Advent’s Hope
Today marks the first Sunday of Advent. Advent – which literally means “coming” - is a traditional season, celebrated by the Church to mark the nearness of Christmas, the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, His coming into our world and our lives and our common space. The same tradition has offered a variety of themes which should be highlighted in the worship of local congregations for each and every Sunday of this season. The theme of the first Sunday in Advent is the theme of hope.
Oddly, this is not a theme for one Sunday out of 52 in the annual calendar of the Church’s worship. (But, for that matter, anything we single out on any Sunday is something that should be worshipped every hour of every day, so why take issue with this one theme among others?)
Hope is often confused with optimism. When politicians speak of hope, usually they are talking about optimism – a sort of foolish notion that good days are always ahead and that with a little spit and polish we can make it ok.
The biblical notion of hope – I find – runs deeper and darker. Hope is the affirmation that the world and all that is in it are in the hands of a force which is driving to a place and that this place is good. Christians have dubbed this place the Kingdom of God after the teachings of Jesus, but other religions share this same sense that the universe and it’s history and direction and natural order are headed somewhere. As Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said when accepting his Nobel Prize:
“When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
The great difference between hope and optimism is that hope does not deny the dark side of reality. Our world is in pain and is far from perfection. It is broken. It bleeds. It cries. What is more, there will be more tears. More pain. More blood. And, in truth, try as we might to avert that, there may be little we can do. We may try to stop the pain of the world and – like Jesus on his Cross – end up throwing our bodies to a machine that will chew us up and spit us out from it’s teeth as nothing more than chum for the sharks. However, this does not mean that God will not be victorious in the end. I may be defeated. You may be defeated. But God cannot be defeated. That is hope! Hope is the assurance that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” and that God is the guarantor of that arc’s direction and destination.
