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What is hope? I realized late in the week as I sat down to actually write this message,
that in all the years of ministry, I’ve never attempted to compose a thoughtful, theologically-sophisticated understanding of Christian hope. I believe I live in hope. I seem to be a fairly hopeful person. When I listen to my own responses to people who are feeling hope-less, those responses seem to come from a deep reservoir in which hope is the active current. So this morning’s message is my first attempt to posit some sort of coherent message about Christian hope. Perhaps it will also stimulate you to ponder and to create your own statement on hope. Hopefully it will!
I begin where I often begin…in the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke…with the questions themselves. What is hope? Does it differ from wishful thinking? Or optimism? In what or whom is hope based? By what or whom is hope informed? Just these few questions would be enough to keep this congregation busy for many hours of meditations!
Dictionary definitions suggest that hope is a verb, an act of “entertaining a wish for something with some expectation; to be confident; trust; to look forward to with confidence of fulfillment; to expect with desire.” Hope is also a noun, referring to “a wish or desire supported by some confidence of its fulfillment; a ground for expectation or trust; that in which one places one’s confidence.”
Whenever I hear the word “hope” either as a noun or as a verb, I am reminded of the comic strip “Peanuts” that ran several years ago. In one of the colorful Sunday pieces, Lucy is standing in her familiar outfield position, while Charlie Brown pitches the ball toward home plate. The first six panels show Lucy looking skyward with her mitt in the air repeating the mantra, “I hope I can catch the ball…I hope I can catch the ball…I hope I can catch the ball…” In panel seven, the ball predictably falls to the ground just behind her. The final panel has Lucy shaking her head while apologizing to Charlie Brown and saying, “I guess hope got in my eyes…!”
As a noun or as a verb, hope includes dimensions of the past, the present, and the future. Living in hope then must include living with the tension between our heart’s desire (which may be quite intangible) and our confident expectations (which are usually quite tangible).
Today, on this second Sunday in Advent, we light a candle of hope. Why? Traditionally, hope is one of the companions on the Advent journey, whose job it is to gently remind us that today is not the sum total of reality. Hope boldly states that there is a past in which God loved the people fiercely and protectively… thus hope is tangible. The Apostle Paul, for example, in the reading from Philippians, is gushing about his friends in
Philippi
—for their tangible financial support of him, for their prayers, for their good works, for their knowledge and their insight. All these are tangible signs of the hope he has that they will continue to do good works and be loving people. In other words, Paul’s hope for their future is solidly based in his experience and observation of them in the past.
But hope is also intangible, reminding us that, with God, there is always a future…intangible though it may yet be, God loves us today and will continue loving us tomorrow. We see this type of hope represented in the first gospel reading…a wonderful reading wherein a very proud father, Zechariah, is gushing about his newborn son, John. As he gazes on his son, we hear Zechariah say, “You will be the prophet of the Most High…you will go before the Lord…you will prepare the way for people to hear his message…you will usher in the dawn that is to break upon us, giving light to all who are in the shadowlands, guiding our feet into the way of peace…” What hope-filled words!
And just two chapters later, the reality of those words ring true, as in our second gospel reading this morning, the newborn baby is all grown up. John the Baptist is out there in the wilderness preaching his heart out and urging people to listen…to prepare…to turn around and to receive the One who is coming after.
Hope, then, has a past, and it also has a future. In fact, yesterday after the service honoring the life of Rick Beswick, I was talking with Police Chief Jim Bueermann, and in a bit of a panic about today’s then unfinished message, I asked him, “So Jim, how do you define hope?” His first response, “Is this a test?!” was followed quickly by a story about how hope plays into the work the police do with drug court folks, parolees, and the troubled youth of Redlands. Jim noted that for these three groups of people—trying to get on their feet and out of a troubled past—hope shakes down to a vision of the future with them in it. If a person has a vision of a future—even if that future only encompasses a few short hours or days—then, according to Jim, they have enough hope to make things right. If, on the other hand, they have no vision of a future with them in it, then he starts to worry and other resources are brought in to help.
Jim’s wisdom and insight parallels the research I discovered when writing my dissertation on suicidal behavior in adolescents. Similarly, a suicidal person who has no hope of a future—even a minimally bleak future—a person who says things like “the world would be better without me in it…”—their suicidal behavior or ideas are actually disempowered for them to the degree that they can begin to imagine a future. So, helping that suicidal person to imagine the next minute, then the next hour, then later in the day, and finally the next day or month or year, is a gift of a hope-filled imaginative exercise that actually may save their life.
On a much lighter note, I am reminded of the first time I entered Wrigley Field in
Chicago
. There was, for me, a magical sense of hope that penetrated those old concrete walkways, a palpable heartbeat of hope that kept the people returning year after year after year after year. I remember having to stop in my tracks and look around in wonder at this place that hope built. And I turned to John and said, “This is the most hopeful piece of real estate I have ever stood on…I can feel the hope that fans have brought here.” It has been nearly a century since the Cubs enjoyed their last World Series victory. Defeat, despair, disappointment, the roller coaster ride for a century of fans, is attributed to an old legend that after the 1908 World Series victory, a man and his goat were escorted out of a Cubs game because goats were not allowed. The man supposedly put a curse on the Cubs, and the rest, as they say, is history. Whether the Cubs’ long losing streak is, in actuality, the result of a curse, or simply consistently bad fielding and worse base running, or the fact that for some reason, the Cubs seem to be the only team in the major leagues who fail to understand the importance of advancing a base-runner all the way around to home plate…well, who knows? I am certainly not qualified to judge that one. However, I do know a thing or two about hope, and Wrigley Field is a place where hope reigns supreme.
So is hope distinct from optimism? Is hope different than wishful thinking? I say yes to both. Optimism is more of an attitude or a perspective which may or may not be based in any kind of reality. I think of the joke of the twins that I’ve told here before. One twin has an apparently incurably bad attitude and the other is just the opposite. The parents take the two siblings to a therapist to try and even out their temperaments, and the therapist suggests the following solution. “On their next birthday,” the psychologist advises, “put them in separate rooms to open their gifts. Give the pessimist the best toys you can afford, and give the optimist a box of manure.” The parents went home, and awaited the twins’ birthday. When the day approached, they followed the instructions and carefully observed the results. When they peeked in on the pessimist, they heard her audibly complaining, “I don't like the color of this computer...I’ll bet this calculator will break in a day...I don’t like this game...I know someone who’s got a bigger toy car than this piece of junk.” Tiptoeing across the corridor, the parents peeked in and saw their little optimist gleefully throwing the manure up in the air. She was giggling and saying with a smile in her voice, “You can't fool me! Where there's this much manure, there's gotta be a pony!” This is optimism at its finest.
And wishful thinking? Like optimism, wishful thinking may or may not be based in any sort of reality. Frederick Buechner, in his book by the same name, suggests that “Christianity is mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept. Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.” Buechner’s words helpfully describe wishful thinking as somewhat distinct from Christian hope, as a bridge that may very well prove to lead us into the land of hope. While a person may wish for something, and like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, click their ruby red slippers together to make the wish come true, Christian hope seems to me to be rooted in something far deeper than red slippers.
Scripture alludes to that deepness many times over. And scripture calls it by name: God. Unlike wishful thinking or optimism, hope is rooted and grounded in the Divine. God has loved the people in the past, and therefore God can be counted on to love us now and into our future. God has led the people in the past, and therefore God can be counted on to lead us now and into our future. God’s behavior is faithful and God’s love is without question. It is the being and nature of God that becomes the ground of our hope.
Something in traditional Christianity would try to convince us that the ground of our hope is in the cross, with its painful and sacrificial notions of atonement. I suggest to you today that Christian hope is not so much rooted in the cross, but in the manger. In a little baby, whose very vulnerability dares to cry out with a divine voice, “Help me! Love me! Play with me! Hold me! Feed me by feeding others!” This is the voice to which we are invited to listen this Advent season. This is the baby we are urged to embrace. This is the hope that, once it gets in our eyes, will forever affect the way we view the world.
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