The Advent of Hope
December 5, 2010
Romans 15:4-13; Isaiah 11:1-9
The word “hope” appears just a few more than 150 times in scripture. Perhaps not surprisingly, about twenty percent of those instances come in the psalms. Truly, these are songs of hope sung by people of faith.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book of the Bible with the next most instances of the word “hope” is the story of Job. To be sure, almost all of the references to hope in Job are negative, as this:
“For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. 8Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, 9yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. 10But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? 11As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, 12so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.”
Nontheless, it is fair to say that Job is filled with hope, even if it is only a hope for hope itself. In many respects, Job is the most humanist part of scripture. Job is everyman or woman – laid low by happenstance utterly beyond his control. Yet still longing after the God of hope.
Earlier this fall I heard Rick Ufford-Chase, past moderator of our General Assembly and current director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, say that he does not have any time left for hope. Rick was speaking as the director of the peace fellowship during a time of endless war, and as past moderator of a denomination that is clearly dying.
But you do not need to go to such high places to find such feelings.
Rick told us the story of his friend, Romona, a woman he knew twenty years ago living in an extremely poor community in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. One of the seminarians Rick was leading on a delegation asked Romona where she found hope in her life, and her response was something along the lines of the following: "Hope is a luxury I can't afford. I get out of bed in the morning and I do what has to be done. Hope is for people who have access to resources."
I can imagine Job uttering just such words. And I can also imagine that if, for example, on Christmas Eve we asked the men and women in the food line when we hand out meals for A-SPAN what gives them hope, we’d probably get back some quizzical looks. Hot soup and a safe place to sleep are probably foremost on their minds.
In such a context, hope is a luxury. Indeed, in the face of such desperation, hope might just be the last thing you need.
Rick also quoted the late archbishop Oscar Romero to us: Romero said, try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of a despairing people. Try instead to be faithful, to do what needs to be done.
I am not generally given to despair, though I carry around a satchel full of unfulfilled hopes, and as I listened to Rick speak that evening, the words of the late Harvey Milk kept running through my mind. “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. You have got to give them hope.”
So, during this Advent season, as we gather around this ancient story that tells us that Christ is coming again, what does Advent hope mean for us? When Paul wrote to the Romans almost 2,000 years ago he firmly believed that the words of Isaiah – a root shall spring forth from the stump of Jesse – foretold the imminent return of Jesus. Whatever our Christology these days, we have to confess that what Paul believed, what he thought and what he preached and wrote about Jesus coming back to earth certainly did not happen. Does Paul’s unfulfilled hope necessitate our despair?
Not at all. The truth is, we share Paul’s hope even now, though we understand it through the long lens of history. Nevertheless, the hope we share would be familiar to him: that Christ is, indeed, coming again into our lives, and that our lives might reflect that hope.
Paul, in his beautiful words from the Corinthian correspondence, speaks of hope in conjunction with two other foundational virtues: faith and love.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three …”
The key to understanding the hope of Advent, and, indeed, the advent of hope, lies in that trinity of virtues – faith, hope and love.
Interestingly enough, I think Harvey Milk was pointing in the same direction when he famously said, “you’ve gotta give ‘em hope.” He said those words in a speech delivered just before he was assassinated in 1978, and if Harvey had been a good southern boy he would have known to use the plural “you,” and he would’ve said, “y’all have gotta give ‘em hope.” What he said, instead, was this: “you and you and you – gotta give ‘em hope.”
In other words, hope is not and cannot be an individual possession, because authentic hope only arises in community. Authentic hope is only possible in community.
That’s why Paul insists on the power of love – that is to say, the binding force that holds community together is love, and only where there is love can there be hope.
Faith, which is never first about belief but is, instead, foremost about relationship, faith binds us to a particular community and gives specific content to our hope.
Let me flesh that out just a little bit in terms of this season and this community.
First, though, let me say that I agree with Rick not only about certain prospects for the near term, but also about the necessity for faithfulness in the present moment. I think he’s absolutely right about the coming demise of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We are living into a post-denominational age, and are already well beyond the age of the mainline Protestant establishment in America. I cannot tell you what comes next, but the church I grew up in no longer exists, and we are simply in denial if we think it’s ever coming back again.
There are profoundly serious cultural, personal, ethical, theological, and political issues at stake in the dissolution of the Protestant consensus in America, and if we cling to some false hopes about a return to the good old days then we are doomed to precisely the kind of despair that Romero had in mind when he said that we do not need people dragging around the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
For those hopes are really nothing more than sentimental nostalgia, the longing after an imagined past that never truly was. Moreover, those hopes can easily be reduced to private possessions. I can curl up in front of the fireplace or the Christmas tree with a Hallmark version of the season, and lose myself in the private revelry of my own imagination. And there’s nothing wrong with that in small doses. But there is no real life there, and thus, there is no real hope there either.
Real hope, real Advent hope, is about new life being born in the most unexpected places: unemployment lines, soup kitchens, the day laborer sites, along the borders, far from the seats of power, but also at kitchen tables and back yards where smaller scale family and neighborhood crises get played out every day against the background of a culture of despair that isolates us from one another at every turn.
Why should this be so? Why should God show up in such places? The God revealed at the manger is the God whose very name is, “I will be who I will be,” and whose steadfast promise is “I will be with you always, in just the way that I choose to be.” Emmanuel. God with us. As God chooses. And as the witness of scripture and especially the story of Jesus make abundantly clear, God chooses first to be with the least of these.
We’re going to talk more about this next week – in particular, about the relationship of hope and love, but for this morning, let me close with a story of Advent hope.
Rick and I have traded some e-mail correspondence on hope over these past days, and he framed his questions about hope in part like this:
“I think my point is that although I dream and feel hopeful all the time, and that motivates me a great deal, I also recognize the luxury of feeling hopeful. As I've been reading through the Psalms over the past two years in morning prayer, I find that I have to push myself to read the Psalms of lament. It makes me wonder what would happen if I lost everything I consider security in my life. What if Kitty had a terminal illness, or we lost our jobs, or one of our children was dealing with a significant disability? Then, I think, I would need to begin to depend more on faithfulness than on hope.”
Those are hugely trying, difficult, even tragic circumstances, but they are also typically human. They are Job like. I look around at our community. Some in this circle have lost spouses to terminal illness. Some in this circle have lost jobs. Some have dealt with loved ones with significant disabilities.
Jean Paul Sarte famously remarked, “Hell is other people.” I would content that hope is other people, other people who respond to desperation in others out of the deep wells of hopefulness that they find in the steadfast presence and promise of the God of Advent.
I know that in the most trying times of my own life – job loss, serious illness in my family, times when I have felt helpless and hopeless, times when I felt that Job might not have much on me – I have been upheld by the compassionate acts of other people to whom I have been bound in the fellowship of the communion of the church, and in their compassion I have found renewed hope.
Last spring I travelled down to Tennessee to help my parents, who are both facing serious constraints on their mobility. My mother loves to work in the garden. It is a place of soul restoration for her, a thus a place of hope. The house that we helped them move into a year ago has a lovely back yard but no easy way to get into it after the ramp we had built for access to the house blocked the steps into the yard.
I went down determined to build some steps, but not sure how I was going to accomplish the task by myself in the time I had. But when I got to Chattanooga, it turned out a retired gentleman from my mother’s church had heard about what I was up to and so he showed up with tools and a truck and we got the job done. Nothing miraculous, nothing like what Job faced, and not even among the most trying times of my life, but still a simple gift of hope embodied by a member of the community who didn’t know me from Adam, but who stepped into a small crisis and offered his own gifts.
Authentic hope – whether it is in the face of huge and systemic concerns or small and personal ones – authentic hope is only possible within communities grounded in the deeper hope of the God of the Exodus and the God of Advent.
May this be a season of authentic hope for each of us who share the bonds of this community. Amen.
Romans 15:4-13; Isaiah 11:1-9
The word “hope” appears just a few more than 150 times in scripture. Perhaps not surprisingly, about twenty percent of those instances come in the psalms. Truly, these are songs of hope sung by people of faith.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book of the Bible with the next most instances of the word “hope” is the story of Job. To be sure, almost all of the references to hope in Job are negative, as this:
“For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. 8Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, 9yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. 10But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? 11As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, 12so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep.”
Nontheless, it is fair to say that Job is filled with hope, even if it is only a hope for hope itself. In many respects, Job is the most humanist part of scripture. Job is everyman or woman – laid low by happenstance utterly beyond his control. Yet still longing after the God of hope.
Earlier this fall I heard Rick Ufford-Chase, past moderator of our General Assembly and current director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, say that he does not have any time left for hope. Rick was speaking as the director of the peace fellowship during a time of endless war, and as past moderator of a denomination that is clearly dying.
But you do not need to go to such high places to find such feelings.
Rick told us the story of his friend, Romona, a woman he knew twenty years ago living in an extremely poor community in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. One of the seminarians Rick was leading on a delegation asked Romona where she found hope in her life, and her response was something along the lines of the following: "Hope is a luxury I can't afford. I get out of bed in the morning and I do what has to be done. Hope is for people who have access to resources."
I can imagine Job uttering just such words. And I can also imagine that if, for example, on Christmas Eve we asked the men and women in the food line when we hand out meals for A-SPAN what gives them hope, we’d probably get back some quizzical looks. Hot soup and a safe place to sleep are probably foremost on their minds.
In such a context, hope is a luxury. Indeed, in the face of such desperation, hope might just be the last thing you need.
Rick also quoted the late archbishop Oscar Romero to us: Romero said, try not to depend on hope, because unfulfilled hope leads to despair, and we have no need of a despairing people. Try instead to be faithful, to do what needs to be done.
I am not generally given to despair, though I carry around a satchel full of unfulfilled hopes, and as I listened to Rick speak that evening, the words of the late Harvey Milk kept running through my mind. “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. You have got to give them hope.”
So, during this Advent season, as we gather around this ancient story that tells us that Christ is coming again, what does Advent hope mean for us? When Paul wrote to the Romans almost 2,000 years ago he firmly believed that the words of Isaiah – a root shall spring forth from the stump of Jesse – foretold the imminent return of Jesus. Whatever our Christology these days, we have to confess that what Paul believed, what he thought and what he preached and wrote about Jesus coming back to earth certainly did not happen. Does Paul’s unfulfilled hope necessitate our despair?
Not at all. The truth is, we share Paul’s hope even now, though we understand it through the long lens of history. Nevertheless, the hope we share would be familiar to him: that Christ is, indeed, coming again into our lives, and that our lives might reflect that hope.
Paul, in his beautiful words from the Corinthian correspondence, speaks of hope in conjunction with two other foundational virtues: faith and love.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three …”
The key to understanding the hope of Advent, and, indeed, the advent of hope, lies in that trinity of virtues – faith, hope and love.
Interestingly enough, I think Harvey Milk was pointing in the same direction when he famously said, “you’ve gotta give ‘em hope.” He said those words in a speech delivered just before he was assassinated in 1978, and if Harvey had been a good southern boy he would have known to use the plural “you,” and he would’ve said, “y’all have gotta give ‘em hope.” What he said, instead, was this: “you and you and you – gotta give ‘em hope.”
In other words, hope is not and cannot be an individual possession, because authentic hope only arises in community. Authentic hope is only possible in community.
That’s why Paul insists on the power of love – that is to say, the binding force that holds community together is love, and only where there is love can there be hope.
Faith, which is never first about belief but is, instead, foremost about relationship, faith binds us to a particular community and gives specific content to our hope.
Let me flesh that out just a little bit in terms of this season and this community.
First, though, let me say that I agree with Rick not only about certain prospects for the near term, but also about the necessity for faithfulness in the present moment. I think he’s absolutely right about the coming demise of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). We are living into a post-denominational age, and are already well beyond the age of the mainline Protestant establishment in America. I cannot tell you what comes next, but the church I grew up in no longer exists, and we are simply in denial if we think it’s ever coming back again.
There are profoundly serious cultural, personal, ethical, theological, and political issues at stake in the dissolution of the Protestant consensus in America, and if we cling to some false hopes about a return to the good old days then we are doomed to precisely the kind of despair that Romero had in mind when he said that we do not need people dragging around the despair of unfulfilled hopes.
For those hopes are really nothing more than sentimental nostalgia, the longing after an imagined past that never truly was. Moreover, those hopes can easily be reduced to private possessions. I can curl up in front of the fireplace or the Christmas tree with a Hallmark version of the season, and lose myself in the private revelry of my own imagination. And there’s nothing wrong with that in small doses. But there is no real life there, and thus, there is no real hope there either.
Real hope, real Advent hope, is about new life being born in the most unexpected places: unemployment lines, soup kitchens, the day laborer sites, along the borders, far from the seats of power, but also at kitchen tables and back yards where smaller scale family and neighborhood crises get played out every day against the background of a culture of despair that isolates us from one another at every turn.
Why should this be so? Why should God show up in such places? The God revealed at the manger is the God whose very name is, “I will be who I will be,” and whose steadfast promise is “I will be with you always, in just the way that I choose to be.” Emmanuel. God with us. As God chooses. And as the witness of scripture and especially the story of Jesus make abundantly clear, God chooses first to be with the least of these.
We’re going to talk more about this next week – in particular, about the relationship of hope and love, but for this morning, let me close with a story of Advent hope.
Rick and I have traded some e-mail correspondence on hope over these past days, and he framed his questions about hope in part like this:
“I think my point is that although I dream and feel hopeful all the time, and that motivates me a great deal, I also recognize the luxury of feeling hopeful. As I've been reading through the Psalms over the past two years in morning prayer, I find that I have to push myself to read the Psalms of lament. It makes me wonder what would happen if I lost everything I consider security in my life. What if Kitty had a terminal illness, or we lost our jobs, or one of our children was dealing with a significant disability? Then, I think, I would need to begin to depend more on faithfulness than on hope.”
Those are hugely trying, difficult, even tragic circumstances, but they are also typically human. They are Job like. I look around at our community. Some in this circle have lost spouses to terminal illness. Some in this circle have lost jobs. Some have dealt with loved ones with significant disabilities.
Jean Paul Sarte famously remarked, “Hell is other people.” I would content that hope is other people, other people who respond to desperation in others out of the deep wells of hopefulness that they find in the steadfast presence and promise of the God of Advent.
I know that in the most trying times of my own life – job loss, serious illness in my family, times when I have felt helpless and hopeless, times when I felt that Job might not have much on me – I have been upheld by the compassionate acts of other people to whom I have been bound in the fellowship of the communion of the church, and in their compassion I have found renewed hope.
Last spring I travelled down to Tennessee to help my parents, who are both facing serious constraints on their mobility. My mother loves to work in the garden. It is a place of soul restoration for her, a thus a place of hope. The house that we helped them move into a year ago has a lovely back yard but no easy way to get into it after the ramp we had built for access to the house blocked the steps into the yard.
I went down determined to build some steps, but not sure how I was going to accomplish the task by myself in the time I had. But when I got to Chattanooga, it turned out a retired gentleman from my mother’s church had heard about what I was up to and so he showed up with tools and a truck and we got the job done. Nothing miraculous, nothing like what Job faced, and not even among the most trying times of my life, but still a simple gift of hope embodied by a member of the community who didn’t know me from Adam, but who stepped into a small crisis and offered his own gifts.
Authentic hope – whether it is in the face of huge and systemic concerns or small and personal ones – authentic hope is only possible within communities grounded in the deeper hope of the God of the Exodus and the God of Advent.
May this be a season of authentic hope for each of us who share the bonds of this community. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
8:05 AM
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