This Advent season we are looking at Kindness, Peace, Joy, Hope and Love as ways to make space and create ways to empower change that builds Beloved Community. We’ve seen that Kindness is a way we can create a space and offer understanding. Peace and Joy are linked to Gratitude and Vulnerability which are also ways that we can be open to change in our lives and in our relationships.
This week, we consider Hope as the core of how God relates
to us. Walter Bruggemann says, “hope is the conviction, against a great deal
of data, that God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the deathliness of
the world, that God intends joy and peace. Christians find compelling
evidence, in the story of Jesus, that Jesus, with great persistence and great
vulnerability, everywhere he went, turned the enmity of society toward a new
possibility, turned the sadness of the world toward joy, introduced a new
regime where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are
brought home again.”
Richard Rohr adds, “’Come, Lord Jesus’ is a leap into the
kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. Hope
is the patient and trustful willingness to live without full closure, without
resolution, and still be content and even happy because our satisfaction is now
at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.”
It’s hard to live in a time of un-knowing, of wondering when
the ‘other shoe might fall’, of not having an end in sight. This COVID-tide
over the last two years has made us all live in that uncomfortable space. Yet,
in the midst of the worrisome, crazy-making, and even fear inducing news we are
bombarded with, we can find Hope. We can look at ways to as Bruggemann
suggests, to ‘turn the sadness of the world toward joy, introduce a new regime
where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are brought
home again.’
How do we do that? By small actions. By supporting local
charities that minister to those in our midst who are lost and displaced and
afraid. By reaching out to victims of disasters. By looking at the larger picture of root causes of hunger and
homelessness and division. By being the Kindness, the Peace, the Joy, the Hope
we are looking for.
The Rev. Phil Hooper in the week’s Episcopal Church AdventStudy reminds us that Mary’s Magnificat was, and is, a
song of Hope. He also notes that “Hope is the song of empty karaoke bars, of
late nights and of last dances, of a husky voice crying out a melody to defy
the encroaching night. It is the song one sings under the breath, an insistent
memory, perhaps, or a reassurance on the lonely walk home. It is the warbling note
that has no obvious splendor other than its defiant insistence to be heard. The
hope-song is not elegant, but it is faithful. It is honest. It is the song one
offers up when the song is all that’s left to offer.”
As this year, like last year, drags to a close with pandemic
restrictions still in place, and new variants rising, we may feel that there is
little way to find or give hope. Phil Hooper adds that we need to tell
ourselves, “I will sing though I am weary, though I am frightened, because in
the singing I place myself within a story, not just a circumstance. I sing a
song of victory, not of victimhood. I am a teller of hard truths and I am the
bearer of hard hope, the type that survives—it is my people’s hope, and my own.”
I am reminded of the hymn His Eye is on the Sparrow, here sung by the Georgia Mass Choir.
What song of hope and victory can you sing to challenge the powers that deny kindness, peace, joy, community, hope and love?
Hooper suggests writing your own Magnificat. You may
want to try that. (Mine is here.) Or you may want to offer a bit of time, talent, or treasure
to a ministry that offers hope in this time and year round.
In the well-known Thirteenth Chapter of 1 Corinthians St.
Paul notes that Faith, Hope, Love remain and the greatest of these is love.
Next week we’ll look at Love and how Love holds within all our kindness, peace,
joy and hope.
