HOPE: Contagious Patience for a Future that Doesn't Come Later

 ADVENT 1 

Isaiah 64:1-4

Hope doesn’t come from us. It doesn’t come from what we do, or how things are going. It’s not wishing, or propping up expectations or anything shallow or flimsy like that.  Hope comes from outside us, reaches from before us and stretches beyond us. Hope is when we exist inside the promise from the Divine about a future we can’t create.  

For us to be seized by hope, it is necessary to be grounded in reality, both the real reality that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other no matter what, but also the reality of whatever we are living in and experiencing right now.  Hope can only come in reality – not in fantasy, or religious platitudes, or sanitized scenarios that settle for the appearance of good rather than good itself.
 
This means that to feel hope, to find ourselves hopeful, we need to first embrace the experiences we are in – even the fear. We need to be willing to look at our sin – which is just a fancy word for our disconnection from God and each other in all the many ways that plays out. We need to tell the truth about the brokenness and even evil, inside us and around us. We let ourselves feel it and grieve it, and we say boldly, Things are not as they should be! because we know there is more.  Hope is knowing it could be different, it should be different, it will be different.  Hope is always about wrongs being made right.  So we need to look wrong in the face and call it wrong.  
 
Hope is the promise that we will see God’s goodness not when everything is ‘all better,’ but now, in the brokenness, in the cries for justice and the suffering of injustice, in the midst of an earth in crisis, in the grips of a worldwide illness, the corruption of governments and the selfishness of commerce notwithstanding, not apart from but right within the frailty of the human body and the vulnerability of human bonds.
 
We have talked about having an eschatological imagination – being people who live now shaped by what will be, by God’s future. A big word for those with eschatological imagination is nevertheless.  Nevertheless, we will see the goodness of God. Anyway.  Here. now. It’s like we said during Lent: Fear asks, What if? And Hope answers, Even if. 

David Steindl-Rast calls hope, "opennesss for a future that does not come later."  He says, 

Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism.... A far more accurate picture would be the hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism.  We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.
 Hope is a passion for what is possible... And since patience is as contagious as impatience, it will also be our way of strengthening each other's hope.
 
Christ has come, the light shines in the darkness. God is here with us in this life, always, always, always bringing life out of death and speaking hope to despair, meeting us here, in the real moments of our real lives and the real brokenness of the real world.  
 
Fredrich Buechner says,
"Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in the stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."
 
So we watch for God. We wait for God.  In any and all circumstances. We are the people who live in openness for a future that does not come later.  The aliveness God brings is not just a remix of what is, it's something new and different, that comes into our impossibility with a new possible. 

So we long for God’s aliveness, we expect God’s aliveness, we watch for God’s aliveness in the places of deadness, with an “even if” and “nevertheless” patience that is as contagious as impatience.  
 
Advent is the season of contagious patience. We are the people of contagious patience. 
God comes in, so we watch for God. Christ is here, so we seek Christ. 
We live in openness for the future that does not come later, and God makes us people of hope.
Amen.