George A. Mason First Sunday of Advent Wilshire Baptist Church 29 November 2015 Dallas, Texas My Spirit Rejoices in Hope Luke 21:25-36 Our Advent theme this year is My Spirit Rejoices. It s based on the second line of Mary s song, which we call the Magnificat. My soul magnifies the Lord, she sings, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. During Advent we will join Mary in rejoicing in the usual four virtues of hope, peace, joy and love. This week, My Spirit Rejoices in Hope. The first Sunday of Advent every year is a bit jarring. In many years, like this year, it comes on the heels of Thanksgiving, family gatherings, Black Friday and all the other activities that begin the Christmas season for Christians. Then we come to church in the midst of all this and hear about the end of the world. Jesus says, There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. You heard the whole text a few minutes ago. What did you think when you heard it? Not a very Christmas-y feel-good word from Jesus, is it? But here s the thing: Jesus is just telling us the truth about hope that is hard for many of us to accept. We tend to fall into one of two patterns of thinking about hope that always disappoint: romantic nostalgia for a past we can never recover or naïve optimism for a future we can never create. Neither of these is Christian hope. I read a report this week in the satirical magazine The Onion. The headline stated: Experts Say the Best Option Now Is Keeping Nation As Comfortable As Possible Till the End. The piece cited sociologists, historians, economists, environmentalists and lawmakers, who all proclaimed that America is on its last legs, that it can barely succeed in carrying out basic functions, and that it is simply more merciful to accept the reality of its demise than to keep providing false hope of a return to former glory. One faux expert said it this way: At the end of the day, it s nearly 240 years old what can you reasonably expect? Others agreed with [him], saying that, with America having gradually become a weak, almost
unrecognizable shadow of its former self, the priority now should be ensuring that it is given whatever palliative support it needs and using the remaining time to put the nation s affairs in order. 1 Satire works when you sense a ring of truth in it. But underlying this report is the assumption that the way forward is the way back, and when the way back seems hopeless well, then, all hope is lost. Maybe the church s role should just be to keep people calm and promise them heaven when it s all over. But that s not Christian hope. For one thing, Christian hope is never the same as nationalist hopes. When Jesus spoke these words in Luke 21, he was standing in front of the Temple in Jerusalem, and he announced that the Temple itself would not stand. The massive and impressive symbol of Israel s national identity would fall. Why, it would be like the White House being blown up, or maybe the Twin Towers collapsing. The Temple was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, and nationalist dreams were dashed. Yet the people survived as the people of God, beyond the nation of Israel. You see, the end of any country as it has been known including ours is still not the end of hope. My preacher son-in-law, Garrett Vickrey, was at my house this week. My three granddaughters allowed him to come along to Pops and Giddy s house, don t you know?! Garrett was working on his sermon before I was, so I will credit him with this story he is sharing this morning at Woodland Baptist Church in San Antonio about one of our favorite theologians. Clinging to a plank of wood in the North Sea, Juergen was hanging on for dear life though it seemed as if life were over already. He watched as bomber after bomber rained fire from the sky over his hometown Hamburg, Germany. He watched from the freezingcold waters as his world came to an end. Neighborhoods he knew like the backs of his hands, places he could walk through blindfolded. He d been there so many times. So many familiar 1 http://www.theonion.com/article/experts-say-best-option-now-keeping-nation-comfort- 50617 2
faces. All gone, covered in the rubble and wreckage of conflict. At 17, Juergen was in the Nazi Air Force auxiliary, working in an antiaircraft battery there in Hamburg. Before he knew what had happened, a bomb dropped from the sky and separated him from his best friend, who had been by his side. It killed his friend and dropped Juergen into the water. When the bombing finally stopped and the sun came up, he and the other survivors made their way through the charred remains of their hometown and surrendered to the English forces moving into northern Germany. The bombing had lasted only a few days, but 40,000 people lost their lives in Hamburg. Another 40,000 had been killed in the period leading up to this day murdered by the Germans for being Jews, dissenters or both. For three years Juergen was a prisoner of war in a Scottish camp. A chaplain gave him a Bible. He read the Psalms; he read Mark s gospel. The cries of Jesus on the cross spoke to him in a way that nothing else ever had. He saw in him one who knew his suffering, the suffering of all the world. And it changed him forever. In the cries of the Christ at the end of his life, Juergen found strength to start over. He decided to study theology, and today Juergen Moltmann is one of the most influential theologians alive. At 89 years old, he is still read by most seminarians and still lectures around the world. It was his experiences in World War II, in the devastation of his hometown and the redemption he experienced as a prisoner of war, that shaped him. He said, The kindness which Scottish miners and English neighbors showed the German prisoners of war who were at that time their enemies shamed us profoundly. We were accepted as people but that made it possible for us to live with the guilt of our own people, the catastrophes we had brought about and the long shadows of Auschwitz. After three years as a prisoner, he returned home. He recalls it this way: In 1948 I returned to Hamburg, limping indeed like Jacob but blessed. That was my new beginning, the beginning I arrived at when Hamburg was at its end: in the end was my beginning I 3
discovered that in every end a new beginning lies hidden. It will find you if you look for it. 2 I spent some time this week looking at photographs on the Internet of refugees from Syria and other countries in the Middle East desperate people fleeing the ravaging cruelty of ISIS and the Syrian dictator Assad. They have all lost their countries. Thousands of Muslims and Christians have seen their world come to an end and are looking for a new beginning. Their only hope is the kindness of strangers. Some of them are finding it in a way similar to what Moltmann had experienced. Others are not so lucky. A massive relocation of humanity is under way. And all of this scares us in so many ways. We are afraid because we can t control our own security. We are afraid because we sense that our country and our world will never be the same. The church should be the one place where you hear the truth about that: It never will be the same. But that doesn t mean that there isn t a new beginning to be found in every end. After his theological training, Moltmann went on to write his signature book, titled A Theology of Hope. A key argument of the book is that Christian hope is found in the coming of God, not in the coming back of a lost world or in the coming to be of any human scheme. Being ready for this future that God is bringing requires on the one hand that we let go of the past as our template for hope. Admittedly, that s all we have to go on from experience. And who wants to do that? We want to hold on, not let go. We want to be comfortable; we don t want to be challenged. There s a church in Moore, Oklahoma, whose motto is Church Just Like It Used to Be. Good luck with that. It s not in our power to control the work of the Holy Spirit, who is making all things new. As Moltmann likes to say, The future is God s proper mode of being. In other words, we honor God best when we embrace with faith 2 Juergen Moltmann, In the End the Beginning. 4
what God is doing, even if we don t know precisely what that is at any given moment. Alison Wingfield is editing a new book about how the church can live with resurrection hope in an age of church decline. Here are some lines to ponder: Loving the future isn t easy. Especially when we sense that death is nearing in our own lives or in our beloved institutions it may be tempting to reject the future, even mock it or resent it. The future seems indifferent to the value of our existence, to all that we have been and tried to be, even to the gifts that we have offered with all our hearts. But loving the future is one of the most important ways we love God. Loving the future testifies that God will not be finished, even when we are. Loving the future testifies that God is God and that we are us, that God knows things that we don t know and does things that we can t do. Loving the future sacrifices our ability to know things and our ability to shape things two of the human treasures that we guard most closely. 3 That last part is important, too. It s on the other hand of naïve optimism about out efforts to make the future. While we are not to wait passively for the future God is bringing we are told to watch for it and bear witness to signs of its appearing still, we cannot bring it to pass by all our hard work and good intentions. The Macy s Thanksgiving Day Parade happened as usual this past Thursday down 6 th Avenue in New York City. If you haven t seen the Christmas advertising theme, it s Believe. That s the word that pops out at you. Believe in the Magic of Giving. So, on the good side, Macy s is once again teaming up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation to provide up to $1 million to help make the wishes of terminally ill children come true. For every letter a child writes to Santa, Macy s sends a dollar to Make-a-Wish. It s all part of the Miracle on 34 th Street magic of the Macy s tradition. But magic implies that there will be no pain. Just believe. And yet Mary believed and still had to go through childbirth to receive what she was promised. And we too, Jesus says, must go through trials to come in order to experience redemption. 3 From the forthcoming book, Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church (author unknown). 5
I fear the Macy s believe campaign also plays into the underlying secularization of Christian hope that says that if we believe in ourselves and act, we can change the world. We hear it in our politics, especially from the left: if only we can elect the right person, if only we can pass the right laws, then we can engineer a future better than we have known. But that sort of self-help activism isn t Christian belief, either, and it certainly isn t Christian hope. Neither conservative longing for a disappearing past nor liberal optimism for a future of our making is Christian hope. Christian hope is rooted in God s promise that our redemption is drawing near. God is coming. So lift up your hearts, Christian friends. Rejoice in hope. 6