We proclaim hope in the midst of hopelessness.

The Advent and Christmas season in our culture is the strangest thing. On the one hand, we are celebrating, partying and doing happy things: television specials and Christmas card images—fun parties at work, at home and at school—wonderful carols of the season that play 24/7 on our favorite radio stations.

We see and hear happy people gathered around beautifully decorated Christmas trees in living rooms warmed with a fire in the fireplace. They are singing together or playing games or giving each other gifts. Their feelings of joy and celebration for the gifts of the season and each other are palpable. Their faces are free and happy—not a burdensome expression among them.

This season of celebration and joy is evident even in just taking an evening drive around town. Beautiful lights decorate homes and businesses and lawns and trees. If alien visitors happened to stop by our planet this time of year, they would certainly conclude that these are a grateful and happy people.

On the other hand, many folks are highly stressed, strung out and depressed.

The irony of this happy hoopla is that I’m guessing at least half of those who have decorated their houses and yards and trees and have bought their gifts and baked their cookies do so while complaining. They don’t do these special things because they are grateful or joyful at all. They do these things while complaining about the unrealistic expectations of family members, the pressure they feel to keep up with the neighbors or the Christmas lights that never did work right.

We complain about the work of it all, the stress of it all and the cost of it all. Somehow the pictures of happy families and horse-drawn sleighs, the music, the lights and cookies and gatherings don’t actually make us all that happy and grateful. In fact, too often the season and its trimmings do the opposite for us. How ironic!

Henri Nouwen wrote: “Celebrating means the affirmation of the present, which becomes fully possible only by remembering the past and expecting more to come in the future. But celebrating in this sense seldom takes place. Nothing is as difficult as really accepting one’s own life. More often than not, the present is denied, the past becomes a source of complaints and the future is looked upon as a reason for despair or apathy.”

Given this definition of celebration, Psalm 126 reflects people who are truly celebrating. We hear shouts of gratitude and celebration from the children of God as they have been returned from exile, brought back again to their Jerusalem home. Listen to the Psalmist who describes the feeling: “It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when God returned Zion’s exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations—other peoples said of us, God was wonderful to them. And indeed—God was wonderful to us. We are one happy people.”

This is the witness of a people whose very lives were destroyed as they were conquered and sent into exile.

What we hear in Psalm 126 is the overwhelming joy and celebration of being released from exile—of coming back home. The people knew this was God’s doing. Indeed, God had done great things for them. And with grateful hearts, they anticipated more of the same in the future, which we hear reflected at the end of the psalm as they pray that God will always be there to make sure “those who sow in tears will reap songs of joy.”

Remember a time in your life when you were overwhelmed with some good news—some good fortune. Something wonderful happened to you, something you were even scared to wish for initially, but then it happened, and you said, “It seemed like a dream, too good to be true. I laughed, I sang, I couldn’t believe my good fortune.” Hold that memory and the feelings of celebration, of gratefulness and joy that it brought you.

Hold it as gift and as encouragement. Hold it as a time when hope was strengthened in you, so you can also be honest about the many times when life is really hard. Our culture has gotten it all wrong. Advent is actually more about being honest about the hard stuff in life than it is about smearing smiles and celebrations over the top of our despair, hoping it will make us feel better.

In most Advent texts, we hear God’s people crying for God to come down and do something. Their lives were miserable. They were in need of redemption. They knew they had made a mess of themselves and their covenant with God, and they were at the end of themselves and their resources, and we hear their cries for God to come down and save them.

There are times when we get in touch with that kind of desperate feeling, but if this has never been our personal experience, we can easily get caught up in the mixed-up messages of the season around us. It is good to stop and acknowledge (rather than just string up more lights) that just because Christmas is coming doesn’t mean cancer is leaving, that the wars are over and the soldiers are all coming home, that jobs suddenly appear for the scores of unemployed among us or that tensions between us disappear.

As we so well know, the birth of Jesus doesn’t keep teenagers from being killed on the highway or gunmen from walking onto a college campus and randomly shooting. The birth of Jesus doesn’t keep grown-up adults from hurting children or greedy executives from ignoring the poverty in our country.

None of these things goes away just because Jesus is coming. Advent is about being honest about that.

“O that you would come down and save us, O God” is the real sentiment of Advent, rather than, “Maybe if we pretend that we are happy people, we will be, and all this evil and suffering will go away for a few weeks. Or maybe if we buy this and that we will be able to feel like the people in the commercials.”

Especially during this time of Advent, especially during this time of celebrating the coming of Jesus into our world, we must hold in our hearts and minds the reality that this world desperately needs saving. We must hold in our hearts and minds the reality that we desperately need to be saved. O that you would come and save us, O God.

The real gift we’ve been given is that we hold in our hearts and minds and voices the promise of God that we’ve come to trust—the promise that someday all tears will be dried, all suffering will cease and evil will no longer have its way. When we are honest about the realities of life now and remember that we already are being saved little by little, then we have something to celebrate. Because of the hope introduced to us most fully at this time of year (in the birth of Jesus), we look forward in expectation to the time when good will triumph over all evil once and for all, which is really worth celebrating.

So in this in-between time of waiting for the return of Christ, we are the voices crying out in the wilderness. We are the ones called to prepare the way for God’s reign. We are the ones who need to declare that there is hope beyond what we can see, that there is hope in the face of hopelessness, there is peace in the midst of conflict, there is joy in the mire of apathy and forgiveness in the midst of hateful acts of violence. We are the ones who need to be singing and preaching and living as if it is true, because it is, even if, even when we cannot see it around us right now.

As you hold on to the memory of the time you knew that God had done a great thing for you, you embody hope for this world. We are the ones who hold the treasure of knowing God’s goodness in the face of all that is evil and awful in our world. We are the ones who are willing to wait in hope for the redemption of this world. We are the ones who cry out, “O God, that you would come down and save us.” The world shifted when God came down to be one with us, and so each year we remember that amazing story, which gives us courage and hope for the journey.

Catch yourself if you start your Christmas complaining. Stop and remember the time when you were overwhelmed with the goodness of God. Allow that memory to give you hope in your present reality, expecting again that God will come to save us in the future. And may you be filled with the fullness of God’s Spirit while you wait, which just might make you want to hang out more Christmas lights and bake another batch of cookies for the neighbors.

Jane Hoober Peifer is pastor of Blossom Hill Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pa. This article is adapted from a sermon she gave on Dec. 11, 2011.