Hope
Advent is hope. (I know, because it says so on that big sign down in front of Messiah House.) Advent is hope—at least for the first week, anyway.
But what do we mean by that? What do we mean when we say “Advent is hope”? Is hope a noun? Or a verb? For that matter what is hope? Anyone care to give a one word definition?
Is hope expectation? Hmm? Well, when I flip a light switch, I have an expectation that the lights will come on. And for the most part, they do. Unless there’s an ice storm, or three daughters using hairdryers all on the same circuit. But even so—we don’t think to ourselves, “I hope the lights come on when I flip this switch. So hope and expectation are two separate things.
Okay then, is hope desire? I hope that Lisa makes a cheesecake for my final dessert of the month. That’s closer to the idea. But a passionate desire for something is not hope—it’s want. Longing.
What about faith, then? Are faith and hope equivalent? We get a little clue from this bible passage—“Faith is being sure of what we hope for.” (It’s in there – 1st Corinthalonians or something!) Faith is ardent belief, hope is somewhat different. Hope is somehow unsure. There seems to be an element of “maybe yes and maybe no’ to hope. You don’t hope for the stars to shine at night—they will. However you may hope that the skies be clear so you can see them. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Perhaps if we thought about hope as it relates specifically to Advent. Most of us think of Advent as a prelude to Christmas. So the hope we feel might be compared to the anticipation of a soon-to-be-born child. We hope the baby is born healthy. Which is almost like a prayer. And we have high hopes for the newborn. Her whole life streams out from this point, all is potential.
There’s also that Second Coming thing during Advent too. When the early church translated the scriptures into Latin from the Greek, the word they used to translate parousia, or end times, was indeed adventus. So Advent is not mainly about the coming of a child. It’s about the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds, to judge the quick and the dead, and to transform and recreate both heaven and earth. Hope in this situation includes some shaking in your boots as you hope that you won’t be cast off into a lake of fire, pit of doom, or some equally gruesome existence. We hope that the one we have placed our trust in, Jesus, will indeed come through for us.
That’s really hoping against hope. Like Noah, like Abraham and Sarah, like Ruth and Job, like Peter and Paul, like Dorcus and Lydia, like all those psalmists! If, in spite of every fiber of your being screaming, “Impossible. Ill-conceived! Incomprehensible,” in direct contradiction with your reason and logic, and going against everything you know to the contrary—you still can imagine that hoped-for outcome, and still hold fast to its possibility—then you are hoping against hope.
And we hope against hope at Advent. We make ourselves ready for Christ’s coming. Though there’s a little part of us that’s unsure if that’s possible. We celebrate the gift of the savior, Jesus, child of Bethlehem. Though somewhere deep inside we doubt that the gift is truly for us. That tension, the tension between belief and doubt, worthiness and unworthiness, possibility and dead end, is hope.
Hope is a tug of war. Except the object is not to pull the opposing team into the mud. It’s to keep each side dry and clean. We need the yes and the no the faith and the doubt in order to hope. Take away either team and you don’t have hope—you just got fear or vanity. A bunch of people holding a rope for no good reason.
Advent is hope. We hope in God’s grace. But rightly speaking, we are given hope at Advent. We are shown the vision of a new world, streaming out from the wrinkly little arms of the incarnate God—Jesus—who is the origin of that re-creation. We are made new ourselves—a down payment on the resurrected life we have been promised that we will share with Jesus. Someday.
Until then, we hope in the hope. The hope that is advent.
What do you hope for this advent season?