Readings : Isaiah 2 :1-5 Romans 13 :11-14 Matthew 26 : 33-44
Hope: There was the person who sent ten different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
Hope: You realise, the reason we have hope is because things can be very bad, even the jokes.
Hope: The reason this theme begins the season of Advent is because we anticipate the re-birth of Jesus, whose name means Saviour, and of course to anticipate being saved is hopeful.
But I have a problem. This is a manufactured hope. It comes round each year along with Christmas songs way too soon before Christmas. Surely if we got the message last year, that is enough.
On top of this, in ordinary life to say I hope, is taken to admit a lack of certainty and the hope we find in the Bible is altogether different.
HOPE from following Jesus is a deep unwaverable reality. We do not use the word in an ordinary way.
Jesus had ordinary hope that he would escape crucifixion. Paul wrote of his ordinary hope to be freed from prison. If they were both terribly disappointed does that make Christian hope bogus? How dare we be hopeful? Only because Jesus revealed to Paul, and then to us, the deeper, different hope that is God. . You remember Paul writing to the church in Corinth. He lists gifts of being spiritually alive but eventually they all pass away except for three, Faith Hope and Love. They are characteristics of God.
Wait though. Suppose that this difference is manufactured too. Suppose that the ordinary hope speaks of Hope that is God.
A good way to describe this is how God is the the Ground of our Being. A favourite term from theologian Paul Tillich.
Then hope is about potential, and we find potential everywhere
We sense hope. By degrees different but not different in essence or quality.
I have begun the novel The Year of the Flood by Margaret Attwood. It fits the gospel warnings ‘As in the days of Noah’ as a dystopian novel; a story about a collapsed human civilization after a pandemic, eerily written in 2009 and now we have lived it, without collapse but with enough human suffering thank you. The novel easily matches the warning to be on alert because God’s ways are unexpected.
The novel begins with a poem The Garden, (page xi The Year of the Flood, Margaret Attwood.)
The hope to restore a planet destroyed by human carelessness is a natural hope, even if we know, once again, we over-estimate our own importance. Human restraint is the first and best gardener.
I have to finish the novel but the religion within it, a nature cult, has real value against a deathly Corporative outlook. May be the second best gardening would be to let women make decisions. Jeanette Winterson wrote in the New York Times: As ever with Atwood, it is friendship between women that is noted and celebrated — friendship not without its jealousies but friendship that survives rivalry and disappointment, and has a generosity that at the end of the novel allows for hope. It is (the women)Toby and Ren who take the novel forward from the last page, not the genetically engineered new humans….
…. Atwood knows how to show us ourselves, but the mirror she holds up to life does more than reflect — it’s like one of those mirrors made with mercury that gives us both a deepening and a distorting effect, allowing both the depths of human nature and its potential mutations. We don’t know how we will evolve, or if we will evolve at all. “The Year of the Flood” isn’t prophecy, but it is eerily possible.
It makes me ask what role does being religious have in being hopeful? Are you more hopeful because you are Christian? How? Let me take inspiration from our knowledge that we do evolve, particularly that we mature because it brings things to a vital crisis of hope. The older we get the more we realise we will die. The more we ask how we can be hopeful. Let me say that empty churches reflect the truth that the traditional Christian answers are inadequate, incredible. The notion of God causing a great flood and warning Noah is untrue without faithful imagination.
The religious hope only comes if we let ourselves develop in our faith and let this change how we talk about God. In the last pages of Stages of Faith, James Fowler includes a diagram to summarise how the strengths of different stages of faith we can grow through lead to several conversions, not one, in a life time, each is a restatement of the previous stages.
Ultimately as adults we can arrive at a faith that deals with paradox, depth and intergenerational responsibility of the world. With this comes a new quality of partnership with Being (capital B), in and for the world.
In the short reading from Romans today, Paul suggests life as it is known is ending, with the day of God, coming like light, for which the appropriate clothing is the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is a description of how to be and makes worries about eating secondary. It is trying to talk about ultimate things. Like dying.
The same sort of religious imagination is found in Isaiah with an invitation to walk in the light of the Lord, with a vision of peace between nations, and the ending of war. The claims are audacious, for who was this people of Jacob, a two-bit people at the mercy of the Assyrians and Babylonians, like Taiwan facing down China. Yet the vision is there, and not just for Jews but for all nations, to find peace. Individual happiness is found in happiness together.
These are our treasures of faith, but they are not and never were fixed, they call us, to follow, to be alert, in hope.
We are alert to how calls to be hopeful are everywhere, in degrees of hope, and they arrive through my letter box, with appeals to help make a better world. Listen to these beautiful claims of hope.
Montreal City Mission summary of 2022 in pictures as much as words, withTransmission, describes Camp Cosmos; celebrated its 50th anniversary with another summer full of fun adventure and discovery. 93 campers in all with a special project o welcome newly arriving Ukrainian children. Waiver entirely for 28 who we made new friends adjusted to life in Canada and enjoyed a worry-free summer without added financial burdens for the families.
Homeless youth: Dans la rue : Saviez vous quenous jour un rôle moteur dans la prévention de l’intineérance jeunessa grâce a nos cinq services. Escaping homelessness is not straightforward, broken romance, losing a job, going back to school. We help youth to get through the most difficult times as well as the successes.
Doctors without borders: in Syria 480 are recruited locally, international aid continues to weaken despite the continuing civil war, now in 11th year. Activities include mobile infant nutrition clinic, anti-tuberculosis treatments for teens, support for hospitals short of supplies.
Ecojustice tells how small donors can make a big impact with11yr old sisters Daisy and Emily, who sold lemonade to raise funds for Ecojustice and their dwarf goat farm. ‘We wanted to support a law charity that help to make policy changes to protect our environment long term.’
Why bother?
There are apparently hopeless situations, where people insist on hope. But this is not naïve, denial of realities. There is discernment. These organisations acutely search out potential for being and insist that all people matter and nature too. They express human intent for hope.
The force for this hope in life as we know it, comes from a connection to a deeper reality. The Hope of Advent is because of the Ground of our Being that we have found in Jesus Christ. He inspires us to realise that broken ordinariness is full of potential. It is hope for all times and all places, for you and your time.
Paul Tillich: The message of Christianity is not Christianity; but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared and still appears, it is hidden and it is visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you.
HOPE.