I… didn’t mean to wait until the day before the Inauguration to post the text of my sermon on hope in the face of despair. The weekend I gave the sermon was also the weekend of a funeral and near a very busy end of semester, so blogging was on the backburner. Even if I had had more time, my website-to-social media setup was a bit borked and I’m just vain enough to not post things if I think my audience is going to be diminished. I finally had some time yesterday to figure out what was going on and fix it, so now I’m trying to get back into regular posting.

Let’s be honest, though: It’s fitting timing, even if it’s unintentional. I’m very non-literal as a Christian (and minister), so it was actually kind of tricky to be assigned a sermon text that speaks to a Second Coming that I’m not sure is ever happening—at least not in the sense that I grew up learning about. (Fun fact, my next scheduled sermon is on the Resurrection, so I’ve been thinking through that one). Yet, there’s a reason that I’m still a Christian (and minister), and that’s because I think these stories are deeply meaningful and count for something.

In this particular case, I think it’s worth wrestling with a hope in a Second Coming, even though Paul’s confidence that it was just around the corner was clearly wrong. So, yeah, I was always going to preach on hope in the face of despair, and that took on new significance after Election Day 2024, when I suddenly had trouble having any hope in a better world. The rest of this post is the text of the sermon (more or less) as I gave it, and I hope it gets at all of this that I’ve written so far.

introduction: advent calendars

This time of year, my family puts up in our living room a simple advent calendar made of three wooden blocks. The bottom block is a base that says “days until Christmas,” and the two top blocks are cubes with numbers on them. Every day, we adjust the cubes so that it reads “30 days until Christmas” or “20 days until Christmas” or, today “10 days until Christmas.”

I have a hard time waiting for Christmas, and this advent calendar helps me keep my cool in December. As hard as it is to wait for December 25th, I can look up from the couch or peer around the corner from the kitchen and count down the days: “It’s almost here. It’s just around the corner. I only need to wait a little bit longer.”

Advent and waiting

When I was growing up, and even for much of my adulthood, I never knew that there was an Advent season that gave its name to advent calendars. As I have learned since, Advent is a season of waiting and hoping. I like having this as a season in our Christian calendar, because as far back as the Bible goes, there have been people waiting and hoping for God to step in and fix our world.

Our spiritual ancestors in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, belonged to a small nation surrounded by larger, more powerful neighbors, and it was not uncommon for those more powerful neighbors to bully that small nation around. The Bible is full of passages where the prophets tell the people that they can start counting down the days: “Deliverance is almost here. It’s just around the corner. You only need to wait a little longer.”

Here’s one of those passages from Ezekiel 30:

3 For a day is near, the day of the Lord is near; it will be a day of clouds, a time of doom for the nations.

We can find similar passages in the books of Isaiah, Obadiah, and Joel: The day of the Lord is near, and when that day comes, the Lord is going to deal with those powerful nations and set things right. Now, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea of God promising “doom for the nations,” even if those nations are bullying around God’s people.

Yet, I still appreciate that promise that the day of the Lord is near. It seems to answer the pleading that we sang earlier this morning:

O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear

Sometimes, the hope expressed in these scripture passages was answered. Things worked out, problems were fixed, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But even when all that waiting was rewarded, that relief never seemed to last. When God intervened with Egypt, or with Babylon, or with all the nations, there would be a period of calm and peace, but then it would be the Persians, or the Greeks, or the Romans showing up, throwing their weight around, and making life hard again. And once life was hard again, people again began to wonder, was the Lord near? Was God ever going to intervene and fix the world once and for all?

Paul and waiting

When the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians, he had an answer to those questions, and that answer was yes. In today’s passage, in Philippians 4, we read:

4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

I love Paul’s enthusiasm and excitement: “The Lord is near.” Jesus has been resurrected and is ready to come back to earth. We can start counting down the days. Things are about to be fixed.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is so confident in this hope that he tells his readers:

17b let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God has called you. This is my rule in all the churches. […] 20 Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.

Paul tells single people not to worry too much about finding a partner, people in rocky marriages not to wonder too much about divorce. He even tells slaves that have converted to Christianity not too think too much about obtaining freedom. That last part really doesn’t sit right with me, but it’s a little easier to see where Paul is coming from when we see that he really thought things were about to be fixed. Here he is later in 1 Corinthians 7:

26 I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are […] 31b For the present form of this world is passing away.

Paul was confident: “Jesus is almost here. He’s just around the corner. We only need to wait a little longer.” There was no point worrying about the problems that everyone had, because they were all about to go away.

we are still waiting

Well, that was almost 2,000 years ago. If Paul had set up a kind of reverse Advent calendar, counting up the days since he wrote his letter to the Philippians, we would today need more than the two blocks on my calendar at home, because it’s been hundreds of thousands of days since he promised Christians that the Lord was near.

In 2011, the Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle published a comic book about the year that his family spent living in Jerusalem because of his wife’s job. In the book, he tells the story of when his friends came to visit around Christmastime. Naturally, given the season, they decided to go visit Bethlehem. The problem, writes Delisle, is that when tourists set off for Bethlehem, all they can picture in their heads are nativity scenes; but to actually get there, they have to pass by concrete walls, barbed wire, and armed soliders at military checkpoints, and all of that—the legacy of nearly 60 years of conflict and oppression—becomes the image that people take away of that little town of Bethlehem.

Sometimes our Advents can feel a little like that; we start off looking forward to the Christ child, but as we make our way toward that destination, we’re reminded that we’re still in a world full of cancer and funerals and wars and family squabbles and political tensions. This Advent, like so many Advents, we’re still waiting for God to set things right, and it can be hard to believe Paul that the Lord is near.

waiting differently

Now, it’s clear that Paul didn’t understand God’s calendar, but I don’t think he was wrong. Maybe he just needed—and maybe we just need—to think about things a little differently.

I believe that the Lord is near. That doesn’t mean that when my Advent calendar hits 0 days until Christmas that the heavens are going to open and that Jesus is finally going to come and fix everything, though I would gladly cancel all my plans for that to be the case.

Instead, I think Jesus is near in ways that we don’t always appreciate. The Catholic priest Richard Rohr has written that:

Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? The incarnation is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event, which is why John’s Gospel first describes God’s presence in the general word “flesh” (John 1:14). This is the ubiquitous Christ that we continue to encounter in other human beings, in a mountain, a blade of grass, a spider web, or a starling.

Similarly, Charles Neff, who served our church as an apostle between 1958 and 1984 once wrote that

My testimony is that Jesus is not one who has gone away and will sometime come again, but is ever present, a face that can be seen everywhere in modern society.

What if we’re not the ones who are waiting for Jesus during the season of Advent? What if Jesus—in the form of our fellow human beings or the plants and animals that make up God’s creation—is waiting for us to recognize Him already here all around us?

hoping differently

In the same way that maybe we need to set aside our waiting for Jesus to come in glory so that we can notice how he is already present around us, maybe wealso need to set aside our hope that God will intervene to set everything right so that we can focus on fixing things ourselves.

The book Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals contains these thoughts on Advent:

we are in a world pregnant with hope, and we live in the expectation of the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. As we wait, we also work, cry, pray, ache; we are the midwives of another world

Muna Nassar, a Palestinian Christian woman from Bethlehem, that city of both Nativity scenes and barbed wire writes:

We as Palestinian Christians are not able to see hope, and have not been for a while now.

Yet, she continues:

hope is a defining characteristic of our Christian faith, expressed both individually and collectively as a community.

The Christmas story is a reminder for humanity all over the world to reorient its compass and ask: What can we do to build hope, to reconstruct it collectively

Finally, here’s how the Catholic writer Thomas Reese puts it:

At the… beginning of Advent, we profess our faith that “Christ will come again.” Optimists believe that, by working together, we can make the world a better place so Christ’s coming will be sooner. […] [I]t is clear from the gospels that Christ calls us to follow in his footsteps by living lives of love, struggling for justice and working for peace.

conclusion

Jay was kind enough to arrange things so that you’ll be singing one of my favorite Advent hymns to close today’s meeting. Because this is another Advent taking place in a world of funerals and frustration, I have to leave before you get a chance to sing these words:

From the halls of pow’r to the fortress tow’r, not a stone will be left on stone. Let the king beware for [God’s] justice tears, every tyrant from his throne. The hungry poor shall weep no more, for the food they can never earn; there are tables spread, every mouth be fed, for the world is about to turn.

My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.

There have been tyrants, and hunger, and poverty, and tears ever since the world began, and for as long as Christians have been waiting for God to step in and fix things, it just hasn’t happened yet. We don’t have a countdown, no set of cubes on top of a base that says “days until Jesus makes everything right.” In the meantime, though, we can challenge tyrants. We can see Jesus present in the hungry and the poor. We can wipe their tears and, in doing so, comfort God already present with us.

The more we do that, the more hope I have—during Advent or during any time of the year—that “the world is about to turn.”

Thank you.

• macro
• Communities
• Paul
• Second Coming
• Advent
• hope
• Thomas Reese
• Palestine
• Guy Delisle
• Chroniques de Jérusalem
• Charles Neff
• incarnation
• 2024 elections
• Richard Rohr
• POSSE