Awaiting dawn: holding onto esperanza / hope

First Sunday of Advent ● December 3, 2023

Readings: Job 14:7-9 and 2 Peter 3:10-15 (The Inclusive Bible)

Rev. Jeff Wells © 2023

You can view the full worship video recording at:
https://youtu.be/HJUGkV8_CQM?si=v92t2WnQFxWIlHfj

We live in a time when large parts of the human and beyond human communities are experiencing diminishment, suffering, anxiety, and very often fear. We face hot wars, cold wars, and civil wars across the globe. A large and growing portion of the human population faces food insecurity, housing insecurity, mass displacement, and forced migration. Meanwhile, all life on the planet is endangered by the depletion of groundwater, the loss of fertile topsoil, the destruction of rainforests, and the growing impacts of climate change.

The future can seem very bleak indeed for promoting peace with justice, for creating economic and social systems founded on the common thriving of all living beings, and for building loving relationships and communities. In times like these, we need to hold onto hope.

Every human language has a word for “hope.” It’s esperanza in Spanish. يأمل (ya'malo) in Arabic and לְקַווֹת (nikavo'to) in Hebrew. In Ukranian, it’s Надія (nadi'ya) and in Russian, надеяться (nadeyat'sya). All humans crave and depend on hope. As the apostle Paul taught, hope is right up there with faith and love as one of the foundations of human existence. 

During the period of Jesus’ relatively short life, there were plenty of reasons for people in Judea, Galilee, and the surrounding nations to despair over the conditions of their lives. All were under the thumb of Roman imperialism and its local puppet rulers. Yet, in the Gospel stories, we hear that Jesus’s mother, Mary – young, unwed, pregnant, and poor – did not lose hope. She sang a song of defiant resistance and praise – imagining that God had the power to bring down the privileged and lift up the lowly and downtrodden.

Jesus, himself, did not fall into despair in the face of Roman oppression or of the power of rigid and self-interested religious hierarchies. Nor did he resort to violence, as did so many others. Jesus recognized that trying to achieve liberation through violence against the much more powerful Roman Empire would lead to the destruction and disbursement of the Jewish people. Instead, Jesus consciously became a servant of God’s desires and intentions for the world. He taught a different way – the way of hope, compassion, and love – even loving one’s enemies. Inspired by the God he tenderly called Abba, Jesus envisioned a way of being and becoming that could lessen divisions, reduce animosities, and promote peaceful, nonviolent means to move toward liberation, justice, and the common good. Jesus taught a way of breaking down barriers and bringing people together. He imagined what a much better world could look like – a world shaped by the desires of a loving, leading, and compassionate God. He called this vision the Kin-dom of God and called on his followers to imagine it, too. 

Genuine hope is not unrealistic. Nor is it a passive wish that things might, somehow, turn out okay. Hope faces the truth of our circumstances squarely yet does not give up on the possibility of changing the situation for the better. Hope is an active intention to change – to change ourselves and to change the world. Hope invites us to be sober and realistic and then to imagine, to dream, and to act in creative, loving, and God-inspired ways. 

Ultimately, Jesus did not succeed in convincing enough of the Jewish people that violence was not the answer. The Romans destroyed the temple and defeated the Jewish rebellion around the year 70 CE. But he did succeed in sparking a movement that has changed the world – largely for the better. 

In each moment and circumstance, God offers us the best possibilities for moving into the future – both individually and communally. But we have to choose. We have to act. We have to commit ourselves to co-create the future with God. Every instant of existence is full of potential for new opportunities, possibilities, understandings, and perspectives. The future is not determined and there are always options and decisions for us to discern in collaboration with God. Therefore, there is always reason to hope.

From my dreams for the Church of the Village to my promotion of open and relational theology, to my advocacy for ecological civilization, I think about the necessity of hope and imagination often. It is crucial for us to hold on to hope because people who lose hope fall into despair and then they are no longer motivated to act. They no longer dream. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of hopelessness and fatalism.

On Tuesday evening, Jim Norton and I joined a webinar hosted by Earth Charter International and several other organizations. It was titled, “An East-West Dialogue on Ecological Civilization.” The webinar featured two speakers from the U.S., one from South Korea, and one from the People’s Republic of China. All of them have long experience as both academics and as advocates around the ecological crisis. What they shared was sobering. They all agreed that we need deep-going, fundamental changes to the philosophies, principles, policies, and practices on which human societies are organized. They also recognized that humanity has very little time in which to make the very big changes needed to avoid reaching the tipping point after which we will be unable to prevent the worst consequences of climate change and other systemic crises. 

Yet, I was also inspired. I was inspired by each of the speaker’s mastery of the science, philosophy, and practicalities related to the topic. I was inspired by their vision of the kind of society that they believe is possible if enough people and organizations, local communities, and government bodies get behind it. Seeing participants join Zoom from locations across the globe felt like an especially hopeful sign. They represented millions of people who see the dangers as well as the huge challenges, yet hold onto hope and continue to take action. 

I was struck especially by comments of my friend, Andrew Schwartz, with whom I serve on the Alliance for Ecological Civilization. Andrew said:

“We need to make big, radical changes on a global scale very quickly. Part of that is changing the story in order to change the way people think. Unfortunately, that takes time.  

“It’s already too late to prevent the extinction of many species. We’re too late to stop significant loss of coral reefs. But it’s not too late to do something. That’s where I find hope. There is always room for something else to be done. And we must! Yet, I keep thinking, ‘Is it enough?’ That’s my struggle.” 

He is saying we cannot pretend things are better than they are. We can’t ignore the reality in front of us. Yet still, we hold onto hope and act upon our hope. Jesus and his early followers could not know exactly what the future would bring. Jesus couldn’t know whether the vision he had of the reign of God’s love, justice, compassion, and community would actually come about. Yet he acted in hope for that better world. And after his death, a very small number of his followers continued to work for that vision and to share his teachings and the story of his life. According to multiple accounts, they felt his spirit still with them. Surely, they must have asked the same question that Andrew posed: “Is what we are doing enough? Is is going to make a difference?” Yet, they hoped and acted – strengthened by their belief that God was ever-present with them to guide and help their collective efforts to bear good fruit.

Our hope, too, is grounded in the presence of God in our midst – today and every day. I don’t believe, as the author of 2nd Peter writes, that God intends to destroy the earth. But God does have a dream and a vision for a very different kind of world, a very different kind of human civilization. Let us work for that vision, hold onto hope, and as the author of 2nd Peter invites us, let’s work with God to “hasten along” that ancient vision, for God’s sake, for the sake of the oppressed and marginalized, and for the sake of all life on Earth.

Copyright (c) 2023 - Rev. Jeff Wells
All rights reserved.