Advent Hope

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

December 9, 2007

The epistle lesson for this morning, which we haven’t read, comes from the end of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. As he signs off, he has this to say: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

We might have hope. That seems precious little to go on – we might have hope.

I wake up most mornings to Garrison Keillor’s The Writers’ Almanac, and one morning last week he read this poem from Anne Sexton, called “Snow.”¹

Snow,

blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

I bite it.

Someone once said:

Don't bite till you know

if it's bread or stone.

What I bite is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

That comes from Sexton’s collection The Awful Rowing Toward God. I’ve often thought that Sexton had a deep understanding of the existential struggle between faith and doubt, and so it strikes me as perfectly appropriate to read her work here in what has been a snowy week, and on a Sunday when we are focusing on Advent hope. For Advent hope must balance between faith and doubt.

So, we might have hope, as Paul promises – hope everywhere, the poet suggests. But, as I’ve considered hope this week, I am left wondering, what is it that we hope for? What do you hope for?

I was at a meeting a while back when the conversation turned to “hope.” Someone in the group said that she was, frankly, tired of talking about hope, she wanted to talk about action and success. If hope is “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson put it, then this woman was way past ready to test its wings and fly.

Hope for the future, she complained, was a lousy balm for soothing the wounds of the present reality.

I suppose, if expressions of hope become excuses for inaction, then I would have to agree. After all, if nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes, then hope is, at best, a coping mechanism and, at worst, a delusion.

Hope is also an easily manipulated notion. For example, have you seen the new Hummer TV ads? It features folks safely riding their monstrous, militaristic SUVs safely through disaster areas and gives way to a slogan: “HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies.”

If that is all we have to hope for, all that keeps hope alive, all that we can hold out hope for, well it’s no wonder we live in a deeply cynical age.

So, in the midst of such an age, what do we make of Advent hope? After all, this is the season when we reread the ancient story about the coming of Christ and speak about Christ coming again. Yet, we’ve been doing that for 2,000 years now and still no Jesus – at least not in any manner that fulfills the expectations articulated by the early church through the gospel writings and the Pauline correspondence. Paul, for example, promised an astounding revelation in his second letter to the church in Corinth:

“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (2 Cor. 15:51-52).

But, if Paul was a prophet of hope when he wrote to the Corinthians, then his writing was a thing without feathers for all the billions of folks who have lived and died without hearing a trumpet blast these past two millennia.

The first generation of Christians clearly believed that, as the gospels put it, “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matt. 16:28).

But it didn’t happen that way, so we are left to wonder about the nature of Christian hope in the season of preparation and expectation of Christ’s coming again.

It is surely true, as the book of Hebrews puts it, that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). So we are invited into a relationship of trust, of faith, with the one who promises to dwell among us, in our midst – Emmanuel, God with us.

I’d like to stand before you and make a grand pronouncement, reveal a mystery like Paul announced. Instead, listen and I will tell you a smaller mystery:

Advent hope is not about waiting patiently for some indefinable future; it is about how we live the present moment.

As Barbara Kingsolver put it, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

Living under the roof of your own hopes enables you to grasp the present moment – no matter what its contours – and continue to map well the journey of a faithful life. This is the small mystery: living in hope, and in gratitude, in the midst of whatever comes your way, is the only way to discover who you are and what you are called to be. In still other words, living in hope and in faith enables us to discover more fully the content of our faith – the deep, authentic grasping that we belong to God in life and in death, in success and in failure, in the present moment and in the infinite future.

I came across an expression of this truth in one of my favorite places for discovering unexpected theological insights: Sports Illustrated. Last week they named Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Farve as their “Sportsman of the Year,” and in the accompanying article that traces not only his remarkable football career but also his personal growth through battles with substance abuse, enduring personal losses on the way to remarkable humanitarian efforts. The article closes with a series of friends and teammates offering their favorite memories, and most of them are of his various football triumphs or signature plays. But when Favre was asked the same question, he said, “The funny thing is, it’s not only about the touchdowns and the big victories. If I were to make a list, I would include the interceptions, the sacks, the really painful losses. Those times when I’ve been down, when I’ve been kicked around, I hold on to those. In a way those are the best times I’ve ever had, because that’s when I’ve found out who I am. And what I want to be.”

Advent hope is like that. In these shortest days of the year, we find out how long and far our faith can carry us. In this darkest season of the year, we discover how brightly one small candle can shine. In a time that can feel sometimes very lonely, we discover again that God loves us enough to accompany us through every step of our journey. In this quiet season of wintry nights, we can hear again the voice crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.

Indeed, we prepare the way for the Lord of our lives – for the one whose life meets the hopes and fears of all the years, the one whose life defines for us the content of our hope, the one whose living and dying shows us how to live into hope.

Advent hope is not the end; it is the beginning. It does not promise completeness, but rather renewal. As Reinhold Niebuhr reminded: “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime. Therefore, we are saved by hope.” He went on, saying, “Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

May the God of love, who keeps faith with us always, keep us in grace and mercy, and may we ground our hope on that mystery this Advent.