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.
