Scriptures: Matthew 3:1-6, 11:2-15
I want to say a few words today about hope…which I think we can all agree is a good thing…hope, that is, not saying a few words about it. Hope is a well-worn topic for Advent, and so there’s always the danger that anything I might say has been said a gezillion times before and therefore might have a kind of standardized quality to it that we could probably all do without. I have a bit of a phobia for well-worn words. I don’t care to preach them any more than I imagine you care to hear them. On the other hand I don’t particularly look for weird things to say, just for the sake of being weird. And all that makes for a challenge when you set out to talk about something like “hope”.
On the other hand, it’s something worth talking about, and something I need to talk about in some way, even if inadequately, given how my life is, how our lives are these days. I think I said a few weeks ago in a sermon that hope doesn’t seem so easy to come by these days. I may not have said it in exactly those words, so I’ll say it in those words this morning. Hope is not so easy to come by these days, not from where I sit anyway.
But even though those words come tumbling out of my mouth rather easily, maybe they are not exactly the right words. It has been pointed out by a great many people—and I don’t mind going over this well-traveled ground, because this is a basic and necessary distinction to be made when we’re talking about hope: There is a big difference between hope and optimism.
Optimism, of course, has to do with the opinion or the belief that some desired result will in fact take place. It might be based on things you can point to that give you reason to think that some good thing will happen, but it doesn’t have to be based on any kind of evidence. I was optimistic that we were going to be able to have worship this morning without too much disruption from the weather. I might have thought that because I listened closely to weather reports and kept track of how the roads were doing, or I might have just had a feeling based on nothing very much that we’d be able to go ahead with church. Either way, I was optimistic. People might argue about whether I had reason to be optimistic, but I could be optimistic with or without cause.
Hope is different. Hope comes from a different place. It’s grounded, not in whether things are “looking good” or “looking not-so-good”, not in what is likely to happen or not likely to happen, not in what you have a hunch will happen or not happen, not in whether you think something will happen for no other reason than that you believe in miracles. All that is being optimistic, thinking that for whatever reason or for no reason, things will turn out in a good way. Hope is different. Hope is grounded in what has to happen, what needs to happen. Hope has to do with what is necessary rather than merely important. Or, let me put it this way: Hope has to do with the heart’s desire. It is grounded in my heart’s desire. In its purest form it is God’s heart’s desire.
We cheapen hope by treating it as equivalent to a positive attitude or a cheerful disposition. Those qualities may be helpful in getting certain things done. People who have those qualities may be easier or more pleasant for other people to be around, maybe easier and more pleasant for a person to be around him or herself. Optimism can come in handy sometimes. So can a sunny disposition. These things are not hope.
Hope is rooted in a deeper place. My hope is, as I say, my heart’s desire, and in the context of faith hope is God’s heart’s desire. So I go back to what I said so casually a few minutes ago, that hope seemed not so easy to come by these days. But that can’t be right, not the way I’m now thinking of hope. I’m thinking that if hope is hard for me to come by, truly hard for me to come by, then I have lost myself. We talk about being disheartened in the sense of being discouraged or gloomy. But we are without hope only if we are dis-heartened in a very literal sense, if we have somehow been separated from our hearts. If there is no such thing as my heart’s desire, then there is no me worth having. If there is no such thing in me as a belief in God’s heart’s desire, then life for me becomes colorless and pointless.
So hope just can’t be hard to come by. Hope is there, in us. If there is any desire, any prayer, any belief, any life left in us, hope is there. It can’t be hard to come by. What I mean of course when I say something like hope is hard to come by is not that hope is absent but that I am feeling other things, which we often mistake to be the opposite of hope. It is true that I am often saddened as I look around me and take in the world these days. Not just saddened but grieved. Put in mourning. More than occasionally I will feel discouraged, disappointed, pessimistic about any foreseeable turn for the better in matters of peace or justice. But these are all things—discouragement, disappointment, pessimism— that presume hope in the first place. If there were not hope in our hearts, in our eyes, in the marrow of our bones and the pores of our skin, there would be nothing to be discouraged, disappointed, or in grief about. There would be no dream deferred, no unfulfilled vision, no unrealized ambition. If a justice hope were not in us, injustice would not be an insult. If a peace hope were not in us, war would not burden us.
So hope is not gone, I say to myself. It’s not even all that hard, not at all. But I can be good to it or hard on it. I can help it to die, or help it to live. And one way I can help hope die is to treat it, to speak of it as though it were something all by itself, as though we could be injected with a healthy dose of hope and all of a sudden we would feel better. But as I’ve been trying to say, hope has very little to do with feeling better. It would be silly not to be discouraged about things going on in our world. It might be sinful not to be discouraged. And we cheapen hope not only by confusing it with optimism or cheerfulness. We cheapen hope by speaking of it in just vague, general terms, without asking: hope in what? For what? If hope is not specific, it will evaporate. It will die. And we help it die by being so confoundedly spiritual about the whole thing, separating it from the concrete, earthly heart desires of concrete earthly human beings, and from God, whose heart desires, I might say, I hold to be also very concrete and earthly. We help hope live when we are willing to stop speaking of hope in just vague, general terms and begin to be willing to give an accounting of the hope that is in us. With that in mind, let me turn for a moment to the scripture.
It’s about John the Baptist. No surprise. As familiar a figure to Advent as the word hope is. The designated scripture for today is the first one Millie read. It presents John to us not just as a preacher of repentance, a wild man with an urgent message, but also as the one who is to prepare the way for the messiah. That is John’s role in the gospels, to prepare the way, announce the coming. In Luke that role begins even before either John or Jesus is born. John’s mother, Elizabeth gets pregnant a few months before her “kinswoman” Mary, and so John becomes a pre-natal forerunner, as it were. When he grows up to be an itinerant preacher, he says repeatedly that he is just an opening act. When Jesus comes to be baptized, John recognizes him as the one he has been talking about and says that he, Jesus, ought to be the one doing the baptizing. Given all that, his question in the second reading may seem somewhat surprising. “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
It’s a question that seems to be born out of frustration, discouragement, doubt, weariness, whatever. Whatever his state of mind or soul, it’s not good, certainly not cheerful, maybe not even hopeful, though that’s much harder to say. In any case, it’s understandable. John being in prison and all. About to be a killed messenger. And maybe without anything very much to show for his efforts. I think that’s where his question comes from. Have I been wasting my time talking about a messiah? Or are you, Jesus, really the One, like I thought you were? Or should we look around for someone else? Or (John doesn’t say this, but it might be in his mind, and this is where the loss of hope might come in) give up looking altogether.
Jesus’ response, you may remember, was: “Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them.”
Most often this is interpreted to mean that Jesus is saying something to the effect of, “Don’t worry, cousin, you haven’t been wrong. I’m the messiah all right. And if you or anyone else is in doubt about it, just look at what’s happening. The blind see. The lame walk. And so forth. That should be proof enough that I am the messiah.”
But I think there are other ways to read this passage. Jesus himself, as he so often does, turns the question in a bit of a different direction, answers it in a way that may be different from what John meant when he asked it. John was looking for the messiah, spent his preaching life promising the coming of the messiah, devoted himself to preparing the way for the messiah. Jesus knew that, got that, heard the question about whether he was this messiah. But he didn’t answer that question, not directly, maybe not at all. The way my faith understands Jesus, it could very well be that what he said to John, kindly but with conviction, what he said was that this was the wrong question.
People always seem to be hoping for a messiah, but maybe a messiah is not what we should be looking for. John asked if Jesus were truly the one, and Jesus answered not by saying, “Well, I mean I don’t want to brag or anything, but well yes, I am the messiah. I can’t lie to you about it, being the messiah and all.” Jesus didn’t say that. He said, as I understand it, “You know, let’s not talk about messiah’s. Let’s talk about the hope that is in me, and that I think might be in you. Let’s talk about the blind being able to see, or the deaf hear. Let’s talk about people for whom life is a form of death being given new life. Let’s talk about bringing good news to the poor. That’s the hope that is in me. You disciples, go tell John what you see. Tell John what you see happening before your eyes, but tell John too what you see with the eyes of faith, what you see because that is the hope that is in you, in us. Tell John that these are the things that are necessary, not merely important.
John had always said that someone greater than he was coming after him. Here in the passage Jesus said that there had never been anyone greater than John up until now, but he didn’t go on to say that now the one who was greater had arrived. What he said was, “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than (John).” John asked for some kind of proof that Jesus was indeed the promised messiah. Jesus responded by giving an accounting of the hope that was in him, that he brought to earth from the heart of God, that he tried to turn into a shared hope.
Advent is a little bit like Lent in the sense that it’s intended as a time for self-examination and introspection. For me, I think part of that introspective process will be to work on giving an account of the hope that is within me. That will mean trying to articulate what is my heart’s desire in words that are mine, not just the Biblical words or words that sound religious, but words that are true to me. It will mean also trying to create a some things to do that contribute to that hope, some concrete things for me to do that are the right size, that don’t expect too much of myself, but that also don’t expect too little. And it will mean not giving up on myself, nor upon God who is a co-worker with us in these matters of the things that are necessary, not merely important. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 7, 2003