The theme for this first Sunday of Advent is hope. Our scripture for today from Isaiah is a vision of hope offered at a time when the people of Judah were fast loosing hope. They were being threatened by powerful nations surrounding them and were looking for friendly nations with whom they could ally themselves for protection. Isaiah warned them against such alliances because in the end they would give up so much to these supposedly friendly nations, it would be no better than being controlled by the conquering nations. He called them to put their hope in God rather than in other nations. It is interesting that our text begins by saying, the word that Isaiah saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Words are more powerful if we can envision what they say in our minds. No doubt, Isaiah was familiar with the proverb, When there is no vision, the people perish. One could just as accurately say, When there is no hope, the people perish. Isaiah wants to encourage the people and so he offers this vision of hope which anticipates a time: When the Lord will establish his home on the highest mountain and all the nations shall stream to it. When many peoples or nations will seek the wisdom of the Lord. When the Lord will arbitrate all the many disputes between the nations And when wars shall cease and peace will reign over all the earth. The century following the time Isaiah offered this vision was a time of great turmoil, and in the end, the Babylonians invaded and conquered Judah and Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and took many of the people into exile in Babylon. Nevertheless, this vision sustained them through that century in turmoil, their time in exile, and still offers hope to Jews and Christians to the present day. It is a vision of God s kingdom about which Jesus came proclaiming, The kingdom of God is at hand! (Pause)
I looked up the definition of hope and really liked what I read. I wasn t sure how a secular dictionary would define it, but I couldn t have asked for a better definition for what I am trying to express today. It said: Hope means trust, reliance; desire with expectation of fulfillment; and one who gives promise for the future. All of these definitions express nicely my understanding and experience of God and God s promises. Hope, like so many good words, has been trivialized by its frequent use in rather meaningless ways. But these words in this definition should remove any objection to our affirmation that our hope is in God. We are saying our trust is in God; we rely on God; we expect God to fulfill God s promises; and God is our promise of the future. We have a spark of hope, even when there doesn t seem to be any hope. On my own spiritual journey, I have discovered that the greater my hope in God has become, the less specific it has become. Hope doesn t mean knowing all the details; it doesn t mean trying to figure out exactly when, where, how, etc. Let me try to explain what I mean. This passage from Isaiah offers me great hope today. Even though it is almost three thousand years since he offered this vision, I believe it contains real truth. I believe in and find hope in Isaiah s vision that a time is coming when God will reign over all humanity; when all people will come to acknowledge God s wisdom; and when nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. I believe in this vision and I pray for the realization of this vision. But I know some of you are thinking, Look around you, are you crazy. If you look at world history over the past 3000 years, and especially if you look at our world today, do you really see any evidence that such a vision is likely to be fulfilled anytime in the next 3000 years? My answer is No, I really don t. I see little logical human evidence that such a vision is likely to come to pass, ever; and to be honest, when I think I have discovered some, it usually get shot down. Furthermore, I don t really know exactly how this vision would be fulfilled in the world that we live in. Are we talking about a mountain where God really lives and
people go up on the mountain and talk to God the way Moses did on Mt. Sinai? And the idea of beating our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks has little practical meaning for us today. It would probably make more sense to say the day is coming when we will turn the energy in our nuclear bombs into electricity to heat our homes. I don t have the specifics, but Isaiah s vision offers me hope; it is a promise of God, and I know it is only through God that such a vision can be realized. The hope this vision offers me, along with many other throughout both the Old and the New Testaments, is that ultimately God will reign in peace and justice over all humanity. Where will this occur? When will it commence? How will it take place? I don t know; specifics would only cloud the vision. But ultimately I believe, like the title of Pastor Rob Bell s book, Love wins! God, who is love, is victorious. So, where does such hope come from? I believe we learn to hope through our own stories and the stories of others. As Christians, we find many stories in the Bible, like our Scripture reading today, that inspire hope: from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a book of hope. While God s relationship with God s people throughout the Bible is often chaotic, God never completely abandons them, even though they often abandon God. Story after story tells us of humans being unfaithful and God s faithfulness holding tight, even as God called them to repentance. Furthermore, God continually offers the hope of a future in which evil will be eliminated and right relationship with God and each other will be established. (Pause) I believe we all put together stories about ourselves, others, and life based on our experiences. There has actually been some scientific research on hope that has discovered that children raised in an environment that is safe and caring and where their physical and emotional needs are met, are more likely to exhibit hope. No family is perfect, but if it is functional enough to be viewed as a basically positive experience, the child is more like to be a person of hope. Thus, it is easier for some people to have hope than it is for others. Persons who did not have safe, nurturing childhoods, or who have been in abusive or destructive situations as adults may have life stories that do not offer a lot of
hope. Sometimes the chemical functioning of our brains or even our genetic make-up may influence our ability to be hopeful. We must always be sensitive so that we never make a person who has little or no hope, feel guilty for their lack of it. We need to be in relationship with them in an effort to offer hope through our friendship and our hope. And I m always astonished at the people who have been through hell and still demonstrate an amazing sense of hope. My own life is composed of many stories, but a theme throughout them all is God s faithfulness. Over and over and over, I have found that I can trust God because of God s presence in my life or because of the witness of stories of God s presence with others. That s not to say that there haven t been some hard times, some disappointments, and times when I had no clear knowledge of where God was leading. Before I made the decision to close my shoe store, sixteen years ago, I wrestled with God for two years about it before an answer came. It was a dark night of the soul for me; a time when hope was thin, but I never gave completely up I kept on praying. And look where God has brought me; I never imagined. There are many stories of people in our lifetime that inspire hope, but perhaps no one more than Mother Teresa. Many people have found it incredible that this woman who was such a witness to hope and who brought so much hope to the entire world, suffered so much darkness, loneliness, spiritual dryness, and an apparent absence of God from her life. Yet, the entire time she had a painful longing for God. After Mother Teresa took her final vow as a nun, she made a vow of her own to Jesus: not to refuse him anything. Mother Teresa was assigned to serve in Calcutta, India, and immediately was greatly impacted by the plight of the poor there. She had never witnessed such utter poverty and suffering. While she had always felt called to serve the poor; the conditions in Calcutta made her even more committed to them. She then received three visions from God in which Jesus was calling her to Come, carry me into the holes of the poor. Come, be my light. She eventually left her Order and founded the Missionaries of Charity. The purpose of this new mission was to serve the poorest of the poor: to carry Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, among the sick, the dying, the
beggars and the little street children. They would provide nursing for the sick and dying, a school for the children, and the beggars would be sought and visited in their holes outside the town or on the streets. The sisters who became a part of the mission would take a vow of complete poverty and rely on God for literally everything. Almost immediately when Mother Teresa began her mission, the darkness and absence of God came upon her. Of course, many great saints write about this dark night of the soul but none seemed to have lasted as long as Mother Teresa s. It lasted almost 50 years until she died. In a letter to her archbishop, she describes her inner darkness: There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God so deep that it is painful a suffering continual and yet not wanted by God repulsed empty no faith no love no zeal. Souls hold no attraction Heaven means nothing to me it looks like an empty place the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. But she continues, Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. For I am only His so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. Despite her experienced absence of God, she never wavered in her hope in God. She was the presence of God, the face of God, the love of God for the thousands she personally ministered to, the tens of thousands that her missions throughout the world ministered to, and to millions around the world, both poor and rich that heard the stories of her commitment to the poor. There have been many possibilities offered over the centuries why so many times those seeking God the most, seem to go through a time of what seems like God s absence to them. Mother Teresa often felt that she was participating in Christ s passion on the cross as she experienced her own darkness and absence of God. Jesus experienced separation from God when he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Mother Teresa cried out those words many, many times.
She also believed that Jesus suffers as the least of these suffer his suffering on the cross was a revelation of God s suffering on behalf of all God s children. She interpreted Jesus words I thirst to mean that Jesus thirsts for the love of all his brothers and sisters and that he will thirst until he has their love. Furthermore, for Mother Teresa, it seems to have been her overwhelming desire, her prayer, to be able to completely identify with the poor. She often thought that perhaps her inner darkness enabled her to truly connect with others who were trapped in a life of such darkness. She knew that Jesus calls us to take up the cross and follow him. Mother Teresa answered his call completely. She prayed that God would banish all concern with self from her life; she suffered as Jesus suffered and still suffers. To live and minister to the poorest of the poor, the very least in the world s eyes; and take on their pain as Jesus does, and to love them as Jesus does, can only cause one to suffer as Jesus does. Most of us, including myself, all too often avoid doing so, because we fear we cannot bear the pain. And yet, Mother Teresa was so often able to bring God s light into the lives of the poor with whom she connected. In one such story, she visited an Aborigine in Australia who lived in a tin and cardboard shack. She told the man, Please allow me to make your bed, to wash your clothes, to clean your room. But he kept saying, I m alright, I m alright. To which she replied, But you will be more alright if you allow me to do it. So he allowed her to do so, and as she worked he showed her an old photograph of his father and she commented on the resemblance. After she cleaned the room she found an old lamp that was full of dirt and she said, Don t you light this lamp; such a beautiful lamp. He replied, For whom? Months and months and months nobody has ever come to me. For whom will I light it? So Mother Teresa said Won t you light it if the Sisters come by to you? And he said Yes. So the sisters started going by for 5 or 10 minutes each day, and he got into the habit of lighting the lamp. Two years later he sent word to Mother Teresa: Tell Mother, my friend, the light she lit in my life is still burning.
So, for me, Mother Teresa is the ultimate witness to hope to choose hope, to act in hope, to believe in hope, even when your soul experiences the dark night of hopelessness. She hoped in God despite the absence of God s presence in her own spirit. And she saw the evidence of God working through her in the lives of the poor (and sometimes in the lives of the wealthy who were poor in spirit). Sometimes hope is affirming hope, even when the evidence at hand screams there is no hope! It reminds me of what John Wesley s mentor, Peter Bohler said to him. John was struggling with his own sense of unbelief or lack of hope and he says it struck his mind that he should leave off preaching. How can you preach to others, when you have not faith (or hope) yourself? He asked Bohler what he thought and he answered, By no means. Wesley asked, But what can I preach? He said, Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith. Hope is most powerful when there is little evidence of things hoped for. Faith and hope go hand in hand. The letter to the Hebrews says, What is faith? It is what gives assurance to our hopes; it is what gives us conviction about things we cannot see. When I preach at funerals, even in the midst of grief, I find joy in celebrating the life of one of God s children and proclaiming the hope of the resurrection; the hope of life in God s kingdom, which is so beautifully expressed in Revelation 21:1-7: Finally, from Messiah, that masterpiece of hope, the Hallelujah Chorus: Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, Hallelujah! The Kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever, Hallelujah! King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and he shall reign for ever and ever, (say it with me) Hallelujah! In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.