How We Hope
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
December 4, 2011
Readings
Isaiah 40:1-11
KJV Isaiah 40:1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her sins. 3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: 5 And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it. 6 The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: 7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. 8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. 9 O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God! 10 Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. 11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.
Mark 1:1-8
NRS Mark 1:1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; 3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'" 4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
Sermon: “How We Hope” -Rev. Paul Sprecher
David Bumbaugh, formerly minister of the Unitarian Church in Summit, New Jersey, re-tells the stories from the Jewish Bible in his collection of sermons, The Education of God. God’s friend Satan stops by to visit his old buddy only to find God in a deep funk. Oh – Satan in the Jewish Bible isn’t the pitchfork-wielding, cloven-hoofed, red-suited incarnation of absolute evil; he actually serves as a kind of prosecuting attorney, making sure that people really are what they say they are – think of Job, where God and Satan have a friendly wager about whether Job is really as righteous as he seems to be. He’s really good at exposing hypocrisy.
They chat over some of the disappointments they’ve been through together over the years. Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God’s instructions by eating the apple (Satan pretended to be a snake to pull that one off). The two of them tried to fix things by sending a flood. They were that Abraham would actually have killed his own son and so on. And now the humans wanted God to fix it all up again?
"I don't know what they expect of me," she shouted. "Right from the beginning, things went wrong. I gave Man and Woman a beautiful home, trees, flowers, food, magnificent climate, graced with all the necessities for a happy life, but it wasn't enough for them. When they had messed up the world, I started over with Noah. It didn't make any difference. In no time at all, things were as bad as ever.
"I tried again with Abraham, whose colossal moral obtuseness seemed impervious to change. I sent them leaders like Moses, and instead of learning to live by law, they learned to live by intrigue and force and violence. I sent them prophets like Jonah, and they learned not love but arrogance.
"And then, there's Job. I tested him to see if—to find out—to prove—well, it doesn't matter. I just don't know what to do any more. Everything I try only makes things worse. They are ungrateful, unresponsive, willful, and then when things go wrong, when they mess everything up, I'm supposed to make them right again. Well, I'm not going to do it anymore! I don't know how to do it anymore!"
"Now, [said Satan, ] “why don't we have a cup of coffee and a bagel or two and begin to work out a plan together, just like in the old days. We were always a pretty good team."
"I can't," said God, looking infinitely old and discouraged and perhaps just a bit frightened. "Whenever I try, I just make things worse. I don't understand human beings. I don't understand what they want, what they need, how they feel. I don't understand what its like to be human. It's as if they know things I cannot possibly know, feel things I cannot possibly feel, understand things I cannot possibly understand…."
[There’s only one solution.] "I mean, become one of them, become human, find out for myself what it is like to be born, and know that I shall die; what it is like to be tempted, and have to choose—really choose; what it is like to love, and know that everything I love is finite and will perish…."
"I think I'll choose Christmas Day. That way, with my birthday and Christmas coinciding, I'll experience disappointment right off the bat, birthday presents doubling as Christmas presents, and all that. And I'll have to be a baby boy. In all my dealings with the human race it seems to me that women are more together, more competent, better able to deal with their humanity…. Anyway, I thought if I wanted to know what it was like to be frustrated, insecure, lusting for power, I would have to be male."[i]
And so the plan was hatched, and it was all over except for the waiting. Advent is a season of waiting, of anticipation, of patience. For a child, the waiting can be almost unbearable. I remember being six or seven as Christmas was approaching and my grandmother told me I couldn’t go into the back room until Christmas. I went there all the time when my mom was washing our clothes, so I asked why I suddenly couldn’t go into that room. “Well,” said my grandmother, “there might be a fox in there.” I almost couldn’t bear to wait – and I was sort of curious to see the fox, too! It turned out that my grandparents had bought twin beds for my brother and me, and the only place to hide them was in the back room. I finally had my own bed, instead of sharing a rather broken down double bed with my brother. It was worth waiting – though I was a little disappointed not to see the fox!
Just waiting and hoping – that’s part of what Advent is about. Parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts are also waiting, hoping that the gifts they offer their children will delight them, that the celebration will be joyful rather than difficult and disappointing. Like the villagers in our story for the children, grownups can sometimes find the preparations tedious and draining, especially the shopping, especially the frenetic shopping on Black Friday, a day that has become a scandalous outburst of shopping frenzy, exhausting for those who work in the giant stores and even dangerous with the risk of death among the mobs; or stickups, or pepper spray to gain a slight advantage over competing shoppers. The wisdom of vowing to buy nothing on that day as a protest against the rampant greed it reveals is coming to seem not only virtuous but also actually life-preserving.
The frenzy of Black Friday reveals something about what has gone wrong with this holiday season, some forgetfulness of the patience that the Advent candles can teach us.
The reading from the prophet Isaiah speaks of a time of waiting, too. The words are very familiar to us because they have been set to the beautiful music of Handel’s Messiah:
KJV Isaiah 40:1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her sins. 3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: 5 And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together:
At the time that these words were first spoken, the leaders of Israel were languishing in Babylon where King Nebuchadnezzar and his army had exiled their forebears almost 70 years before when Solomon’s temple and Jerusalem itself were utterly destroyed. The waiting and longing for a return to their own land, to their own sacred city, was almost unbearable. The prophet held out the hope that the time would come soon when their waiting and hoping would be rewarded, that God was preparing a highway to make their return home possible. Indeed, the promise was fulfilled soon after the words were spoken, and many of the people did return to their holy city and Promised Land when King Cyrus freed them to walk down the promised highway.
The return from exile was a fulfillment of the promise given by Isaiah, but it fell short of fondest expectations of the leaders of Israel. Many of them even chose to remain in Babylon, having established themselves there and become comfortable with the foreign ways of that kingdom. Never again would Israel be truly free, ruled by a king as great as David or Solomon. More than that, God seemed to have abandoned them; no more prophets arose to make promises to the people. As in the story told by David Bumbaugh, it might have seemed that God had despaired of his attempts to teach people the ways of righteousness, of the right ways to lead their lives. Oppression grew more and more severe, first under the Greeks and then under the Romans. Hope was almost lost. And then a child was born in Bethlehem of Judea.
When the first followers of Jesus looked for ways to explain what they had experienced when Jesus came, they found the words of Isaiah comforting just as their ancient forebears had. They came to believe that Isaiah was speaking of the liberation that they, too, experienced as a result of the teachings and presence of Jesus. They understood that the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus said was already among them allowed them to live in freedom regardless of the tyranny of their oppressors.
The first verses of the gospel of Mark apply the words spoken by Isaiah centuries before to the ministry of John the Baptist in their own times:
NRS Mark 1:1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; 3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'" 4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Once again, the waiting had been rewarded and hope was renewed. Of course, human beings didn’t become perfect, and the world was still a place of bitterness and strife, as it is to this day. But something new had come into the world, an abiding promise that the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus proclaimed would come to pass, was already coming to pass; at the same time, the birth of Jesus as a weak and powerless infant reminded us that God is in fact present among us and that we are all made in the image of God. We can’t count on God to do the liberating and creating of that hoped for future – we are empowered, in the spirit of Jesus and following his teachings – to be co-creators of that possibility, of that Kingdom to come. Our waiting is also creative; we are not only waiting, we are also working. We have been given the burden and the honor of participating in the redemption of the world ourselves.
David Bumbaugh concludes his story of that new and ardently awaited transformation this way:
There was a moment of deep silence. The entire universe seemed to be holding its breath. The light of a billion billion stars suddenly blinked out and darkness enveloped all. In the midst of that moment of dark singularity, nothing could be seen, nothing could be heard.
Then, the sound of a small cry, the cry of a newborn child, filled the universe. The stars began to shine anew; light returned to the world; a new era had begun.
Where the celestial realm had been, only stars, planets, dark clouds of dust, and vast empty reaches now existed. God was no longer in heaven. God was no longer to be found anywhere except in the human race. Now and forever, the holy would look upon the world through human eyes. Now and forever, the divine power would function through human [115] action. Now and forever, the salvation of Earth would depend upon human choices. Now and forever, God was born in every human child, lived in every human life, rejoiced in human joys, suffered human pain, died in every human death. Now and forever, the hope of creation rested upon the created.[ii]
Such is the burden and the glory of the season, to remind us that God appeared among us, a baby like all of us, reminding us that each child is sacred, that each of us bears the image of God, that each of us is responsible for joining in the work of perfecting the creation while humbly accepting that it will not be accomplished quickly or in our lifetimes. But the hope symbolized by this season of Advent gives us confidence that the waiting will be worth it, that each of us can play our part in this great work, and that the spirit of Jesus in which we unite can continue to inspire that hope.
May it be so, and Amen.