Hope: A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Our word for today is Hope. On this first Sunday of Advent and of a new liturgical year (and as it turns out this very first day of December) we have lit the first Advent Candle on our Advent wreath to mark the beginning of our Christmas preparations and to remind ourselves that we are a people of Hope. Quite literally, we are a people gathered at the corner of Church and Hope. You can’t make this stuff up!

I want to offer you a visual reminder of something important. I’d like to ask that we turn the lights off, for just a moment. And let our eyes adjust. It’s not the same as if it was midnight here but even on a Sunday morning, I want you to notice what it’s like without electric lights. (lights out!)

 I commend to you a book by Gil Rendle, a church consultant who has written an important book called Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World. At the end of that book, Rendle shares this story about a young boy who lived on a farm. He was instructed by his mother to go out on a pitch-dark night to make sure the barn door was closed and locked. He left through the back door but immediately returned, telling his mom it was too dark. She handed him a flashlight and told him to try again but again he came back pretty quickly. He said the flashlight was too weak and he couldn’t see the barn. His mother said, “you don’t need to see the barn…you just need to walk to the end of the light.”

The Scriptures tell us that a people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. The Scriptures tell us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. What I want you to notice is that it only takes a little bit of light to help us walk in the dark. I know that it’s harder and harder to drive at night as we get older, at least that is my experience. But we don’t need to drive anywhere we just need to walk – one step at a time. It's harder to read in the dark or see the words in the Hymnal. I get that. But for now, for just a moment longer, let’s just take in what is here. We are here. God is here. And the lights shine in the darkness of this holy space – and more importantly still, in the world.

That’s hope. It’s a word sometimes cheapened by everyday usage. We may hope that the Patriots win a game, or we hope that it isn’t raining when we take our vacation next summer. But hope is a bigger word in our vocabulary of faith than that.

“Faith, Hope, and Love,” at least according to St. Paul...seem to be the big three. Love may well be “the greatest of these” but the implication is that the three are somehow connected. I’ve always thought that the journey begins with faith, which isn’t about saying a creed, or about memorizing a catechism, but about trust and more specifically about well-placed (rather than mis-placed) trust. Faith leads us to hope. And hope gives us the courage and the vulnerability and the strength to love God and our neighbor.

Hope is an Advent word–the first word that carries us toward the celebration of our Lord’s birth, and sets the tone for these next four weeks. I often turn, when I am thinking about words, to Frederick Buechner. He writes, in “Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC” -

For Christians, hope is ultimately hope in Christ. The hope that he really is what for centuries we have been claiming he is. The hope that despite the fact that sin and death still rule the world, he somehow conquered them. The hope that in him and through him all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them too. The hope that at some unforeseeable time and in some unimaginable way he will return with healing in his wings.

Jeremiah was a prophet of the Babylonian exile. He had a very difficult ministry, called to prepare the people while all seemed to be going well for the Babylonian exile. I’ve come to make a connection between our world and the world of the Old Testament between 586 and 911. (Alright, full disclosure – Walter Brueggemann and others smarter than I am have made this connection, but I fully embrace it!)

9/11 you all get immediately, even if you were a child then or not even born. 586 BCE was the year that the Babylonian Army marched into Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, which led to a period of grief, and despair, and exile in a foreign land. It is a number that marks the end of something, with a future yet to be determined. Jeremiah’s calling was to prepare people who didn’t want to face up to that for what was coming, before it was clear to the pundits what was unfolding.

Imagine our modern prophets in the U.S., as those people who through the 1980s and 1990s tried to warn us that we were on the wrong path in so many ways, that the ferment in the Middle East was not going to go away until there was peace with justice there. We are preparing not just our hearts but our homes, our church, our world for the coming of the prince of peace. There cannot be peace on earth until is begins with us, and surely it needs to include not just followers of Jesus but our Jewish and Muslim cousins as well. Pray today and always for the peace of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah had difficult words to speak in a time before people were ready to hear them. But late in that book–late in that “scroll”–there is this tiny little text of hope, this fragment really of just a few sentences that looks beyond the difficult days to the dawn of a new day.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness."

The days are surely coming…all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as Dame Julian put it. That’s hope. Learning to see well enough in the darkness to keep on keeping on. All Jeremiah gives us is a dead branch. A stump – out of which a new shoot will come. It’s not a lot to go on, friends! But it’s enough. In fact, I suggest to you that that is the only way any of us get through difficult days, is to know that even if it will be a long haul, that a new day will eventually dawn. I think if we can ponder that reality we begin to get a grasp of what hope is really all about. The image of a “stump of Jesse” that gives way to a “new branch of David.”

I’m sure you’ve all tried to keep maple trees from consuming some piece of property by cutting them off at the trunk, only to come back in the spring and find a new shoot coming up out of the old trunk. That happens, as I understand it, because the root system already there makes new life come about more quickly, even though at ground level it appears that life has been cut off.

Stay with that, because that can guide you through this often frenetic month. Ponder for a moment what that means not only in the Bible, but for the spiritual life. For our real lives. Advent is such a time, a time to contemplate new beginnings and new possibilities. It’s a season of hope.

Jesse is King David’s father. What this metaphor suggests is that even though it appears that the Davidic dynasty comes to an end–that it is only a stump, from that stump new growth will appear. For us as Christians that is language we cannot help but to connect to Jesus, the Son of David who is our hope and our salvation.

And so Advent begins with talk about endings, about the end of the world we know. But don’t be deceived. The Christian paradox is that we begin here because we know that God is doing a new thing. God is birthing a new creation–new heavens, and a new earth, a branch of David out of the old stump of Jesse. For us, every ending is but a transition to a new beginning. That’s what we say at funerals, when a loved one dies, that life is changed, not ended. That our dying leads to new life. So, to, with our families, when old patterns die, and new ones begin to emerge. So, too, in congregations and in the world in which we live, and in this town of Bristol. Signs of endings, all around us. But not the end. Rather, a new beginning.

That doesn’t mean we won’t grieve the loss of what we once knew and loved. I have often said that it’s not really change that people fear, it’s grief. It’s loss of what is known, in exchange for what is not yet known. But we do it because of hope. Hope isn’t naivete, or blind cockeyed optimism. Hope isn’t the power of positive thinking. Rather, hope is the conviction that sin and death never get the last word. It is the conviction that love is stronger than hate, that truth is stronger than lies, that trust is stronger than fear. 

Hope is the knowledge that God is in the healing business, and that health is God’s plan for us–personally, socially, and cosmically. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, Andy Dufrane tells Red in The Shawshank Redemption. Indeed. If we face a choice every day to get busy living or get busy dying, then it seems to me that the key to living is hope.

Hathy and I have had the privilege this week of having our son, Graham, and our daughter-in-law, Cara, with us in Worcester for Thanksgiving. We put our Christmas tree up and put the lights on it. (Please don't report me to the liturgical police!) Watching our one-year old grandson, Julian, watching and noticing and being captivated by those little lights is a beautiful thing to see, and an inspiration. The light of Christ has come into the world. That Light continues to shine in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it. 

Today we begin a new liturgical year together, and we light this first Advent candle to remind ourselves and each other that we are a people of hope, and to remind ourselves and signify to the world that we will not let our worst fears dictate our behaviors. We choose to act and live and move and have our being from that place of hope. We just need to keep on walking to the end of the light. Eventually that will lead us to a barn in Bethlehem. Stay tuned.