Are You Hoping?
David C. Myers
November 30, 2008
Advent -- 1
Isaiah 62:16 -- 64:8
Mark 13:32 -- 37
Today marks a new church year. We begin the cycle again, with the period of preparation and expectation. Advent, the season we are now observing, is the period of the four Sunday's prior to Christmas Day -- each Sunday marking a different mood or theme.
This morning I'd like us to focus on the theme of HOPE. I offer two main points: the first is the importance of the experience of hoping and the second is the elusive object of hope.
1.) It is important to hope even though hoping is hard for many in today's times, mainly because we are trained and acculturated to be. Basically we are brought up to be calculators rather than watchers. We want certainty and we don't live easily with questions. We move with caution on our dreams because we don't want to be unsure. We want probabilities -- and high ones at that. We don't sit easily with the great mysteries of life.
While we admire Abraham, the father of all Judeo-Christian faith when he and his wife, Sarah, if God were to ask the same of us -- "To go out not knowing where we are to go" [Hebrews 11:8] I doubt many of us would. Abraham and Sarah and family packed up their belongings in Ur, of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (now southeast Iraq) and went out on a journey that took years. If we went out at all we would want to be sure our car was ready and our investments were in place so we would have something to fall back on.
Yet to live by faith is to live by not having to know. Faith is to trust. The author of Hebrews puts it well, "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." [Hebrews 11:1] All for one simple reason: God is the Creator. To live by faith is to give up some of our control and let God be God.
Adrin Konig, a leading theologian of South Africa, says that one of the keys to understanding the Advent texts which talk about hope and the second coming is to understand the difference between prediction and promise. [The Eclipse of Christ in Eschatology: Toward a Christ-Centered Approach, Konig. Eerdmans, 1989]
A prediction, he says, is fulfilled only once and is either right or wrong. Weather forecasts ""it will be partly sunny tomorrow with temperatures in the mid-70's") and forecasting the Redskins to win the eastern division are predictions -- bad ones at that!
Contrast that to the Bible's sayings about the second coming of Christ -- that is a promise of our faith. And unlike predictions, promises are fulfilled again and again in creative and unpredictable ways. Because they are promises (and not predictions) they are still relevant today. The "signs of our times" that Jesus pointed to are for all times, not just for one specific period of years yet to come.
There is a scene in Neil Simon's movie, Plaza Suite that illustrates the difficulty of living with uncertainty showing the need to have hope. In it we find that a nervous, panicky bride has locked herself in the bathroom of the hotel suite on her wedding day. It's not her love for her soon-to-be groom that is in question, it is the uncertainty of what the future holds locked into this commitment of marriage. So there she remains absolutely unmoved by her father's threats, cajoling, pleading. Nothing he or her mother says brings any response from beyond the door. Finally, as the hour for the wedding arrives, in desperation they send down to the ballroom where the groom is waiting for his bride. They ask him to come and see if he can get through to her. He comes, knocks on the door and says, "Mimsey, this is Borden. Cool it."
Just two words and out she came.
In other words, don't panic.
Isn't that what Jesus is saying to us in Mark's lesson? "Cool it!"? Sure, there is uncertainty, sure we are in covenant with God. Sure we can't know what God knows. But the message is, until the Messiah comes we are to wait in hope, not panic. Advent helps develop a way of dealing with waiting and hoping. It helps us live with confidence into a promise -- a promise that surely will be realized; but a promise not predictable by human certainty or calculation.
2.) Ah, but what about this coming of Christ for which we await? It is promised to us, but how will we know when it is here? This is the elusive object of our hope. The idea of a second coming of Christ into our lives is not easy to comprehend. Frederick Buechner writes:
"Surely there is no part of the New Testament faith more alien to our age than this doctrine of the second coming, this dream of holiness returning in majesty to a world where for centuries holiness has shined no brighter than in the lines of a certain kind of suffering on faces like yours and mine. . . .
". . . Maybe not as the Son of Man . . . , but [perhaps] as a child who has already been born into our world and beneath hose face the face of Christ is at this moment starting to burn through like the moon through the clouds."
Maybe God's realm will burst -- or more likely, sneak -- into our lives in a way we least expect it.
Actually all of Jesus teachings are sprinkled with this theme experiencing the unexpected. One of my favorites is the parable of the Mustard Seed. You know how it goes. The mustard seed is allegedly the smallest of all seed, and yet it grows in to a very large tree, big enough for the birds of the air to build their houses in it.
Well, that is an exaggeration. My travels to Israel have revealed that the mustard plant there, as well as here, may grow to 3 maybe 4 feet tall.
Very dense. Yes. And the vine or stem that supports this plant (not tree) is very tenacious. Strong enough for birds to nest in it. Maybe not eagles, but then again, must of us are not eagles. Certainly the mustard plant is large enough for the smaller of common birds.
The interesting thing about this mustard plant -- at least to me -- is that they were very common in the field out behind my childhood home in Orono Maine. In summer they weren't much taller than the surrounding grass and hay -- but, O, were they dense. I can remember more than once running through the field, trying to catch up with friends ahead of me, when I would trip over the stem of the mustard plant.
Advent reminds us of that. As we hurry about trying to keep up with the rest of life and all those seasonal activities, we are liable to trip over the mustard plant that Jesus told us is like the Kingdom of Heaven. Watch, because like a child running through a field, it will trip you when you least expect it. Because Christ's coming into our lives is like that. It is unexpected. And while we are told to watch, we can't plan for it or create it to happen. As unexpected, it will probably happen in the midst of our most ordinary, mundane activities.
There is a picture painted by Pieter Bruegel that I have always enjoyed -- so much so that I used in my "Musings" column in the December Highlights. It's also your bulletin cover. It is entitled, The Numbering of the People at Bethlehem. The artist's warm, earthy, browns combine with white winter snow to render a December scene in a Flemish village. What we see is an ordinary day in the life of the little town. In the foreground someone butchers and bleeds a squealing pig. Some carpenters are busy erecting the framework of a sled. Children cavort on a frozen pond. A woman busies herself sweeping away the snow from her door. The only thing remotely out of the ordinary is that above a table outside the local inn hangs a Christmas wreath. All in all, it is an ordinary, mundane winter day with nothing, save the wreath, to suggest anything extraordinary, anything beyond the expected.
But then if we look more carefully at the scene, down toward the bottom of the canvas we see, moving toward the census takers at the inn, an inconspicuous, thoroughly ordinary young woman on a little donkey led by a stoop-shouldered, bearded peasant who carries a saw. Here is Mary, with Joseph the carpenter, come to town to be counted. Nobody pays the slightest attention to them, they are just people immersed in the bustle of everyday life, set in the midst of an indifferent crowd of anonymous men, women and children who play no special part in the story. They are so easily overlooked in the midst of ordinariness.
Old masters like Bruegel "were never wrong". They understood Emmanuel, God with us. They understood our blindness not only to the tragic but also to the triumphant in our midst. The Flemish painter knew how we trudge by the divine in our midst with barely a shrug of the shoulders. "God comes to us only on the stage, in some fantasy drama of the extraordinary," we say. Not here, not in Bethlehem or Chevy Chase or wherever else we make our home. In life, God's Presence goes unnoted as we thumb through the evening paper. And so we wait, sitting in the darkness of the everyday until something extraordinary breaks in.
We go about our life as a child runs through the field. It's because we don't know where to look for God's presence. We await some grand intervention -- when, as in Bruegel's painting, it's right under our nose.
The old master's knew it best.
And the message from Mark's Gospel is to "Watch!", keep hoping -- you don't know the day or the hour.
And as we go about our life; like a child running through the field, we better be ready, we may just trip over it.
And if we wait for the extraordinary event of Christ coming into our lives, we will miss God's presence as it works in our lives.
So, . . . not only are we to hope, we are to be prepared for the unexpected.
The movie, Dead Poet's Society is about one teacher's influence and relationship with the boys in a private boarding school, Welton Academy. The teacher, Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, was most unconventional and creative in his teaching, and had but one goal -- that to get the student's to think for themselves.
In one early scene, he has his class out in the foyer examining the pictures of former students who have long since died. He firmly, and yet tenderly, too, explains the one fact of life: all people die, including the students themselves. Because of that fact, he gives them Latin lessons and says to them "Carpe Diem" which means "Seize the day!" Mr. Keating tells them to lean their ears very close to the pictures of the former students and listen to what they say. As they do, he quietly whispers, as if from the grave, "Carpe diem, carpe diem."
"Carpe diem." "Carpe diem." Seize the day.
"Watch therefore, . . . for you do not know the day or the hour" when Christ will come into your presence. . . . Right in your midst! . . . When you least expect it. . . . When, in all probability you are doing the ordinary things of life.