs with Israel and in the testimony of Jesus. So we wait… Amen.