Daring to Hope

By Timothy Brunk, November 30, 2025

On the First Sunday of Advent in the Roman Catholic Church, the Missal requires the presider to use Preface I of Advent.  Before the invitation to join “all the hosts and Powers of heaven” in the singing of the Sanctus, that preface contains this clause:

that, when [Christ]  comes again in glory and majesty

and all is at last made manifest,

we who watch for that day

may inherit the great promise

in which now we dare to hope

The word “dare” caught my attention.  This word appears daily in the Roman Catholic Mass, when “we dare to say” the Lord’s Prayer.  It appears in the Missal in only two other places as a part of a required prayer: the Collects for the Nineteenth and Twenty-Seventh Sundays in Ordinary Time.

We “dare” to say the Lord’s Prayer, calling on God in familial terms, the God who is our “Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God” in the words of so many Prefaces (including Preface I of Advent).  The Lord’s Prayer, of course, petitions that God’s “kingdom come, [God’s] will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  The eschatological emphasis is clear, but the “daring” concerns the intimacy with which the assembly addresses the eternal God.

In Preface I of Advent, the “daring” concerns precisely the eschatological hope in which Christians live.  In view of a world and of our individual nations characterized by poverty, bigotry, murder, torture, and war and in view of the sinfulness that ever lurks in our individual hearts, Advent is indeed a time to recall that Christian hope dares a great deal.  Let us “watch for that day” when God’s kingdom comes, a “kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”¹  Let us watch for that day by daring to be pursuers of justice, makers of peace, reconcilers of divisions and hatred.

¹Preface of the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.  Assemblies hear this preface on the Sunday immediately preceding the First Sunday of Advent..