Holding Out for Hope

Sunday, December 4th Sermon Manuscript

Don’t be such a scrooge!  The familiar Charles Dickens character has become a descriptor of a miserly individual.  But it is even more than someone unwilling to spend or give away money, inclusive of being a selfish and unfriendly person.  Singular.  Don’t be such a grinch!  The familiar Dr. Suess character has become a descriptor also of someone, an individual that is unfriendly, but even more, mean-spirited.  A grinch specifically wants to take, reduce, to spoil the pleasures of others.  These are characters of this season, charicatures of trends and motivations possible within each of us, if and as we retreat inwardly.  In this season encouraging us in generosity toward hope, joy, peace, and love they serve as warnings. 

These fictional over-dramatized and embellished characters are honestly closer to us, in us than we care to admit.  Whether it’s our frustration over rising costs or long lines or cynicism and despair at the conditions of our world – did you know that everyday last week there was at least one mass shooting in America?  And yet here we are in this place hearing familiar prophecies and voices in the wilderness, lighting fires of peace and hope, proclaiming a different possibility, encouraging us to turn, to journey, to commit to those.  It’s so easy just to end up falling into the trap of Scrooge, of the Grinch … to want to snuff out the light, to yell “Humbug” when someone croons this to be the most wonderful time of the year, when prophets proclaim impossible possibility that all logic denies.

We are not the first to feel this way.  The biblical narrative and history is filled with such moments where things had gotten so bad that people could not envision a better tomorrow or a tomorrow at all!  And yet every time came voices in that literal, figurative, and spiritual wilderness encouraging people through faith to hold onto and hold out for hope.  These voices recalled the ways God had been active in the past and encouraged a hope for what yet could be.  It was more than just a hope for the glories of what already had been, it was a hope for more.

This is the surprising way of participating in the unfolding of God’s grace.  Just when we think nothing is possible, something new emerges, something new springs forth, something rooted in that which has been from the beginning.  Just when it seems that the great tree bearing fruits of the Spirit has been hacked down with only a stump remaining with no life left in it, God will do something new.  Just when we proclaim something to be dead, God will resurrect. 

Such a fate had befallen Isaiah’s people. Sharp-toothed Babylonians circled, and with axes they chopped down the tree of David. But a shoot will grow from the stump, the prophet promises. In this one we may hope, he preaches. And when Jesus came he preached good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, as Walter Bruegemann states, “who refuses Rome’s rule of force and religion’s rule of code, opening the world to healing, freedom, forgiveness and joy” … and his life was tossed in the air before the gale of fickle crowds and public opinion. The ax is quickly laid to the root once more, and the shoot dies, fixed with nails to the dry, barren tree that stands where all our good intentions have crashed and burned.

But that ugly stump, a shameful thing of wicked judgment, becomes the shape of our hope and good news. Upon it Jesus joins us in the wilderness and takes as his own the depths of our emptiness. We live by the promise that God will raise us too—not only some day when we die, but today, in our dead-as-a-rock-in-the-wilderness despair, loneliness, fear or shame.  The question is are we willing to hope for more?  Are we willing not only to hold onto hope, but to hold out for hope?  Are we willing to join God’s movement?  Advent presents an impossible possibility, that the partnership of humanity and divinity will create a new earth. Advent invites us to wait, but also be catalysts for the changes we wish to see.

Isaiah speaks of this impossible possibility – enemies becoming companions, children safe from harm, wise national leadership, and a world without war. None of this has ever occurred, despite Isaiah’s dream, but Isaiah’s dream still judges world history and serves as a polestar for our endeavors. As unrealistic as Isaiah’s dream, we must still strive after God’s peace and, perhaps, in the striving create communities that nurture a better humanity and make peace with the non-human world; a world in which poverty, injustice, racism, sexism, and global climate change are a thing of the past and God’s peace reigns.

As Walter Brueggmann said, this “new world of God is beyond our capacity and even beyond our imagination, like poetic fantasy, a power of God that lies beyond us.”  This serves as the antidote to our fatigue and cycnicism, to redeem us and grow our hearts – 2 sizes, 10 sizes, 100 sizes!  It is to see a world not of limitation, of despair, of fear, of death … but of abundance, hope, faith, and life.

This is what is possible when we are rooted in God’s love.  Something new can spring forth, cycles can be broken, hate collapse, fear dissolve, anxiety lessen.  We hold out for hope we accept this invitation and call toward our proper vocation, a partnership with God — care for the earth, love of creation, bounty for neighbor, enough for all, with newness, deep joy, hard work because the cycles that are will one day be no more.  That no more will we compete with one another over crumbs, but seek to outdo one another in good.

This very moment is the right time for us to let go of the past, turn away from our half-heartedness and complicity with injustice, and find a new pathway to God’s peaceable reign, one step and one breath at a time; to prepare for Jesus’ mission in our time – to respond to increasing cynicism and despair. To hold out for hope which enables us not only to simply ‘keep going’ but to keep moving ahead with purpose as we work for the sort of justice and righteousness and peace so vividly painted for us in the words of the prophet.

Advent, holding out for hope is trusting in spite of our gnawing questions and doubts which we cannot banish from our minds.  As we crave certainty … God invites us into mystery.  A love so deep that it can envision what is possible, that it can and will hold out for hope in seemly impossible odds.  How it is isn’t the way it has to be.

Our lives do not have to be defined by our weaknesses, our cynicism, the adversity we face, or our many shortcomings.  Life can be defined by how we hope despite all of that, by how we build strength in the face of weakness, build character, fortitude, and tenacity to overcome adversity, build bridges between each other rather than walls, and by how we turn our doubts, our shortcomings, our struggles, our grief, our despair into stronger and fiercer, braver versions of us – living the impossible possibility.  When we choose to hold out for hope, when we choose to join God’s movement, when we choose to believe, we will overcome, heal, and let go, coming out the other end tougher and stronger as a catalyst for change in partnership with God.  Humbug, the world will say.  But we’ll take that chance.

Laboring God, with axe and winnowing fork you clear a holy space where hurt and destruction have no place, and a little child holds sway. Clear our lives of hatred and despair, sow seeds of joy and peace, that shoots of hope may spring forth and we may live in harmony with one another.

For you are the future towards which the Spirit draws us, the salvation offered to the world, the joy exceeding all exciting pleasures, the destiny which was prepared for us before the foundation of the world.

You come as the humble Perfection outside our grasp yet graciously within our reach. You are the Beauty that is to come; the Beauty that calls us into that most natural of all miracles: the ministry of love!  God in this season suspended between hope and fulfillment, let we never forget what you have done. May we be overwhelmed by your mercy, which flows in wave after wave, the grace of Jesus Christ in whose name we pray.  Amen.

Rev. Daven Oskvig