Last Sunday Cheryl began her sermon by telling us that what she was about to say had nothing to do with the sermon title printed in the worship bulletin. Her thoughts had changed since giving her sermon title to the office staff at the beginning of the week. This morning I can tell you my sermon has just about nothing to do with the second lesson I just read, part of the Gospel lectionary text for this first Sunday in Advent. What we heard in those verses represents an idea held by many people living in the time immediately after the death and resurrection of Jesus—the idea that he would return in some dramatic way and establish the kind of rule or kingdom people had expected during his lifetime.
The word apocalyptic is used in connection with such writing—a word popularized to some extent by Francis Ford Coppola's motion picture Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse in Greek means "revelation." Its meaning has expanded to take on dimensions of divine appearance or intervention, preceded by catastrophes and wonders. In our Wednesday evening studies about hope, I will say more about apocalyptic, but I won't talk about it now because it has little to do with the kind of hope I live with.
If you want a shorthand version of what I believe about hope, think of the word nevertheless. What I mean is that to being hopeful is not the same as being a "cock-eyed optimist, immature and incurably green"—with a nod to Rodgers and Hammerstein by way of Mary Martin and Mitzi Gaynor. People who are hopeful in the Biblical sense are altogether realistic. Their eyes are wide open, and they don't wear the proverbial rose-colored glasses. They know that life is difficult—for everybody at some time or another, and just about all the time for a lot of people—for a majority of the world's population, as a matter of fact.
The words of the prophet Jeremiah that were our first lesson this morning come from four chapters in the middle of the book that bears his name. Those four chapters are called by scholars "Words of Comfort and Hope." One commentator writes, "The book [of Jeremiah] is storm-ridden and only here and there does the sun break through with hope." But when the sun does break through with hope in Jeremiah's writing, it is with stunning power and beauty. He was writing to people who had been forcibly carried into exile as captives, who were living among strangers, cut off from all that had meaning for them. They longed to return to Judah, their homeland that had been ravaged, reduced to rubble. Jeremiah didn't minimize their suffering, nor did he promise them quick deliverance. He offered them a nevertheless.
Thus says the Lord...in this place that is waste, without human beings or animals, and in all its towns there shall again be pasture for shepherds resting their flocks. In the land of Benjamin, the places around Jerusalem, flocks shall again pass under the hands of the one who counts them, says the Lord.
And the nevertheless looked far down the corridors of time.
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promises I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
Hope never belittles the seriousness of any situation. But hope always looks for possibilities, because hope is the future tense of faith. Hope is faith looking ahead. Jeremiah wrote words of hope to his people in exile because his own life was rooted in the reality of God, God whose steadfast love was the very ground of his life. Jeremiah wasn't concerned with precisely how God's promises would be carried out. But he trusted that they would be.
What Jeremiah wrote to the exiles in Babylon was good news, good news clothed in radically new truth. Jeremiah told the people that God was working for their well-being. He further told them their well-being was not tied to a geographic place, or to familiar surroundings, not even to a particular structure for worship like a Temple. God was promising to be with the people, wherever they might be, in whatever circumstances they might find themselves. From our vantage point we know that God's good news required the people to let go of their old assumptions and to be open to a new way of defining salvation, restoration, and deliverance. The promised "branch for David" didn't occupy a royal throne, didn't offer easy solutions or exemptions from life's challenges. Instead he formed a community and taught them the ways of justice, peace, and love—the ways of nevertheless.
There are many stories about hope and its ramifications. I read this one in a newspaper some time ago. A woman who was completing a ten-month back-packing trip through Africa and Asia was ready for the long airplane trip from Tokyo to North America. Tired and lonely, she was in the railway station trying to find out which train would take her to the airport. People were streaming past her, hurrying to get to their destinations. These are her words:
Out of the mass, a woman stopped and asked, in English, which way I wanted to go. She took me to the station master. She spoke to him in Japanese, found out the platform number, the price of a ticket and the time of departure. I had half an hour.
I thanked her and bid her farewell, but she said she had ten minutes and insisted I join her for a quick cup of tea. She told me she had been born in Japan but had spent a year backpacking in New York and knew what it was like to be a woman traveling solo. We excitedly traded stories but soon our brief chat was over. Her train was leaving. She hurriedly paid for both our drinks.
I stood up to go, pulling the load once more onto my back. Suddenly the woman reappeared, out of breath, with a square box wrapped in red and white paper. "For the train. Goodbye," she said. And she was gone. I had seen these specially prepared boxed meals for sale in the stations. They looked delicious, but were well beyond my budget.
As I waited on the platform, my pack didn't feel as heavy. Even though I had been given one more thing to carry, I felt lighter—blessed with the taste of warm food, the dreams of homecoming, and the generosity of a Japanese woman I would know only this once.
What does that have to do with hope? Did you hear the part about the backpack not feeling quite so heavy? That's often how I experience God's nevertheless. Whatever difficulty I find myself in, whatever challenging task I feel God is calling me to, when I quiet my racing heart and clear my cluttered mind, I try to let God's promises echo in my soul. I try to hear God saying, "I will never leave you or forsake you. I am with you always. I have come, and I will keep coming."
As I trust those promises, as I trust the One who makes them, somehow what has seemed heavy begins to feel lighter. What has been an oppressive weight gets lifted. Where there seemed to be a blocked pathway, there now are possibilities. Such is my witness to hope—and to faith, hope's source.
As many of you know, the realm of faith has been hotly debated in the letters to the editors of the New York Times this past week. For me there is no conflict between Biblical faith as I understand it on one hand, and science or reason on the other. There is, of course, great conflict between fundamentalists on either side, on the side of religion or on the side of science. I take my place with those who are grateful for what the human intellect has been able to achieve and who continue to be open to those mysteries that do not seem to lend themselves to rational analysis—the mysteries of origin, destiny, purpose, and meaning.
In a world where the scientific method has accomplished many positive things, we acknowledge that its benefits are shared unequally in the human community. Peace with justice eludes us. Our deep yearning for connection remains largely unfulfilled. Nevertheless....