Called to Hope

January 7, 2018

Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

Like many folks, I sometimes suffer a bit of seasonal affective disorder, or, to put it simply, the lack of light during winter months sometimes triggers depression. I’m pretty sure, historically speaking, that the roots of Christmastide are bound up with this common reality. Nobody knows when Jesus was actually born, and our mid-winter holy days – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany – are rootbound with pagan celebrations of light in the midst of darkness. Indeed, every major religious tradition includes central images of light for our spirits.

No matter what path you follow to get to it, we all need a little light.

Light works as a pretty fine metaphor for grace. That is to say, the grace of God is like light on a sunny day – it’s out there no matter what we do. Which is also to say, we can choose to go outside into the light of day, or we can draw the curtains, lower the blinds, and curl up in the dark.

Unless you have really exceptional black-out blinds, though, a little bit of light is going to sneak in. As St. Francis observed, all the darkness in the world can never extinguish the light of a single candle.

So, rather than the curse the darkness, light a candle.

Which brings me to these epiphany questions:

·      When it feels dark and foreboding and bereft of hope to you, where do you look for a light shining through?

·      Where do you see light shining in the darkness even if you’re not particularly looking for it?

·      What practices help you seek light?

We don’t know anything at all about the magi – the “wise men from the East who came to Jerusalem asking ‘where is this child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’”

Well, that’s not quite accurate. We know one important thing: they paid attention. They looked for signs of light, for signs of hope that things might change.

Looking for hope is a practice to which we are called. Hope, to be clear, is not at all the same thing as blind optimism. Blind optimism sees only the best of all possible worlds in the midst of crushing poverty and ceaseless violence. Despair sees no way out.

True hope see something else: the possibility of human agency living out divine hope. That, as Walter Brueggemann put it in a recent Sojourners interview, is the point of preaching: “to say that God’s hopes are to be performed through human agency that is authorized and powered by God.”

That is the hope to which we are called.

That Sojo interview was marking the 40^th anniversary of the publication of Brueggemann’s ground-breaking work, The Prophetic Imagination. In that seminal book, Brueggemann draws out the distinction between “prophetic consciousness” and “royal consciousness.” As Howard Divinity School professor Kenyatta Gilbert notes, “While prophetic consciousness promotes an economics of equality, politics of justice, and religion of God’s freedom, royal consciousness, by contrast, reinforces an economics of affluence, politics of oppression, and religion of divine accessibility where God is fully controllable and perceived as the king’s patron.”

Prophetic consciousness led the magi to follow a distant star in search of a new hope. Royal consciousness led Herod to try to extinguish the light and stamp out the hope. That pattern is ancient, but it certainly lives on. As Gilbert put it, “We hear echoes of this imperial mindset today when religious leaders – professional God-knowers – claim that natural disasters are a sign of God’s displeasure and at the same time endorse political candidates whose […] actions and legislative agendas stand counter to Jesus’ vision of good news for the poor.”

Perhaps you can see why, 40 years on, Brueggemann’s work continues to speak a powerful critique of American political, economic, and religious culture. Perhaps you can hear also in that description a whisper of the pressing invitation that Brueggemann hears everywhere issuing forth from scripture: the still small voice of God calling us to be a people of hope.

That is enough light for the day. May it shine in us and through us throughout the year. Amen.