Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Matthew 24:36-44
Romans 13:11-14
The term Black Friday is not as new as you might think. At one point, it was schoolhouse slang for the day when most tests were given. In 1951, a manufacturing industry publication used Black Friday in specific relation to the day after Thanksgiving, but it had to do with employee absenteeism, not retail accounting. In the 1960’s, police in Philadelphia took up the same term for the same day, pure coincidence. They were irked at the terrible traffic, pedestrian and vehicular congestion, that made the day difficult. It wouldn’t be until the 1980’s before Black Friday took on the meaning we give it today, the day when retailers supposedly go from being “in the red” to being “in the black,” that is, when they begin to net a profit. I’m not even sure this is financially true, but it is a fine example of how meanings change, and especially about how we create stories to explain things we don’t understand. I don’t remember Black Friday being a thing when I was a kid, certainly not something that was on the evening news for a week, and Cyber Monday? Yeah, not so much. My telephone had a cord attached, and I was an adult before personal computers became affordable.
Of course, Black Friday is no longer the start of the Christmas season. Plastic trees and inflatable reindeer can be spotted while we still have jack-o-lanterns on the porch. Christmas itself has changed. New traditions are invented, sometimes for profit, like that creepy little voyeur who sits on the shelf and spies on our children. That sort of behavior can get you arrested in some jurisdictions.
Advent is, for us at least, the start of the preparation for Christmas. This was not always so. Congregationalism comes from the merger of the Pilgrims and Puritans in the New England colonies, no longer divided at that point by their relationship to the Church of England, which seemed pretty irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. Puritans, the far larger of the two, not only didn’t celebrate Christmas, they made it illegal to do so for decades, punishing offenders. They found no scriptural warrant for the celebration, associated it with pagan rites and debauchery. And the pagan rites are there, as is, if tales from office Christmas parties are to be believed, the debauchery.
While the Congregationalists relented and got on board the Yuletide train by the early 18th century, we probably get most of our Advent impulse from the German side of our UCC heritage, especially the Evangelical and Reform branch, which had managed to retain a sense of liturgy and the seasons of the church. We get things like paraments, the cloths on the altar, and vestments, the alb I am wearing, from that more liturgical side of the family. But given that Advent is an adopted tradition for most of us, we can still get it wrong, or at least, like the explanation of Black Friday, make a meaning for ourselves that was not originally intended.
Advent was traditionally a penitential season, purple like Lent, when we were asked to repent for our sins. I know we don’t use that word much anymore, and repentance isn’t really fashionable either in the age of celebrity sorry – not sorry, not sorry for the wrong conduct, simply sorry for getting caught, or sorry that people were upset. Ironic that this is also an age that doesn’t believe in redemption and repentance, when we shun people today for things they might have believed or said twenty years ago.
But even if we turn away from the penitential approach, Advent is still a season with a purpose. Specifically, we are called to prepare for the coming of the Christ, the Anointed One. You might think this is about Christmas, a few years BCE in Bethlehem, all babe in a manger, frankincense and myrrh, but it is not. In fact, Advent does celebrate that historic event of the past, but it mostly aims squarely at the next coming of Christ, the Second Coming, all apocalypse, rapture, and “Left Behind.” That is why we have readings like today’s passages from the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew and from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome.
The technical terms that are relevant here are eschatology, which conveys the idea that God has a plan for creation that will eventually come to fruition, and apocalyptic, which conveys the idea that the world is so screwed up that the only way to fulfill God’s plan is with massive destruction and upheaval with a large dose of holy vengeance. Apocalyptic, then, is a subcategory of eschatology. Both assume a direction, an end, differing on the specifics.
While some of us may be able to stomach eschatology, even that can be a stretch, and progressive Christians want nothing to do with an apocalyptic God who would send four horsemen to usher in the end of the world, or at least the end of this world. While we may be able to carve out room for a mysterious, serendipitous, and loving divine power, that angry God and the battle of cosmic forces, of good and evil, doesn’t cohere with our experience of the world, with our understanding of Big Bang and natural selection and the weird and quantum and transcendent.
But even as progressives who have no patience with rapture theology, we can orient our Advent around a vision of the future, for you know me well enough by now to know that while I love history and learning the lessons of the past, I have zero interest in a religion that is oriented toward the past, nor am I interested in a religion that is passive. Faith is the future, and hope is the future. But what kind of hope?
Hope is a hunger, a hole, a sense that things are not as they should be or could be, and the decision to believe that they might yet be. Believing is an active thing, no small feat, for we all know folks who have lost the ability to hope. I’m willing to accept that for some there is a neuro-chemical thing going on that makes it hard to hope, but for many, I believe that their belief is flabby and out of shape, muscles they have not used in far too long, or that their imagination is buried under the rubble of a tsunami of information, the sensory overload of our age.
Everyone can hope, though it might take digging out of that rubble, getting a little emotional space, stretching and exercising that flabby hope. Which might mean turning off the television and the computer. Trust me, I know how hard that can be.
For some, passive hope may be the best they can muster. Will power alone cannot defeat cancer, Alzheimer’s… you could have all the money in the world. Hope, belief, community, all tied together, do have a positive impact on outcomes. And the good news is that miracles happen all the time, though not in that arbitrary and capricious way of a God that cures some and abandons others. Miracles do happen, I’ve seen too many myself to pretend they don’t, though they are not always the miracle we want…
Other can do something about their hopes, can turn hope into reality, but they need a leg-up, an assist, for the system is bent against them. They are willing to work but are stuck in a cycle of multi-generational poverty, are up against systemic racism, are the least of these of the gospel. It is for us to listen to their hope, not define it for them, help them on their path, not tell them how to get there.
Then there are those of us who are doing okay, mostly. We have agency, the ability to act in our lives. We have some form of privilege in an unequal society, racial privilege, gender privilege, economic privilege. Some of that may have come from hard work, though much is unearned. We aren’t worried about going hungry. We’re not terminal, at least any more than everybody else. We are in a position to focus on the positive, to appreciate the absolute improbable beauty of this creation, the absolute improbable beauty that we can experience in one another, our art and our care and our love.
But we still have hopes. And for many of you, like me, that hope is for a better world, for those at the margins, for your children and grand-children. It is hope that “thy will be done,” thy being that ultimate source of life and love that we choose to understand as a force for extravagant generosity and extravagant justice, as being more, always more, a force we name as God.
We hope, and if it is positive and constructive hope, we don’t just complain and criticize, we articulate a vision for how that world would look. This is often the failure of the forward facing, for while those who worship the past can name exactly what it is they miss and want to claw back, those who hope for a better world join in the negativity, tearing down the present and failing to build the future.
Hope, then, for most of us, isn’t wishing upon a star. It is the hard and rewarding work of being in community, of imagining along with our Creator how a world of love and justice in which everyone had the chance to thrive, a world that valued this living planet, how that world would look. It would be a hope that discerned the gifts of the gathered community, then rolled up sleeves and got to it.
It is a hope that says “I will live this day to the fullest, and try to leave this place a little better than when I woke up.”
It doesn’t require that a horseman ride across the planet sewing seeds of division and war. When it comes to destruction, well let’s just say “we’ve got that.” We don’t need a Second Coming. God made us amazing, apes with massive brains that can do almost anything if we work together and believe. And in a universe filled with miracle upon miracle, how can we not?
I started the week reflecting on Emily Dickinson’s little poem about hope. It begins:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
I thought to myself, a bird? Really? I don’t want a hope that is small and tiny. But I went back to the poem, read it again. And I was wrong. The belle of Amherst did not give us a wimpy little hope. That bird is tough, resourceful.
Let us not sit in this time of waiting hoping for the wrong thing. Instead of hoping Christ will appear again to fix the messes we have made, let our Advent discipline be to see the many ways Christ is already with us, present as we gather at his table, preparing us to make the world a better place, though we be as wee as Emily’s feathery friend. May we embrace an Advent discipline of hope in action. But first, maybe a cocoa and a Sunday afternoon nap, with dreams of the world that might be.
Amen.