December 5, 2010

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit”

Sometimes, I think Advent suffers from bi-polar disorder. The lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans ended with those words, but in the Gospel, we heard words from John the Baptizer that promised doom and destruction, fire from heaven.

What are you hoping for? What is your deepest desire, your greatest wish? Advent is a season of hope as we look forward to Christmas. Children are hoping for a big haul under the Christmas tree. Some of us are hoping for other things—that the pain we live with will go away; that we will have enough money to make it through the month; that the relationship with our spouse or partner will pass through the rough patch and find more stable footing. Are your hopes only about yourself and your family? Do you harbor hope for Grace Church, for this community, our nation and the world? Or are those things just too much to ask for in our time, with a difficult economy and a poisonous political culture?

Paul’s hope encompassed all of those things. His expression of hope comes at the end of a passage that began with him pleading to his readers to be at harmony with one another, and moved from the immediate community to Christ’s work of reconciling human communities with one another—Jew and Gentile, and with God.

Paul stresses that the community, the church, is the primary place for hope, and for the expression of reconciled community in chapter 16. He does it explicitly by naming individuals in the church at Rome, 26 of them. They encompass the diversity in society and the church. There are rich and poor, slave and free—we know that there were some Roman Christians who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to provide for the needy in the congregation. He also named women who were leaders in that community; indeed, he named one woman Junia, who was an apostle.

Paul’s vision of this new community came up against the reality of human nature. He was writing to a church at Rome with which he had no direct connection. In fact, many scholars believe that he conceived the letter to the Romans as something of a letter of introduction. Paul would be coming to Rome, and wrote this to let the church in Rome know who he was and what he was about. But Paul knew well the reality of people living together. He himself experienced bitter conflict with churches that he had founded, in Corinth for example. But that conflict did not temper his faith in God. Nor did it shake his belief that the church was the body of Christ, and his hope for the church and for the world. He believed strongly that God was at work in the world, making all things new.

Contrast that vision of a hopeful future with today’s gospel. The second Sunday of Advent is always dedicated to John the Baptist, that enigmatic figure who in all four gospels is linked to Jesus, but whose depiction in each of the gospels raises questions about who he was and about his relationship to Jesus. John is clearly depicted as the last of the prophets, one pointing forward to the coming of the Messiah. By describing him clad in camel’s hair and a leather belt, Matthew places him in the line of Hebrew prophets that stretches back to Elijah and Elisha.

He seems to be something of a celebrity, or at least a figure of curiosity, someone people might check out as they do today. The crowds come to see him, and he preaches to them the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and calls for them to repent of their sins in preparation for its arrival. Eventually, even the members of the leading Jewish groups—the Pharisees and the Sadducees come to see what the fuss is all about. His message to them is somewhat different, much more threatening: He calls them a brood of vipers and warns that fire from heaven will come down to destroy them.

I’ve always suspected that John spoke those words of condemnation with at least a little glee. Here he was, out in the desert, preaching and baptizing, sensing with immediacy a coming change, a cataclysmic intervention of God in history. He preached against the comfortable, the wealthy, and the powerful. And now, they were coming out to hear him, too. The kingdom of heaven may have been at hand, but like so many other prophets of disaster, John may also have been looking forward to seeing the destruction of his enemies.

The gospels agree that there was more to his message than gloom and doom. Whether historically accurate or not, the gospels all have John proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, the coming of the man who the gospel writers, and we, believe to be the Christ, the Savior of the World. Matthew has him proclaiming Jesus’ coming with the same certainty that he had about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the descent of divine fire upon God’s enemies.

What I find most interesting is that despite the certainty we see here, at the end of the day, John was not certain at all. Later in the gospel, after he’s been arrested by Herod, John sends some of his disciples to Jesus, to ask of him whether indeed he was the one they were waiting for, or whether they needed to continue to wait, and hope. He died without knowing whether the one he hoped for had come. He died in uncertainty. Did he have hope?

In today’s readings, we have two images of hope. Isaiah paints a picture of a world in which there is no anger, enmity, or violence, where natural enemies play and rest together. John offers a different image of hope, yes a hope of the kingdom of heaven, but also hope for vengeance upon the enemies of God. But the two images share something. Both are vast, cosmic, in proportion. Both prophets look for drastic, thorough-going change, where the world as we know it is transformed into something new.

Is our hope of that caliber? Rarely, if ever. The most that we hope for is usually a better life for ourselves and our children. Ours is a vision that normally encompasses not the universe, but our little worlds. Such hope is valid as far as it goes, but it is a hope that is tiny compared to the God in whom we proclaim our faith. Isaiah painted a picture of a world transformed by God, removed of its violence and suffering. He hoped for a king who would transform the human community in which he lived. In Romans 8, Paul writes that all creation groans in labor pains, waiting for its coming redemption.

Our temptation is to view our relationship with Christ, our faith, in deeply and only, personal terms. The coming of Christ that we celebrate this season tends to be viewed as a coming only to save us from our sins, to help us, as individuals, to get right with God. But that is only part of the story. Advent’s emphasis on the second coming is a necessary reminder that we need to broaden our vision to include all of creation.

What are we hoping for? A pretty and expensive stash of gifts under the tree? A good life for us and for our children? Perhaps, like John, that God will rain down fire on our enemies? Advent, the coming of Christ, should inspire us to hope for bigger things, for a transformed cosmos, a renewed creation, for a human community in which there is justice, and peace and equity, “where the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

How can we, as individuals, and as a community, be a beacon of hope in a dark and troubled world? How can we experience for ourselves the cosmic reach of Isaiah’s vision? How can we share that experience and that vision with others? How can we create in Grace Church a spirit of hope that embraces all who come near in a community of hope? Those questions should give us plenty to ponder during this season of Advent as we await the coming of Christ.