Good morning, friends. I know, I know, I can’t believe it either. They let me back up here again. Just when you thought it was safe to come back to church.
But, we gather together this morning on the second Sunday of the Advent season. For us Christians, Advent is a season of great hope. In it’s etymology, the word advent is derived from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival. Each consecutive Sunday brings with it a greater sense of hope than the last as we come nearer and nearer to Christmas day when we commemorate the arrival of our savior 2000 years ago and celebrate in hope his promise to arrive again. And on this morning of the second Sunday of Advent I would like to talk in depth about our conception of hope. It seems to me that with our economy in utter turmoil, with America’s sons and daughters dying on foreign soil in a war that is far from over, and our day to day lives filled with struggles both big and small, hope is something we need to talk about more often.
After 21 months of stump speeches you may be surprised to find that hope is not a thing reserved solely for political campaigns for presidency. You may also be surprised to find, as I know I was, that our beloved President-elect Mr. Barack Obama is not the inventor of the notion of hope. In fact, as a professed Christian in general and a United Church of Christ-er in particular, Mr. Obama is heir to a tradition steeped in hope all the way back to its roots in ancient Israel. If nothing else, we Christians are a hopeful people.
However, in the course of his campaigning Mr. Obama bandied the word hope about as if it was in need of no further definition. I take issue with this. Hope, if left undefined, can easily become confused and conflated with words like wish, dream, or aspire. Hope, hope is different. It has added dimensions, added layers – it is a good deal more complex. Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest and social activist, defines hope as a not-yet-consciousness that seeks to be made manifest in the future through human action in the present. Let me run that by you one more time. Hope is a not-yet-consciousness that seeks to be made manifest in the future though human action in the present.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate what he means by this. There is ship halfway through its journey from Morocco to Miami in the middle on the Atlantic Ocean. The trip is going smoothly, the coast is clear as they say, when all of the sudden a storm system moves in from the west trapping the ship and its crew near the northern edge of the storm. The ship is being tossed about in the brutal fury of the sea. The crew knows that if they don’t do something to get out the storm they will perish beneath the frigid waves of the mid-Atlantic but they are so disoriented they don't know where to begin. Then in a crack in the clouds the captain spies the North Star, and visions of the calm sea beyond the northern edge of the storm fill his mind. What does the captain do? He is the captain so of course he spurs his crew to action by ordering them to batten down the hatches, to man the rudder, and to pump out the bilge and to shiver me timbers, whatever that may mean. The crew springs to life, taking all the actions necessary to propel their ship through the storm and into the safety of the north, where eventually they arrive, shaken, but unscathed.
Now, where was the hope in this situation? According to Gutierrez, the hope is not located in the sighting of the North Star alone, nor in the calm seas it represented. Nor was the hope singularly located in the exertions of crew. Rather, the hope is located in the synergy that occurred when the vision of the calm sea met with the action necessary to get there. That is to say, where the crew’s not-yet consciousness met with the corresponding action necessary to make it happen, there was hope. In the specifically Christian sense, hope usually arises in recognition of some aspect of God’s goodness not yet fulfilled in our lives. As faithful believers we are called to hopeful action to bring that goodness about. It is just this kind of active, lively get-up-and-do-something, God-inspired hope that we see in today’s scripture reading. Enter John the Baptist. John is introduced to us as an ascetic who lives in the wilderness, who eats only locusts and honey, and who wears only a loincloth of camel hair and a leather belt. Although, I have no personal experience wearing one myself Rev. O’Brien informs me that they chafe a great deal – adding the perfect complement to John’s already uncomfortable lifestyle. Brother John was obviously not one to be concerned with material comfort. Rather, he awaited with great longing the coming of the messiah who had been prophesied about for generations. A messiah that would rescue the Jews from the oppression of the Roman occupation of their lands / and usher in an age of prosperity for the Israelites. John understood with great clarity that waiting was not enough. John, the paragon of hope that he was, realized that his longing for the messiah called for immediate action in the present to make that which was not-yet come to be. And so it was that John cast off all worldly comfort and went out to the Jordan preaching and cleansing the hearts of men, women, and children through water baptism, making straight the path for the coming messiah.
And in talking about John the Baptist’s ministry we encounter one more property of hope that I didn’t bring up before, but deserves mention; that is, to co-opt Mr. Obama’s descriptor, the utter audacity of Christian hope. We often find ourselves surrounded by seemingly insurmountable evils and obstacles in our lives. And even when the deck is seemingly stacked against us, even when nothing in life seems to be going in our favor, we as Christians have the unrelenting audaciousness to envision a future much brighter and much Godlier than our present condition.
John preached of the coming messiah but he did not know, however, when this messiah would come or what this messiah would even look like. To the best of our knowledge, John didn’t even know who Jesus was. Although the Gospel of Luke asserts that John is in fact Jesus’ cousin, most scholarship indicates that this relationship is, in the words of one, actually kind of pretentious, theologian, “of dubious historicity.” That is to say, John and Jesus were probably not related at all. Moreover, John the Baptist was certainly not aware that he was the “one crying in the wilderness” of whom Isaiah spoke. We know this only because in his gospel Mark has woven these strands of history together for us. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? We know what’s going to happen in verse 9: Jesus is going to show up at the banks of the River Jordan wanting to be baptized by John. But poor John living out verse 8 / didn’t have a clue. John had no visible, no tangible reason to expect that his ministry could actually help pave the way for the coming messiah. The Israelites had lived under Roman rule for over a century and had no reason to expect it to end anytime soon. Rather, John’s ministry sprung forth as a necessary component of an absolutely audacious hope that recognized a goodness not yet fulfilled in the world for which he strived to help bring about. Not knowing if he would even see it in his lifetime. Not knowing if his actions would even be effectual. John the Baptist believed against all logic and rationality that he could overcome his present condition and take action to aid the future fulfillment of a messiah, who, as it would turn out, would provide the world with hope for generations to come.
But it is often the case nowadays that our hope is maligned by society as naïve, as childish. We live in a world that is critical of religiosity of any sort and wants to hear little of a hope animated by the good that God intends for our lives. There is a famous critique of religion by the philosopher Karl Marx that gets quoted all the time, especially on college campuses / especially toward upstanding young men who come out saying that they want to be preachers / (not that I’m bitter… OK maybe a little). But you’ve all probably heard this quote before: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” If I understand this quotation correctly, we stand accused of being pacified by our religion even when surrounded by manifold injustice and evil in our lives. If I understand this quotation correctly, we stand accused of being so focused on the otherworldly that we are rendered unable to function in our present reality. If I understand this quotation correctly, I would say that the role of hope in our Christianity is being completely mis-understood.
Pithy as it may be this quote does not take into account the action that so defines our hope as Christians, action that can be attested to by biblical and also by historical witness. I want to take you back now if you’ll join me. I want to go way back, way back to the captivity of the Jews in ancient Egypt. Slaves to the Egyptians for 430 years, the Israelites were oppressed, mistreated and forced to do labor under pharaoh’s regime. They had very little going for them, nothing really to live for, their day-to-day was filled with pain, sorrow, and punishment. But then God appeared to Moses in a burning bush and told Moses that God had heard the Israelites’ cries, was concerned about their suffering, and would set them free. Upon learning of this goodness that God intended for them, the captive Jews did not sit and wait for their freedom to happen unto them. It was the Jews who hoped for their freedom from Egyptian bondage who got themselves to their feet in the middle of the night and headed for their homeland, trying to make that goodness which was not-yet, come to be. Theirs was not a passive hope, as Marx would like you to think. It was a 600,000 person, mass exodus, Red-Sea parting kind of hope.
Let’s fast-forward now a few millennia to the 17th century at the beginning of the slave trade in America. After being captured in their homelands Africans were forced into ships with room only to sit, were beaten and were starved for months on end. If they survived the cruelty of the Middle Passage they were put on an auction block and sold into slavery not as humans but as property. And then, after being sold, in an attempt to “civilize” them, and I use the word civilize in the most ironic sense possible, they were forced to convert to Christianity and were preached a most pernicious version of the gospel that quoted over and over Ephesians 6:5, “Slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear.” And yet, the stories they heard were not the same ones being preached to them. Because in this Christianity they found a Jesus that gave them hope that their present condition was not as God intended and that God had goodness in store for God’s children. And so theirs was not a passive hope. It was an Underground Railroad kind of hope. It was a Civil War fighting kind of hope. And after much struggle and bloodshed when they eventually gained their freedom only to find themselves confronted with the evils of Jim Crow and segregation their hope did not turn did turn into a docile, whimpering kind of hope it remained a Rosa Parks white-only seat sitting, Montgomery bus-boycotting, nonviolent protest marching kind of hope.
We continue to engage in this active Christian hope even today. Everyday of our lives we bear witness to people struggling with debt, people in relationships that do not honor their personhood, people fighting drug and alcohol addictions, people fighting evils of all sorts who do not lay down to die but rise to the challenge and effect change in their lives because they hope to move beyond the present into the goodness that God holds for them.
So in short what I’m saying is that religion is NOT the opiate of the masses and most certainly not of the Christian masses. Our hope as Christians is the great motivator of goodness in our lives and our world. As you go forth from this place today, please keep in mind that you are an essential participant in the process of hope that is embodied in this season of Advent and that the goodness that God holds for you is not just to be waited for but is to be acknowledged and to be strived for, trusting that ours is a good God and that we are loved. Amen.
