Nov 30, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Hope"
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The First Sunday of Advent
November 30, 2008
W. Gregory Pope
RE-GIFTING HOPE
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19;
1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
Our theme for Advent this year is Re-gifting God’s Gifts - the gifts of hope, peace, joy, love, and the gift of God’s self.
We will be asking ourselves two questions:
1. Where do you find hope, peace, joy, love?
and
2. How do you share God’s hope, peace, joy, and love with others?
We will ponder receiving God’s gifts and then re-gifting them, sharing them with the world.
When we think of re-gifting we usually think of giving away those gifts we were given that we either did not care for or have more of than we need.
God’s gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love can never be too plentiful and are gifts we care for deeply. And the wonderful thing about re-gifting God’s gifts is that you can share them and keep them for yourself at the same time.
At the Advent wreath you are going to hear stories of how people have received and given the gifts of hope, peace, joy and love.
So I invite you to open your hearts this Advent season to the great gifts of God.
And then to open your hands to share those gifts with the world.
It has been said that human beings can live without anything except hope. When hope dies, we die. We can live for brief periods of time without love, but we cannot live without the hope of love soon coming our way. We can live in desperate times if have the hope of a better tomorrow.
In her novel Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler describes a middle-aged character named Maggie as one who “viewed her life as circular; it forever repeated itself and was entirely lacking in hope.” [1]
Some people view their lives and history itself as a treadmill that goes round and round in monotonous cycles, no hope of anything new. To feel as if we are without hope is to live at the bottom of the bottom.
How do we get so low?
The prophet Isaiah points to our sin as one cause of such hopelessness, choices we have made that harm ourselves and others and have a way of hiding God’s face from us. To be hidden from God’s face, blocked from the light of God’s love, to feel out of the reach of God’s gracious hand, is to indeed feel hopeless.
Are there ways of living your life that keep God’s face hidden from you? Are there choices you are making that are turning your life away from God?
The hiddenness of God is a mystery. It’s hard to know if God does indeed turn away from us for a season or if it is only perception. Reality or perception, if we do not feel God’s presence, or believe God is present, our lives can become blinded to hope.
Isaiah puts some of the blame on God for not being more visibly and powerfully present to Israel in their return from exile. Isaiah cries out to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” - do what you did in the past, bring fire and earthquake, make our enemies tremble. Three times he asks for God’s presence, but it seems to Isaiah that God has hidden God’s self from the people.
Scott Bader-Saye believes this divine inaction tells us something about the way God has chosen to relate to the world. The hidden God of Isaiah 64 is the God who refuses to act powerfully and dramatically to rescue.
And in many ways this understanding makes more sense to us. The frustration Isaiah feels is the frustration we often feel. It is the struggle to reconcile the ancient stories of God’s powerful presence with our present experience where God doesn’t seem to act so powerfully. We have these biblical stories of God’s grand intervention and wonder why God doesn’t do the same today. Why would God deliver Israel from Egypt but not deliver six million Jews from Hitler’s death camps? [2]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a German concentration camp in 1944, offered this perspective. He said “God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us.” [3]
For Bonhoeffer this realization was not a denial of faith but a retrieval of faith in the God of the cross, whose power is suffering, whose omnipotence is vulnerability, who relates to the world through the vulnerable path of non-coercive love and suffering service rather than through domination and force.
God’s refusal to replicate a Red Sea-type deliverance does not mean that God has abandoned God’s people. Our hope does not rely on God’s acting today in the same ways God acted in the ancient stories, but it does rely on God’s being the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow - a God who hears our cries, a God who does not abandon us, a God that will finally redeem all that is lost in a new heaven and a new earth (Isa 65:17). [4]
What has been the testimony of scripture and saints down through the centuries is that the absence of God is a very real experience, but that God’s absence is never permanent. Hope is never completely lost.
While Isaiah says God has hidden God’s self from us, the psalmist cries for God to shine God’s face upon us that we may be saved.
We are like the people of Israel - waiting, wanting, expecting to see the face of God.
Even though the people of God had sinned and felt God had hidden God’s face from them, they still trusted God in their spiritual exile.
Our hope is in God’s restoration: Restore us, O God, the psalmist prays.
How does restoration come? Where can we see God’s face shine upon us? Where do we find God’s hope in the world?
Isaiah points us to the past. God did awesome deeds we did not expect. God may not have given us a Red Sea deliverance, but God did carry us through some stormy waters: the death of someone we did not think we could live without, the time our family fell apart, or when the dream of a career came crashing down around us, or when we made the decision to leave home and move to the other side of the world in the hope of a better life. And we were given a new home and a new family. We were held by a strength beyond our own. God has done things we did not expect.
There is no God like our God, Isaiah says. With our God there is always hope. God is our Father, and we are God’s children. God is the potter, and we are the clay, the work of God’s hands. And God is not finished with us yet. God is always making of us a new creation.
We are not defined by our past. God does not remember our iniquity forever.
Isaiah and the psalmist call for God to bring hope and salvation into a troubled present: to give ear, to shine forth, to stir up might, and save. They point us toward a future when God did “give ear” to our cry Indeed, the Shepherd of Israel gave much more. God gave God’s whole self. The Lord God of hosts left the throne of the cherubim and in Christ joined the rest of us who knows what it is like to feel that God has forsaken you. God answered the demand, “Let your face shine upon us that we may be saved,” though not as anyone expected: it was in the light of a Child born in Bethlehem, the light the darkness has never overcome.
God did not end political and military oppression. God’s might was expressed in the vulnerability of a baby who grew up to die at the hands of oppressors. And that first advent we relive each year sustains us until that second advent that we anticipate each year when God will act fully and completely for our salvation.
History does not go round and round in monotonous cycles. History has a goal. And that goal is the kingdom of God where the world will be redeemed and re-created by God. The Christian story is a salvation story.
Yes, we live in a world full of wars and rumors of wars, corruption, greed, and injustice. But’s that’s only one side of it.
The Christian story reveals another side where, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “with every sunrise, grace spills across the horizon in acts of healing and words of truth. . . . Jesus opens our eyes to the world of grace and commands us to pay attention. That means we don’t go into the world each day desperately trying to hold on to things or people, panicked at everything that might weaken our grasp on those things or those people.” [5]
Rather, we open our lives in hope to the Christ who is with us, keeping awake, waiting expectantly for those times and places, great and small, where Christ breaks into our lives and our world.
Paul discovered that in Christ God is doing what Isaiah and the psalmist asked God to do, breaking into our world through the gathered community of faith, strengthened by our fellowship with Jesus, not lacking in any spiritual gift, full of hope rooted in the faithfulness of God who will see us through to the very end.
Hope is what is left when your worst fears have been realized and the future looks like a never-ending bleak mid-winter. In Advent, God’s people summon the courage and the spiritual strength to remember that the holy breaks into the daily. And that in small ways we can open our broken hearts to the healing grace of God with a willingness to be mended.
We do not lose heart; rather, we live with our hearts broken open so that compassion, caring, and reckless love of God can find a way into our hearts and the heart of the world.
This first Sunday in Advent corresponds as it often does with the celebration of Thanksgiving. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he invites us to offer thanks to God, not for material gifts, but for spiritual gifts found in the church. A reminder that we are the gathered body of Christ “intended to be a feast of abundance laid out for the sake of the world.” [6]
We have gifts to share - God’s gifts of hope and peace, joy and love. We enter the darkness of our world with whatever hope we have, sometimes hoping against hope that we can shed the light of hope.
It was 4:00 pm on May 27th, 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, that several mortar shells struck a group of a hundred starving people waiting in a long line in front of the only bakery in town that still had enough flour to make bread. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded.
The next day hungry people lined up again to beg for bread - certain they would die if they didn’t come to the bakery and convinced they could die if they did. Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, had been standing at his window the day before and saw the whole thing happen. That next day, as the people lined up again, he dressed in the black suit and white tie in which he had played every night until the opera theater was destroyed. He walked into the street carrying his cello and a chair.
Smailovic sat down in the square and, surrounded by debris and the remainders of death and the despair of the living, he began to play the mournful Albinoni’s Adagio (which you will hear in just a moment), the one music manuscript that had been found whole in the city after the carpet bombing of Dresden.
For the next 21 days (one day for each of his friends and neighbors that had died), shelling or no shelling, he came back to the square to play the Adagio in honor of the dead.
His actions inspired the novel by Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo. [7]
Galloway says he played until he felt his hope return. And most days, by the time the last few notes had faded, he was able to feel the music somehow restore his hope.
Today, where he sat, there is a monument of a man in a chair playing a cello. A monument to his refusal to surrender the hope that beauty could be reborn in the midst of a living hell.
What the cellist wanted, says Galloway, was to stop things from getting worse. And perhaps the only thing that will stop things from getting worse is people doing the things they know how to do.
What is it you know how to do that can stop things from getting worse and shed a little light of hope?
Play music.
Sit with a child.
Visit someone who is lonely.
Teach someone English or math or science.
Install clean water in a village without clean water.
Pray with someone.
Work for justice.
Be a peacemaker.
Galloway says of one of his characters who serves as a resident of the city that he would often sit “inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.”
In the midst of our cities filled with violence and loneliness and fear, the Christ of Bethlehem comes as the cellist of Sarajevo and Iraq and Mumbai and Louisville. His arms are spread on a piece of carved wood, inhaling all the pain the world can hold, and he plays the music of the world’s salvation, singing hope through his tears, refusing to despair that God is shaping a new creation.
Christ, the cellist of the whole world, brings hope where there is no hope. Can you hear his music?
(Cellist plays Albinoni’s Adagio)
________________
1. Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons, Knoff, 1988, 315
2. Scott Bader-Saye, in David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol.1, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 4
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Macmillan, 1971, 360
4. Bader-Saye, 6
5. Eugene H. Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible with its Translator, NavPress, 2007, p.1568
6. Martin B. Copenhaver, in Bartlett and Taylor, Feasting on the Word, 18
7. Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo, Riverhead, 2008
posted by fret @ 6:20 PM
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