Creating Christmas: Hope

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Romans 8:18-25: 

When Congressional Medal of Honor winner and Hanoi Hilton survivor Admiral James Stockdale was asked who it was that had the hardest time as a prisoner of war, he said, “That’s easy. It’s the optimists.” He said that the optimists would think, “We’ll be out by Christmas,” but when that didn’t happen, it was “we’ll be out by Easter,” and then “We’ll be out by the 4th of July,” then “we’ll be out by Thanksgiving,” and then they were back to Christmas again. The constant crushing of their optimism, would lead to delusion and other problems.  It shattered their endurance, and Stockdale said, “I think they all died of a broken heart.” But, the ones who were most likely to make it through were the ones who went through the full cycle of grief, and then held onto the faith that they would prevail in the end. That they would make it out. They didn’t know when, and they hoped it would be sooner rather than later, but no matter what was happening to them in the prison camp, they had faith in the final outcome. The suffering could not be eliminated, but how they decide to approach it and think about it can make all the difference.

And so in hearing that, we have to understand that Admiral Stockdale was not arguing against hope, but against false optimism, because although we often talk about optimism and hope as being the same thing, they are in fact difference. Shortly before his assassination, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when asked about the move towards racial justice, he said that he was not optimistic, but he was hopeful. That is, you can have hope even when you have lost your optimism, and not false hope, but the hope that we will prevail in the end, or even more importantly that we know that God will prevail in the end. And so today as we begin our advent journey, making our way to celebrating the birth of Christ, we will begin looking at the four themes of Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love, and as we already talked about in lighting our advent candle, today is hope. And we have to know, as Paul sort of tells us, we don’t need hope when things are going well, we need it when we are in trouble, when we are suffering, when we wonder what’s going on, and the exact same thing is true of Christmas. We don’t have Christmas because everything is great. We have Christmas because we live in brokenness.

When then Senator Barak Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope, I remember leading a Bible study and we ended up talking about the idea that hope could be audacious, and when it is that you needed and felt hope. You can certainly feel hopeful during good times, even if it’s just the hope that the good times will continue, but that’s more like Paul’s statement that we don’t hope for that which we can see, for who hopes for what is already there. Instead we hope for what we don’t see, and unfortunately, although Paul doesn’t say that word, we wait for it with patience. But, perhaps patience isn’t actually the right word. We wait for the fulfillment of our hope with patience, but we can see that hope is possible because of the light overcoming the darkness, because we know that we are not alone.  And that hope, Paul says, comes because of the realities of the world. In chapter five of Romans he says, “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:2b-5)

When I was growing up, to get me to eat my vegetables, my grandfather would tell me that eating them would put hair on my chest. That wasn’t a convincing argument for me, and I can tell you honestly that it is even less effective with three daughters. But, whenever I hear Paul saying that suffering produces hope and hope does not disappoint, it sounds like trying to get us to eat our vegetables by saying something that sounds good, but we really know is trying to gloss over the negative part, or the whole vegetable thing. And that’s true, and yet it also has an underlying truth as well, and that is its connection to the reality of both suffering and hope.

Has anyone ever been in complete darkness? And I don’t mean in a dark house, but like in a cave darkness where you can put your hand in front of your face and wiggle your fingers and not see them dark. When you are in darkness like that, how much light does it take to shatter that darkness? All it takes is a pinprick of light and the darkness is overcome. And so what Paul is telling us here is that we are saved by hope because we know how the ending works and what will happen. We haven’t seen it yet, but Paul tells us, Jesus tells us, that we will see it someday, and so we have to be patient, because as we talked about the last few weeks, while Jesus brought the reign of the Kingdom of God into being, it’s not quite there yet either, and so we await the consummation, the birth of the Kingdom, yet to come. And that begins with the resurrection, which is part of the first fruits that we claim in the glory of Christ, the future glory that awaits us, and patience is one of the fruits of the Spirit.

And so in the passage Paul says that he does consider the suffering we may be undergoing now worth comparing to the glory that is to come. This is an eschatological claim, which is one of my $60,000 words, which means it’s about the end of times. That part of the image that we got in the gospel passage from Mark this morning, which begins the Advent season as a reminder that Christ has come and Christ will come again, and so our time of Advent, which means waiting or preparation, not just to remember that first Christmas, but also for the return of Christ. And so Paul says that the creation itself is also waiting with us, and that this pain in suffering is like labor pains. That’s an interesting analogy, because labor pains are unique in the suffering they cause. It’s said that the most intense pain besides for giving birth is kidney stones, I sort of doubt it, and I’ve had kidney stones, but there is a distinct difference between those two pains, because one of them serves no purpose whatsoever.

I’ve never had anyone who has had kidney stones say they would be willing to do it again. But women go through the pain of childbirth many times, and the reason is the outcomes. Sure there is suffering and pain, and I am forbidden on pain of death, or at least kidney stones, from telling our birth experience with Samantha, but there is also the promise of the coming child, and in that there is also anxiousness and worry and maybe some fear, while also hope and joy and all the other things that surround it. In Matthew’s account of Easter, the women flee from the tomb, we are told, in fear and great joy. I’ve always found that juxtaposition of emotions striking, and my best analogy, like Paul, is that of child birth, or even pregnancy, which has both of those emotions and many more.

While the woman in labor pains wants the suffering to be over, even more importantly she looks forward to the child that is about to be born, and awaits that great hope in the birth of her child, and so suffering and hope are tied up together. And so it is for us, for while Paul says that we are saved in hope, the tense there, which is one we don’t have in English, indicates not something that was done once, but something that keeps happening. There is a future component to this. So we have been saved in hope, we are being saved in hope and we will keep being saved in hope, and so while we wait with expectation, and we are instructed to stay awake, for the creation to be redeemed, for the new Jerusalem to come, and for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we wait patiently, we also know that God’s Kingdom has already broken into the world, and we have already received the light of Christ, and the forgiveness of God, and that God’s love reigns here and now.

It’s having that both and. Hope already fulfilled, and so we don’t have to wait for it, and hope not yet fulfilled. And so as we begin this advent journey, we remember and celebrate God’s hope given to us, and the hope that comes that ends our suffering, and indeed makes our suffering endurable, and then most importantly we are called to offer that hope to the world, which is not optimism. For as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.” So the questions to ponder for yourself this week is what brings you hope? Who do you know who needs hope in this moment? And what are you going to do to be the light, God’s hope, in their darkness? Cause we can find and give hope by practicing gratitude, by finding meaning in what is happening, by letting other carry our burdens, and carrying the burden for others, and by looking for the good in others. For we are called not just to claim the hope of God, but to be that hope in the world. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.