(24 minutes)May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13 (NRSV)
Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.
I Peter 1:31
In Greek mythology there is the story of Pandora’s box. There are many versions of this story, but the basic premise is this: The Greek gods made a woman, gifted her in many ways including great beauty, and placed her on earth. The gods gave her a sealed box and told her never to open the jar. The box contained all the evils, misfortunes, and miseries that could afflict humankind. Pandora could not resist the temptation to look. As she opened the box, all these miseries flew out of the box into the world to plague humans for all time. Pandora quickly closed the lid, but the only thing left in the box was hopelessness. So, hopelessness was the only evil that did not escape the box. The message of the myth is clear: The only power that can keep humans from ultimate despair in a world of so much evil and suffering is hope.
This ancient story demonstrates that even thousands of years ago (even in a pagan culture) humans realized the vital importance of hope. In many ways hope is what keeps us human. Hope allows us to cope with the misfortunes of life; to see beyond the confines of the past and the limitations of the present; to imagine a future which transcends and overcomes the harsh realities of the now; and to envision a new reality, a different existence, a better world. The first Sunday is traditionally associated with hope. Today I want us to look at hope in light of the biblical faith and especially in light of the coming of Jesus.
As the story of Pandora’s box illustrates, hope is a universal, human trait. Every person in every culture knows what it means to hope. But the Judeo-Christian faith has a special understanding of hope. Foundational to our faith is the belief that history is going somewhere and is ultimately directed by God. We are not here by accident. God has a purpose in creating us along with the rest of creation. There is a destination—a goal—a homecoming for this great cosmic experiment. God is involved in providential and often hidden ways directing history and creation to a final purpose. This hope is one of the unique features of the Jewish-Christian faith.
Biblical hope is not wishful dreaming; it is God hoping through us and our dreaming with God.
But God does not direct this movement like a puppeteer pulling our strings. God does not determine this outcome as a computer programmer would program a computer. God invites us to walk with Her into this future and to help Her create this “somewhere” which is our final goal. Aged Abraham and Sarah were among the first responders to this invitation from God as they left everything behind and chose to trust the dream God has put in their hearts. Biblical hope is not wishful dreaming; it is God hoping through us and our dreaming with God. That is what makes biblical hope unique and different. God hopes through us, and God invites us to dream with Her as we flesh out this hope. It is God, the Maker of heaven and earth—the Source of time and eternity—the Alpha and the Omega of all that matters, who inspires this hope in us and invites us to join in creating something beautiful, wonderful, and enduring–something worthy of God’s dreams and of our humanity created in God’s image.
Now, all this sounds sweet, wonderful, and grand, doesn’t it? What pulls us back to earth is this realization: hope is required because our world is not what it should be. Hope is necessary because things must change. The status quo in no way reflects the will and dreams of God or the noble aspirations of humanity. The only people who truly hope in the biblical sense are those who know that things are not as they should be. Those comfortable with the status quo don’t want change; they don’t want a new heaven and a new earth; and they don’t want a Messiah who will usher in a new kingdom with both a different ruler and different rules. Only people who see the world through God’s eyes, who hear the world through God’s ears, and who feel the world through God’s heart will have the inspiration, courage, and strength to hope.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, this kind of hope is best seen in the prophets. The prophets saw themselves as participating in the sodh (council) of Yahweh. They were included in the heavenly gathering of God and Her celestial beings. Within that transcendent experience, they saw the world as God saw it and shared in Her divine pathos. Immersed in the truth, righteousness, and compassion of God, they knew that a world based on greed, violence, and idolatry could not stand for long. If God is Maker of heaven and earth, the ultimate force behind history, and the final judge of right and wrong, the world could not continue as it was. There must be change, radical change. That’s why the prophets ranted and raved against all the power brokers in the world. That’s why they courageously and relentlessly spoke truth to power. And that’s why they demanded that justice become the norm at every level of Israelite society.
Augustine said that hope has two sisters: anger and courage. And he called them “lovely sisters.” But why are they lovely? Because without them, hope degenerates into cowardice and sentimentality. Augustine understood the true nature of biblical hope. Only people who have seen the world through God’s eyes and grieve over the pain and suffering, the violence and injustice—only such people can hope, for what they see angers them, and God’s Spirit inspires the courage necessary to act on that anger so that the world can be fundamentally transformed. They share in the wrath of God. Modern and post-modern Christians often shy away from the notion of God’s wrath, but God’s wrath is real. How can God not be angry over the pain and suffering of victims of racism and prejudice; over the starvation and deaths of thousands of children every day because a world with more than enough to feed its population several times over refuses to allocate the small resources needed to abolish hunger from the face of the earth; over the exploitation of this beautiful planet which is the cause of so much destruction; over the greed which oppresses billions while 1-2% of the world’s population wallows in obscene wealth? A God who does not have anger over such evil is a god not worth emulating or worshipping. And those of us who do not agonize over such evil and its horrific consequences can scarcely call ourselves “children of God.”
But seeing the world through God’s eyes of hope is also why the Jewish prophets imagined a different world. A world where wolves and lambs, lions and kids, bears and cattle, children and snakes could dwell in peace and harmony—where swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks—where no one would learn war any more—where everyone would live under her own vine and fig tree and no one would ever make anyone else afraid. These were the dreams God shared with the prophets. But make no mistake about it; the prophets knew this radically different world would not come without a cost. People who dream are not dangerous in themselves. They only become dangerous when they insist on fleshing out those dreams and making them real in time and space, in politics and economics, and in society and religion. If Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Jesus had just dreamed their dreams and gone their merry way, they would have faced no ridicule, opposition, or violence. But these great heroes of faith knew that the God who had shared Her dreams with them was also the God who wanted Her will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. These spokespersons for God knew that all authentic hope must be this-world directed as it seeks a transformation of the whole earth according to God’s own heart. And these great prophets knew that it was dangerous to hope with God in the truest sense because there are powerful forces which do not want hope in this world. Why? Because as we said earlier, hope is only for those who hunger for change.
And perhaps that is why authentic biblical hope is so rare today, even in the church. Walter Brueggemann, perhaps the greatest biblical scholar of our time, said, “We have always known that the way to get along is to go along. . . and who among us wants to be the one who runs risks, dares newness, and act on God’s dream?” Who indeed? The people I see running risks, daring newness, and acting on God’s dream today are not, for the most part, in the church—they are rock stars and actors, activists and reformers, teenagers like Greta Thunberg who may or may not have any religious affiliation and humanitarians like Bono. God will always find someone to envision, dare, and act on God’s dream even if they don’t understand the true source of that dream. It is shameful that those of us who claim to follow Jesus of Nazareth, the most radical human being who ever lived, are content to sit on “our blessed assurances” and watch the world go to hell in a handbasket. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, put it well: “No one has the right to sit down and feel helpless. There’s too much work to do.”
As Christians we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the greatest revelation of God. In him we see what God is like. And in him we see the dreams of God for us and our world better than anyplace else. The prophets were allowed to see the world as God sees it, to hear the world as God hears it, and to feel the world as God feels it. But Jesus as God’s Son and the incarnated Word was exponentially more sensitive to God’s ways, thoughts, and feelings. We are told in the Gospels that Jesus frequently went off by himself to spend time in prayer with God. I believe that some of that time—perhaps a lot of that time—was spent sharing in the dreams of God for this world. How special those times must have been! And yet he did not stay in the quiet places meditating and dreaming. He always came down from the mountain top back into the real world to share those dreams with his followers and those willing to listen. He asked those peasants of his time to imagine a world where God—the God of compassion, love, mercy, justice and peace—was king and not such sorry excuses like Caesar, Herod, and Pilate.
Psychologist William Lynch once noted that the path to healing for people stricken with mental illness lies in the ability to imagine a world different from that in which they are imprisoned. That is exactly what Jesus asked his followers to do—to imagine a world different from the one in which we and hundreds of millions of others are imprisoned. There is an alternative, and that alternative is possible because the God who made heaven and earth wills that different world and is passionately committed to its birthing.
Jesus knew that sharing and living that dream would come at a great cost because authentic hope is never easy, cheap, or sentimental.
Jesus knew that the world is God’s ultimate concern. “For God so loved the world” is the premise for all the gospel (something too many so-called “Christians” have forgotten in this country). And the God Jesus called Abba is determined that the world will not be left to its own destruction. God has greater dreams for us than our own sad demise. So, the resurrected Christ came back into the world to share God’s dreams with common humanity—to confront those who did not want change or real hope in this world with the truth of God—to show us how to flesh out those dreams right now as a preview of God’s great coming attraction when God’s will shall be done on all the earth as it is in heaven. And of course, Jesus knew that sharing and living that dream would come at a great cost because authentic hope is never easy, cheap, or sentimental. The author of the Book of Hebrews has a marvelous way of putting it. For God’s will to be done on earth, God must shake heaven and earth. God must remove those things that are shaken loose so that the things that cannot be shaken may stand. Hope is about the rebirthing of creation so that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. And all those willing to seek that will on earth must also be willing to take up their crosses and follow Jesus as they, in the words of Acts, turn this world upside down. Now do you see why Herod wanted to kill the baby Jesus? Why Pilate wanted to kill the adult Jesus? Why many of the Caesars in history wanted to kill the followers of Jesus? Hope is dangerous to the keepers of the status quo, and no hope is more dangerous than resurrection hope.
Paul in Colossians calls Christ “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:24-29). “Glory” in the Bible refers to “the visible presence of God.” The prophets looked to the day when God’s glory would fill the earth—where every part of creation will be tinged with the light of God’s presence and character. In the first chapter of John, we are told that Jesus is God’s word made flesh and we “have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” In other words, we see God in Jesus. But God is not satisfied with such a limited glory. And that is what the resurrection is all about. God raised Jesus from the dead in a resurrected, glorified body as a sign that all of creation is destined to share in this glory. God will not rest until Her dream is incarnated and fleshed out in all of creation, all of time and space. The resurrection of Jesus is the sign of things to come. And that is why those early disciples were intoxicated with hope, driven by hope, sustained by hope, and inspired by hope. As Christian ethicist Larry Rasmussen says, those early followers had to learn never to say the impossible cannot happen. How could they possibly say that after witnessing the resurrection of Jesus? Seeing even death itself defeated, they refused to accept “hopeless” situations, full of death’s presence, as final. “Hope against hope” is the way the New Testament puts it. Crazy hope, a lunatic’s hope, a fool’s hope—that’s the way the world looks at it, but those early disciples walking away from an empty tomb knew better. With such a God, nothing is impossible. So, they went out and turned the world upside down. Now compare their hope with our hope—our puny, malnourished, timid, flaccid, superficial, spineless hope. If the church could ever recover biblical hope/resurrection hope/God’s hope hoping through us, we too could turn this world upside down. And if ever this world needed turning upside down it is now.
Advent is a time when the church prepares itself for the coming of Christ—the birth of this strange peasant king who rules through love and service, truth and justice, compassion and peace. As the Christmas carol “O Holy Night” puts it, “long waits the world.” The world has waited a very long time for the birth of hope, peace, joy, and love in its sordid and sad history. This One cradled in a manger in Bethlehem, suspended from a cross on Calvary, and leaving behind an empty tomb outside Jerusalem is the hope of the world. But make no mistake about it; this is a costly hope—a dangerous hope—a radical hope–a glorious hope. This Advent may we discover afresh this hope of glory and make it our own. Without that discovery Advent will be no more than a sentimental and useless expenditure of our time. With that discovery, Advent can prepare us to receive this strange King and join him in transforming this world according the dreams of God’s own heart.
