Hope for what we don’t know how to hope for
Wonderings:
There’s that line from a John Lennon song, “Life is what happens to you / while you're busy making other plans.” I wonder if that’s been true for you.
I wonder if anyone has ever saved your life.
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God.
We find ourselves here in Advent, in this season in which we light feeble candles against the deepening darkness. Advent is a season of darkness. And a season of anticipation. Waiting. Hoping.
On the most obvious level, in Advent we are waiting for the coming of Jesus. Jesus, whose name can mean “rescuer,” or “the one who saves.” We are waiting for salvation.
This week I was reminded that when the New Testament writers wanted to talk about salvation, they used the Greek word soteria. Which means: “to have a big heart, to breathe deeply, to be free, to be in full health.” [footnote] In Advent we double down on our daily prayer “your kingdom come.” We hope, we wait for liberation and healing, for the coming of God’s reign, where everyone may breathe deeply, in freedom, and in full health.
And the question that keeps pressing on me in this season, for reasons I don’t fully understand, is this: Will that salvation come in the way we expect—will it fulfill our hopes for this world we know? Or will salvation disrupt, maybe even shatter our lives, coming like “a thief in the night?” Will salvation break into or break open this world in ways we cannot now conceive of, and thus, perhaps, cannot hope for?
When we talk about Advent hope, are we talking about making wishes that we hope will be granted? Or is hope what we hold when we do not know what to wish for, when we wait without knowing exactly what we are waiting for?
Maybe the way we can hold these two ideas together is to think of Advent as a time to clarify what it is that we are hoping for, while loosening our expectation that we know how any of that is going to happen. Advent could be a time to be honest about what salvation would mean for us, about what we hope for, about what is calling us. But it could also be a time to open ourselves to surprise—to paradox—about how our hopes might be realized.
In a moment I’m going to “show my work”—to briefly talk through the readings assigned for today to share where some of these ideas are coming from, for me at least. And some of you may want to tune that out, and that’s fine. But even if you are listening, let these questions percolate in the background.
What are you hoping for? What, in the most desperate part of your heart, is crying out, “save me”?
And: (What if you are looking in the wrong place, or facing the wrong direction?) What if you were to let go of your expectations about how salvation should come, how your hopes should be realized?
The prophet Isaiah knew what he was hoping for. He describes this reign of God as the dream of his city, Jerusalem, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Judah. Isaiah dreams that Jerusalem would be a city on a hill, a beacon of light and freedom to which people from the four corners of the world would come to learn about justice. In Jerusalem, he dreamed, “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Isaiah was likely riffing on the tradition he had inherited, a tradition we heard in our Psalm. In that tradition, Jerusalem is imagined as a place for the often competing and conflicted tribes of Israel to come together in peace, “to praise the Name of God. For there are the thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house of David.” That was a vision of national unity, of peace internal to the borders of ancient Israel. So we notice that the prophet Isaiah receives that tradition and expands its vision beyond those borders. This isn’t just peace and justice for me and mine, but a new global order in which the contagious health and wholeness of God dissolves division everywhere. Nation shall no longer rise against nation, but remake their weapons of war into tools of cultivation and nourishment.
I would say that Isaiah’s vision definitely represents progress: that expansion of the vision he’d inherited feels right to me. And I notice that this progressive vision still begins in Isaiah’s own backyard, in the temple where he worships, in the place where Isaiah feels most comfortable. It still reinforces the centrality of Isaiah’s people, the triumph of his god. There’s a lot of continuity here.
The gospel lesson today presents a different theory of change, a different spiritual imagination of how salvation will come. With disruption. With surprise, perhaps even traumatic surprise, like a thief in the night. The author of Matthew’s gospel here isn’t talking about the birth of Jesus, but the return of Jesus in an apocalyptic culmination of time—
“Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
I think there is some radical wisdom in this passage, but first I need to acknowledge that this wisdom is wrapped up in something kind of terrifying. We will talk more in the next two weeks about the community around Matthew, who wrote this Gospel, and what they had suffered and what kind of meaning they made out of their trauma. Why they might have been hoping for in an imminent end to their world.
This passage brings me back to my early teens, when I was on my way out of evangelicalism, but still connected enough to be aware of the Left Behind books, and frightened by their imagination of “the Rapture.” If this is your first time hearing about this—thanks be to God—it’s a long story. But the short story is that over the last 150 years, a group of Christians developed new ways of reading the Bible—not as a book of wisdom, but as a puzzle to be solved, a cipher to be decoded.
They were looking for clues about the end of the world. These “pre-millennial dispensationalists” have taken this passage from Matthew with selected verses from the Book of Daniel, and the Book of Revelation, and scattered others and interpreted them to mean that, at the appointed hour, faithful Christians will be assumed into heaven, bodily “beamed up” into another dimension, while the rest of us endure the tribulations of an epochal battle, here on earth, between the forces of darkness and light.
Personally, I don’t put much stock in these interpretations. First, because these interpreters keep on fixing dates for this apocalypse, and it keeps on not coming. But more importantly, I distrust the confidence that these interpreters bring to their vision of the end of days. They believe that they know exactly how it’s going to go down.
Like the prophet Isaiah’s vision, this interpretation keeps these interpreters in the center of the action. The End Times, which will break open this world, will prove that they are right, that they are the chosen ones, the righteous ones. Their interpretation definitely lacks the progressive, inclusive wonder of Isaiah’s vision. But it also lacks the awareness of how foolish and wrong we often are; it lacks the humility that I consider a fruit of spiritual maturity and wisdom worth our trust.
Lastly, I don’t put much stock in these end-times interpretations because I struggle with the shape of their vision…that the world will end with victory. Their victory. That God will make everything right—will finally grant God’s people salvation—by grinding God’s enemies under his boot.
That isn’t the God that I see revealed in Jesus. If we pay attention to the stories about God throughout the Bible, and especially in the Gospels—God is continually showing up in ways that God’s people struggle to understand; God keeps on showing up in ways that subvert their expectations and realize their hopes in ways that surprise and even shock them.
The savior of the world that the people who struggle with God were waiting for 2000 years ago was supposed to kick ass and take names, was supposed to give the Roman occupiers a taste of their own medicine, was supposed to bring salvation through victory!
Instead they got Jesus—the inventor of nonviolent resistance. A king who washes his servants’ feet and serves the meal. Who does not ask others to suffer for his glory, but who offers his own body to be broken on behalf of all. Who is publicly tortured and humiliated and executed by the Romans, and instead, in dying, conquers death itself.
Some of Jesus’ followers in Matthew’s community didn’t get what they expected, either. They waited and hoped for God to flip a switch and end the world as they knew it. Instead they found themselves part of a community where the kingdom of God was being realized. In them, through them. In their own hearts, and in the hurting world they served.
Advent is a time to practice a wakeful awareness that God is working in ways we don’t understand.
So let me close by asking again—What are you hoping for? What, in the most desperate part of your heart, is crying out, “save me”?
And: What if you were to let go of your expectations about how salvation should come, how your hopes should be realized?
Amen.
Today we mark the feast of All Saints—when we remember those who have gone before us, whose memories sustain and inspire us. Today we remember those who help us trust that the path will lead us on to justice and joy, and who, in some mysterious way, are walking along beside us: goading us, guiding us, whispering encouragement in our ears.
Today we honor our ancestors in the faith who have gone before us. We honor them by singing their songs: the songs they learned from their ancestors, and made their own, and we make them our own, and so our ancestors live on in us. Their struggle and their wisdom shaping us. Their wounds, perhaps, healed in us, and through us.
The lyrics and the tune of “Up above my head” can be traced back to the 19th century, and the experience of Black people debased by white enslavers, dehumanized by an entire economic system that extracted their labor with violence to produce wealth for somebody else. And they knew it was wrong. Everything in them screamed that this was wrong—that this was a living hell. And though many escaped, and some, like Harriet Tubman, even came back to free others, many never lived to see freedom. And we can imagine how important it may have been to them, that the justice they were denied in their lives would be their eternal reward in heaven—and that the ones they loved who had already died were there, up above their heads.
That’s part of what’s happening in this cryptic reading assigned today from the Book of Daniel. Daniel reports this prophetic dream, of four great winds and four great beasts—and what he’s likely talking about are four different empires who would debase and dehumanize the people of Israel. And Daniel himself is living through such imperial violence, about 160 years before the birth of Jesus. The Greek King Antiochus IV has conquered Jerusalem and has criminalized Israelite religious practice. Observant Jews are literally being given the choice to eat pork or die.
And in the midst of this, Daniel develops the historically novel idea of a heaven where just living will be rewarded, in ways it is punished in this world. Up until this point, the Israelite idea of the afterlife was distinct from, but largely similar to the Roman concept of Hades; She’ol was not a place of punishment, but simply the underworld place where everybody goes after they die. A place of shades, a monochromatic world, without substance, without feeling, without passion, without life.
But Daniel is promising those around him who are unwilling to give up their faith, that they will be rewarded in another world, up above their heads. And “the holy ones of the Most High shall receive [that] kingdom and possess [that] kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.”
And we hear that theme picked up 250 years later, in Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus teaches: when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, or defame you… “rejoice”—even “leap for joy”— “for surely your reward is great in heaven.”
These teachings we hear today are traditionally called the Beatitudes. Beatitude means blessedness. And they show the tension that exists throughout the Bible, about whether blessedness is something we might experience here on this earth; or if true blessedness is to be found on another plane, which we reach either in sanctity or in death. In the Bible, blessedness is something already here, already available; and not yet known, not yet arrived; elsewhere.
There’s another tension in Christian ideas about beatitude, evidenced even here in our readings. Is beatitude something we can experience through our own integrity, our own fidelity? Or…will beatitude be complete when we have emerged victorious over our enemies, when the sinners are punished? As we heard, and read, in our psalm today…
“Let the faithful rejoice in triumph; *
let them be joyful on their beds.
Let the praises of God be in their throat * [record scratch'!]
and a two-edged sword in their hand,
To wreak vengeance on the nations *
and punishment on the peoples.”
This tension between integrity and victory is there even in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you; turn the other cheek… AND…woe to those who are laughing now—you’re gonna get the hammer!
If this discussion of the readings has gotten too in the weeds here, let me sum up by saying that if heaven and hell are important parts of your spiritual imagination—you belong here. And if you have questions about what happens what we die, or feel unconvinced by the stories that have been handed down to us—you belong here too.
I confess that I do not feel very confident that I know what happens when we die. I trust in this Christian tradition that puts resurrection at the center of our story; and so I trust that death is not the end. And I experienced in my own life the indomitability of love, and the continued presence of those I love, and have lost. And so I say again, death is not the end—the end of life, or the end of love.
But for me the afterlife isn’t something we can have knowledge about; it’s something we tell stories about, or sing about. So I want to conclude by returning to music, and the story behind another song we will sing a bit later, and will learn now.
Repeat after me: Siyahamba ekukhanyen kwenkhos
This is the Zulu language, which is spoken around South Africa. It means “We are marching in the light of God.”
Nobody is quite sure about the exact details, but this song seems to have come from a grammar school in the province of Natal, maybe as early as the 1950s. It seems to have been widely regarded as a children’s song. And when this song was brought to Europe and the United States, it kept that connotation; I myself learned it in the summer between fourth and fifth grade at church camp. But much later I heard another story about this song—about what this song became.
The story I heard was that, during the long, long, bloody struggle to end apartheid, Black freedom fighters would go to the morgue to claim the bodies of their comrades who had been killed by the South African Army, or by white vigilante mobs. They would bring a wooden casket, rough-hewn; they would gently place their beloved’s body in the casket, and carry it out into the street. And they had a ritual for this funeral procession. It was not somber, but defiantly joyful; the eyes of the pallbearers were not cast down, but lifted up to the music their oppressors could not hear; the music up above their heads.
And they sang… siyahamba ekukenyen kwenkhos. We are marching in the light of God.
Blessed are those who mourn—because we know that those we love are still with us; we know that in fighting for freedom in our own day we are fighting for God’s own dream; we know that in the long march toward justice, that we are marching in the light of God. And we know that we do not march alone: for those who have died march with us; and they sing with us too.
Amen.
