THEOLOGY FOR COMBATANTS
2 Corinthians 4:13-18, Matthew 11:2-11
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
As I begin this morning, I have a confession to make about last week. I lit the wrong candle. In the heat of the moment, when the Scaturo family was up there, I gave the wrong advice, and we lit the purple and the pink candle. And I could hear an almost audible gasp go up from all the LOGOS kids, who from their worship skills class know that you only light the pink candle on the third Sunday of Advent. So I, the highly trained religious professional, blew what every kid in the congregation knew. You only light the pink candle this week.It's traditionally been called Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, and the candle stands for joy. Gaudete is Latin for "rejoice," and it's called that because the season of waiting and fasting and preparation for Christmas is almost over, and so we rejoice.
My sermon this morning is also out of order. You know, Emerson said, "A slavish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." So I'm going with Emerson this morning, and I'm preaching on the first candle, which is about hope. We symbolize these theological affirmations through the Advent candles as a way to celebrate and reflect on the meaning of the season. Today I want to talk about hope, even though it's out of order. I want to talk about the particular way we, as Christian people, have understood hope. Because it's different from how we might ordinarily think of hope. It's important that we remind ourselves constantly of what we mean by the word "hope" as Christians--our unique way of understanding it.
So let's begin this way. We're going to be sort of anthropologists and scientists and put this concept, hope, under a microscope today. Let's begin this way--let's talk about what it is that we are hoping for, if we are hoping with this unique brand of hope that we as Christians hold forth.
Are we hoping for comfort? Let's start there. Is comfort the real content of our hope? The desire to live a comfortable middle-class life, free from pain? To go to a good college and choose a worthy mate? To live the suburban dream without the cold and prickly hand of suffering ever touching us? Is that what we're hoping for when we are employing this particular kind of hope?
As we think about this hope, it's important that we first understand that no, that's not what we are hoping for when we speak of this kind of hope. About a week and a half ago I went to the mall over here--Quakerbridge Mall. And I generally try to avoid at all costs going to the mall between Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the obvious reasons that I'm sure many of us do: it's crowded; it's stressful; you can't find a place to park. But I find it particularly depressing around this time of year--going to the mall. Sometimes I wonder whether people will look back at this era of our history, and say that the building of shopping malls is our modern equivalent to the medieval impulse to build cathedrals. Are they not our contemporary shrines to the religion of materialism, built upon the ground of human longing?
And I guess that's what I experience when I go to the mall--I experience human longing. My own--maybe the other people's I see as I sit on the bench and I watch men and women of all sizes and shapes and colors carrying bags from Neiman Marcus and Radio Shack and Victoria's Secret. I just feel human longing--unfulfilled, unsatisfied human longing. And I feel my own participation in all of it as well. And I wonder to myself, "Is this really the truest and greatest gift to humankind?" Even the religious symbols that once had a power to speak to our public consciousness seem to have been co-opted by the economic Mardi Gras that's now called the Christmas season.
This past week I came upon a blog, written by a woman named Frederica Matthews Green, devoted to Advent. And I couldn't resist offering this to you. She describes a friend's experience at the mall--what her friend saw during a recent trip to the mall--how her friend saw "giant plush bears, robed as Mary and Joseph, beaming at a swaddled baby Jesus bear in the manger." And she writes, "If there once was a grand mystery around the incarnation, it has long since dispersed. Three jolly bears now convey everything we know or expect to know. It is a scene plump with stupidity. Jesus as a cookie. God as a pet. This is very bad news."
So that's the first thing we might say about this kind of hope that we celebrate as Christians--it is not comfort--it does not exist in our middle-class aspirations. In fact the depth of this kind of hope might lead us to a profound discomfort and dis-ease with how the world is. I commend to you reading the quote I provided you at the beginning of the order of service from Jürgen Moltmann, who wrote the famous theological work called The Theology of Hope. And in that quote, I'm sure you'll read it later and this will resonate with you: "Hope in Christ means no longer putting up with reality as it is."
The second thing we can say about this hope, or rather…we can say this about what this hope is not. It is not optimism. I know I made a similar point in an Advent service last year, or the year before, I don't remember. But I think it bears repeating. This kind of hope is not based on a vague and passive belief that tomorrow will somehow be better than today. Because if our hope is based on that, we know that the data will very often disappoint us.
How often have I walked into a room--and I'm sure many of you as well, as deacons and ministers of this church--how often have we walked into a hospital room and found someone, a friend or companion, dying of cancer, to whom we want to offer hope. And we want to say, "It'll be better. It'll all work out," when we know it might not. If we're operating in that framework we know, for the person who has cancer, it might not be the outcome that you desire. If we offer that kind of hope, inevitably we will be disappointed, because the sort of hope that we offer as Christians is not about optimism. It's not based on progress or even improvement of the outward circumstances.
Karl Barth, the renowned Protestant theologian of the last century, speaks in his writings about his theological training at the turn of the last century. He was trained by German theologians who were in the school called, at that time, liberal theology. And that kind of theology taught that we could identify the Kingdom of God with human progress: the idea that every day in every way things are getting better and better. God's eschaton--God's fulfillment of history--is coming, and the way God is accomplishing that is through human progress…these advances in technology and science…there was the feeling it's happening. The way it's happening is through human progress.
And then came World War I. And by the way, all of Barth's theology professors cuddled up to Kaiser Wilhelm and his war. Then came World War I and the absurd human carnage that it brought with it: 100 yards captured was measured in 100,000 lives lost. No one could then say, on the basis of that historical event, that human progress was the means by which the Kingdom of God would come.
So no, this hope is not based on optimism, or progress. This kind of hope is deeper than that. This hope, again, is not based on some vague and passive waiting for a better tomorrow, a more comfortable tomorrow if today isn't comfortable. This hope is about actively bringing the promised future into the present. Again, as Jürgen Moltmann said in that book, Theology of Hope, a theology of hope is a theology for combatants, and not onlookers.
In other words, to believe in Jesus Christ is to believe in the one who makes the future present. To believe in Jesus is to believe that God came down in a suit of flesh and bone, and hung out with us, and eventually they tortured and killed him, and by that death God defeated death. And so hope becomes then a question of how we will live in the awareness of that eventuality--of that future, which is present. It's not about making our present circumstances more comfortable--it's about the future breaking into the present. Breaking into and transforming right now. As the prophet Isaiah writes, and we heard this in our liturgy today, this hope is not about paving the desert and installing air conditioning. This hope is about gentle crocuses breaking through hard pan. It's about the gentle grace of God breaking through the hard crust of human lives. That's what this hope is about. It's not about tomorrow being better. It's about the transformation of the present, because we know what the future has in store, and we trust that God has already secured it for us.
We see that understanding of hope in the gospel lesson this morning--did you hear it? It's a kind of counter-posing, and comparing of John's understanding of hope with Jesus' understanding of hope. Did you hear John's disciples going to Jesus and asking whether he was "the one?" Whether he was the Messiah? Because you see, John understands that hope is about what's to come, tomorrow. John the Baptist's gospel was about the fact that God is coming, and to paraphrase a line from my colleague Mary Alice's sermon a few months ago…God is coming, so you better look busy. Right? Because tomorrow God will judge the righteous, and give them their reward, and the wicked, God give them their punishment. Tomorrow God is going to kick out all the Romans, give us back our country.
And so John's disciples go to Jesus and ask him, "Are you the one who is going to bring tomorrow? Or shall we look for another?" And Jesus says, "Look around, and see what's happening now. The blind see; the deaf hear; the lame walk; the poor have Good News preached to them." The future hope is already transforming the present. That's what this hope is about.
This past week I watched a movie called Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas). It's a French film, and was lent to me by John MacDonald. And it's about an actual historic event--a historical event that happened in the 1st World War, in 1914, about six months after World War I began. World War I, of course, was trench warfare, where the front lines were maybe about 100 yards from each other. And this story takes place around where the front lines meet, and there was the German front, and the French front, and the Scottish. It takes place on Christmas Eve. And on that night, some of the Scottish bagpipers began playing a familiar Christmas tune in the night. And then a famous tenor on the German side, who they'd brought to the front, started singing Silent Night, which was recognized by all the soldiers. And then the bagpipers started playing along. And the tenor, taking one of the Christmas trees that was sent to the front lines by the Germans, holds up a Christmas tree, emerges from the trench and walks to the center of the battlefield. And then the commanders from the French and the Scottish join him in the center. And they make a truce. Then all the troops come up from the trenches and exchange gifts, and the next day they play soccer, and bury their dead.
I would call that an apocalyptic moment. A time when the future somehow has broken into the present, and transformed it.
So how do we practice that kind of hope? Instead of passively waiting for a better tomorrow, how can we be non-violent combatants of hope? And how do we deal with, as Paul puts it, the momentary afflictions of the present, and not lose heart? How do we find that hope even though we might be struggling with depression, or marital trouble, or illness, or unemployment? How can we, the church, be people of hope, and bearers of that future?
The story is told of Martin Luther, that someone once asked him what he would do if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow. And his response was, "I'd plant an apple tree." To plant an apple tree based on the conviction that the ultimate future of God is about fruitfulness, and so our present practice is to bear witness to it, and plant fruit.
I guess I know that hope in my own life because someone who believes in that hope took time to plant a tree in my life. I know that Jesus Christ has risen again, not in my head, but in my heart, because people who believed in that hope gave it to me. So maybe practicing that kind of hope is very simple for us. Maybe it begins simply by believing in it--the ultimate victory of God. And if you're weighted with a momentary affliction of the present, to find some small bit of evidence, some sign of that future that has broken into your present: a hand extended; a casserole delivered; a cleansing tear shed; a moment of laughter shared.
Maybe being a combatant for hope and planting a tree in the present moment is as simple as getting off the treadmill of your life and realizing that hope does not exist in a completed to-do list…and going and tutoring someone in prison. Maybe it means giving more than we spend this Christmas season.
I think that what we're doing now, in worshiping; that itself is also a profound act of hope. If you think about it, this is a colossal waste of time, isn't it? Worship? We're not doing anything practical, especially now, as the preacher drones on and on up here. But really what we're doing is this very unproductive act of bringing the future hope into our present through our worship. That's what we're doing. Do we not bear witness to this future hope as a church every time we swing a hammer in Trenton to rebuild a house, or sit with a sick person in Haiti and offer medicine and comfort? Do we not bear witness to this hope as we tell Good News to a friend about how God is acting in our life?
As I was preparing for this sermon, I re-read some of Mother Theresa's writings about how she began the Home for the Dying and Destitute in Calcutta. How she simply began going to the streets of Calcutta with some of her friends, and rescuing dying people. And in that writing, she tells this story:
"Then there was a man we picked up from the drain, half eaten by worms. And after we had brought him to the Home, he only said, "I have lived like an animal in the street, but I'm going to die as an angel, loved and cared for." Then after we had removed all the worms from his body, he said, with a big smile, "Sister, I am going home to God." And he died. It was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man, who could speak like that without blaming anybody, without comparing anything--like an angel. This is the greatness of people who are spiritually rich, even when they are materially poor."
This man knew the promise. Those people knew that promise. And so shall we, in this season. Right now, today. Amen.
December 16, 2007
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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