Sermon:  "Hope Is Born Anew"
Date:   November 27, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:Mark 13:24-37

There is a daily comic strip found in both the Los Angeles and Long Beach newspapers.  Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis, is edgy and sometimes offensive.  It involves several animals—a rat, a pig, a goat and a zebra, who all live together in a house, next door to zebra-eating crocodiles.  They walk, talk and act in human terms, as only animals in comic strips do.  Some days I start reading the strip and it seems inane, so I quit.  But here’s one from last week.  In the first panel, Rat confronts the conscience he locked away in a trunk up in the attic many years ago.  Speaking from the trunk, the conscience says:  “Let’s see… you skip church… get drunk… and think only about making money.  If that’s not a prescription for salvation, I don’t know what is.”  Next panel Rat points to the trunk and says, “Shut your face.  I’ve got a plan.”  Conscience replies:  “Lemme guess… You’re gonna keep doing whatever you want, but ask for forgiveness in the seconds before you die, hoping like heck that your death doesn’t one day catch you by surprise.”  Last panel, Rat asks, “Who talked?”  The conscience locked in the trunk answers, “About two billion other consciences.”

If truth be told, that comic strip may be easier to understand than today’s scripture lesson, considered by scholars a notoriously difficult passage to interpret.  But both Mark’s scripture and the comic strip are about the same thing:  we do not know when the end times will come, when Jesus will return.  While the apocalyptic imagery may have been disconcerting for Jesus’ disciples to hear, one noteworthy theme predominates.  Namely, the disciples are repeatedly told to “beware,” “be alert,” “keep alert” and “keep awake.” 

Mark’s Gospel text for today begins ominously enough:  “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven…  Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.” (13:24-26)  This is Jesus’ depiction of how time will end.  But he offers no chronological timeframe, nor gives all the details.  It seems as if he’s telling his disciples this will happen during their lifetimes, a common expectation throughout the first century of the Christian era.  

Yet his message is not intended to evoke fear, but faith.  This is not a horror story, but a story about hope.  Jesus is coming again, and on this first Sunday of Advent, we skip over the first chapter we all so love to hear at Christmas, the Cradle, to today’s last chapter, the Clouds and the Crown.  We know a baby will be born, and it’s a good thing to rejoice in this good news each and every year.  As they sang in the musical “Mame,” “We need a little Christmas…”  But we also need to be reminded that someday God will wrap up the human experience on terrestrial earth in God’s own time and own way.  We should not spend time and money to predict when these things are going to happen.  We should just be ready, and not surprised, when they do.

In the meantime—in all the time between Jesus’ first coming and his second coming—we live in faith and hope.  As the anonymous author of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote around the same time as Mark:  “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (11:1)  And he goes on to catalog a whole series of events in the lives of that great cloud of witnesses who lived in faith and hope:  Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Rahab, David and Samuel.  None could see the end product of what they did in their lifetimes, but looking back, now we can see their place and contribution to our Judeo-Christian faith.  And in these days in which we live, we cannot expect to fully see what mark we will leave for those who follow us.  But we hope that our lives, our faith, our service will have made a difference.

Jesus preached his words in first century Palestine to the downtrodden and dispossessed.  We, gathered here this morning, are not living in such a world; however, since the economic downturn of 2008, what with bank failures, home foreclosures, job losses, cutbacks, increased tuition to meet rising costs, we have hopes for a better future.  Or do we have wishes?

Eugene Peterson (Living the Message: Daily Help for Living the God-Centered Life) points out that what a lot of people call hope is in reality something different.  It’s wishing, not hoping:  and wishing and hoping are not the same thing.

“Wishing,” Peterson says, “is something all of us do.  It projects what we want or think we need into the future.  Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as hope.  It does not.  Wishing extends our egos into the future; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing.”

Peterson goes on to say that we can picture wishing as though it were a line coming out from us with an arrow on the end, pointing into the future, pointing toward that thing we most want to possess.  Hope is just the opposite.  It’s a line that comes from God out of the future, with its arrow pointing toward us.

“Hope,” he continues, “means being surprised, because we don’t know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed.  To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing—to refuse to fantasize about what we want, but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.”

We have prayed here in worship for a young couple of my acquaintance.  They are in their thirties, and have been trying for several years to have a baby.  They first tried the traditional approach, and after that didn’t succeed, they sought out medical advice to figure out why.  Now, for a few years, they have been trying the more expensive, scientifically-assisted method of trying to become pregnant and carry a child until birth.  Each set-back brings disappointment and much sadness.  They have gone from wishing to a much deeper sense of hope—in Peterson’s words:  “to refuse to fantasize about what [they] want, but living in anticipation of what God is going to do next.”  I know, and I’m sure God knows, they would make wonderful parents, however that might happen.

Hope is the essential element in our Christian faith.  Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah cried out to God:  “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…  From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.” (64:1, 4)  Long before Christ, the people were crying for God’s presence in their lives, to come into their midst.  And in a man of the most modest means, born in a stable to poor and humble parents, God came to us.  Hope was born anew.

We await his arrival again each Advent season, with hope that we will feel his presence fully in our lives.  It is not what we want most to possess.  It is what we hope and pray God will do in our lives.  Hope is always born anew.