Practicing Our Hope

Practicing Our Hope

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 3, 2017

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent is a time of preparation and anticipation. We prepare to welcome Jesus into the world once again. We anticipate the joy that we know will come. Traditionally, we mark the four Sundays of Advent by lighting a candle for each of the four. As the number of lit candles increases, our anticipation and excitement increase. The increasing light of the candles reflects the coming of the light of the world at Christmas. Each of the four Sundays of Advent has a traditional theme. Today’s theme is hope. We lit the candle of hope, the first candle of the Advent wreath, a few minutes ago. It burns among us now, bringing us the light of hope.

Now, that’s lovely, isn’t it? I mean, who doesn’t like hope? Hope is a good thing, right? We use the absence of hope as a synonym for bad, like when we say a situation is “hopeless.” A “hopeless situation” is one out of which nothing good can come. A “hopeful” situation is one that looks promising, one out of which something good might very well come. So why, then, when I saw once again that today is hope Sunday did I very nearly panic? I’m here to tell you I did. Hope, I thought. How in heaven’s name can I preach on something most of the time I find it impossible to discover in this world? I know that not all of you share my bleak assessment of the condition of our world, but just take a look around. What do you see? War, famine, pandemics, political oppression, massive economic injustice, bigotry and discrimination on all sorts of bases, major world religions (including most of the manifestations of ours) that dehumanize women, and on and on and on. How, I thought, can I preach on something I don’t have? That was the question I couldn’t get around.

But I knew I had to preach today, so I set about trying to overcome my preacher’s block on the subject. I started by looking up hope in the dictionary. After all, if we’re going to talk about hope, we’d better have some idea of what it is. One dictionary I looked in defines hope as “a feeling that what is wanted will happen” or “desire accompanied by anticipation or expectation.” Well, OK. But the problem is that most of the time I don’t have the feeling that what I want to have happen will happen, at least not on the global scale. So I went back to the drawing board, and here’s what I came up with.

Hope, it seems to me, is an attitude not a feeling. It is a way of approaching life; and one way to get at an understanding of that attitude is to talk about what it is not. It does not require us to be unrealistic optimists. Hope does not require us to be Pollyannas, rosily and unrealistically thinking that nothing bad will ever happen. It isn’t an attitude that refuses to look at all the evil and suffering in the world and looks only at what is good. Hope does not mean skipping the front pages of the newspaper and skipping straight to the comics and the heart-warming human interest stories. Hope does not require us to be unrealistic.

Rather, hope is the attitude that looks reality in the eye and says: Nevertheless. Yes, I know I said recently here that that’s what faith is. But the theologian from whom I took that notion also says that hope is faith applied to the future. Hope, as faith applied to the future, takes in all of the suffering, all of the injustice, all of the violence and says: Nevertheless, I will live as though something good could come out of all this evil. I will not deny the evil. I will not run from it. I will stare it in the eye and say: I will live as though you do not have the last word. Hope is a decision. It is a decision to live as though peace, freedom, and justice for all people were an attainable reality in the world.

Now, you may be asking, or maybe it’s just me who’s asking: How is it possible to make that decision? How can we not be so overwhelmed by the violence and injustice in the world that we give in to despair and hopelessness? Well, I submit that there is only one way that it is possible, and that is the way of faith. Without faith in God, it seems to me, despair is unavoidable. Without God, there is no hope; but we are people of faith. We have already made the decision to live in the reality of God. We have made the decision to say yes to God; and in saying yes to God we have said yes to God’s world. The temptation to say no is strong, indeed sometimes nearly overwhelming; but as people of faith we have said yes. Hope is a form of that yes. Hope is the attitude that says: I know that this is God’s world, and I will live as though it were obvious that God will cause the good to prevail. In worldly terms, that isn’t obvious. In faith we say: Nevertheless.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow expressed this nevertheless beautifully and powerfully in the words we know as the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Perhaps you know it. We’re going to sing it here momentarily. It says: I heard the bells on Christmas Day their old familiar carols play….” In Longfellow’s poem he hears the church bells ringing on Christmas Day, and he is at first overcome with despair:

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

But in faith he overcomes that despair, for his words continue:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Wordsworth wrote these words in 1864, during the carnage of the American Civil War. In the midst of that unimaginable nightmare Wordsworth somehow found the faith to say: Nevertheless. Despite everything, I choose to believe that God is in charge and will prevail. That is the attitude of hope.

Advent is about that nevertheless, about that attitude of hope. Advent is a time for us to practice our hope. In Advent, liturgically speaking, Christ hasn’t come yet. We hope that God will come to us, but all we have is hope. That situation mirrors our life in the world generally. We live in a world from which God seems much of the time to be absent. We hope that God will come to us, will bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. We hope it, but that’s all. That means that we choose to live as though that were possible, as though that were indeed going to happen. We are able to make that choice because of our faith in God. Indeed, our faith in God requires us to make that choice.

I can’t speak for you, but I know that God is real and is part of my life. I know it because I have experienced it. I have experienced God’s gracious, healing presence in my life, sustaining me in grief and leading me to new life. When I remember that reality, then I find that I cannot remain in that despair over the state of the world that so often threatens to overwhelm me. When I remember the reality of God in my life I have hope. When I remember the reality of God in my life I am able to say “Nevertheless.” I am able to live as though the good were not just possible but inevitable. I don’t know how it is possible, and it sure doesn’t feel inevitable; but when I hold onto my faith then I know that it is.

So, this Advent, season, let’s practice our hope. Let’s look all the world’s horror in the eye and say: Nevertheless. Let’s live in the anticipation of God coming to us in Jesus Christ at Christmas, and let us understand that anticipation as the model of hope, of living as though God’s triumph in the world were inevitable. In faith, we can believe that it is. Amen.