Month: December 2016

Hope Despite Evidence to the Contrary

shelliwilliams Uncategorized ,

2016-12-02-hope(Advent 2A) 4For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.  5May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, 6so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 7Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. 8For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, 9and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name”; 10and again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; 11and again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; 12and again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.” 13May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.   (Romans 15: 4-13)

So why do we have these Scriptures?  There are those that will tell you that you need to memorize as many as you can, amassing sort of a mental collection of passages to pull up as we need them.  Well, good luck with that!  I can’t even remember my grocery list unless it’s written down.  There are some that depict that Bible as having all the answers.  Oh come now!  Have you read the accounts of the canonical Gospel writers?  (Not to mention the non-canonical ones—yeah, there ARE more of those writers!)  They can’t even agree on the order in which things happened much less why.  And then there are those that assume that the Bible is the moral code, the list of things you should do and should not do.  How boring would THAT be?  (Yeah, behavior lists also make for profound and exciting reading!)  But, here, the writer Paul says that the Scriptures were written that we might have hope.

For Paul, this hope comes through an awareness and acknowledgment of our shared story.  Hope, then, is realized in community.  None of us have a lock on the truth by ourselves.  Truth comes as we journey through life with others experiencing and balancing our story together.  Think of those that came before us 2,000 years ago.  For generations upon generations they had hoped for a Messiah, hoped for the One who would lead them home.  And their hope was part of their community, it was who they were.  That hope provided the very foundations on which they built their faith.  As each generation learned the stories and practices of their faith tradition, they also learned hope.

So hope is more than just a wish for the future.  It is more than an awkward dream that things will work out, that things will turn out all right.  Hope is found in the very depths of who we are.  Hope springs from the well-worn words of the pages of Scripture that we read and carries us into the future.  It is hope that takes us beyond where we are, that belies our fears and our need for the comforts and security of what we know.  It is hope that reminds us that we are called to be more.  It is hope that gives us life.  That is the promise.  The sign above Dante’s hell reads “Abandon hope all you who enter here.”  Regardless of what your image of hell may be (Dante notwithstanding), as long as we have hope, we have life.

Advent is the season that teaches us to hope, that teaches us to let go of certainty and let go of that need to know exactly where we are going.  Advent reminds us that even in the wilderness, even on those days when we do not think we can possibly go on, even when we forget who we are and feel a little alone, even when we momentarily lose our way or when we think the world has somehow slipped from our grasp and gone into a place that we do not want to follow, there is hope.  To have hope means that we dare to get out of our own way.  To hope is to open ourselves to God, to open ourselves to the God who leads us home.  May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there is not one ounce of proof in tonight’s black, black sky that it can possibly come. (Joan Chittister)

 

FOR TODAY:  In what way is God calling you to open yourselves to hope?  What’s in the way?

 

Advent Peace,

Shelli

And a short programming note…Apparently some (or all–I don’t know) of the emails for the 11/30 (Wednesday) blog post did not go for some reason unknown to me and unknown to WordPress.  If you did not get it, it IS there on the website.  Sorry about the confusion!  S.

Between Night and Day

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2016-11-30-between-night-and-day(Advent 2A) A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. 3His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. 6The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. 7The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. 10On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious. (Isaiah 11: 1-10)

Yes, another reading about that future vision that God holds for us.  Advent is harder than we thought it was.  After all, we assumed that we just had these four weeks to prepare for Christmas (challenging enough by itself!) and we keep getting hit with the prospect of preparing for what is essentially the “Great Unknown”.  I mean, God gives us this vision pretty plainly but wolves cavorting with lambs and calves and lions sharing an abode and all of this being led by a child may be just too much to fathom.  In the words of Mary at that fateful encounter with the angel, “How can this be?”

Maybe that’s our whole problem.  Maybe we have not allowed ourselves or risked ourselves or trained ourselves to imagine something other than what we know.  We are pretty locked in.  Most of us have planned our tomorrows and possibly even the day-afters and we get really irritated when someone has a different idea.  In other words, those pesky new shoots that keep getting in the way of our perfectly trimmed hedge around our lives are sometimes just downright irritating.

So this season of Advent comes along as the great reminder that life does not and cannot go as planned.  Thanks be to God for that!  As we walk this season of remembering that coming of God into the world 2,000 years ago as Jesus Christ and at the same time looking toward the coming of God’s Reign in its fullness into the world that we now know, we are acutely aware that we live between two ways of being.  With our feet planted in this earth that still bears the marks of poverty and homelessness, of terrorism and war, of disunity and disregard of the rights and lives of others even at our own back door, we are called to imagine something different, something more, something beyond what we have.

We are the ones that live between night and day.  The night is reaching toward us, calling us, desperately needing our voices and our hearts to bring it into the light.  And up ahead in the faint distance is the Light that we ourselves crave so badly.  It would be so easy to just go and leave all this mess behind.  But that is not the plan.  Between night and day is where we are called to be.  That is the lesson of Advent.  And here, here is where we are called to imagine God’s vision into being.  We are not called to passively wait for the coming of God but rather to actively imagine this world the way God does and do our part to make it happen.  So, dare to imagine what God does.

If I cannot find the face of Jesus in the face of those who are my enemies, if I cannot find him in the unbeautiful, if I cannot find him in those who have the “wrong ideas,” if I cannot find him in the poor and the defeated, how will I find him in the bread and wine, or in the life after death? If I do not reach out in this world to those with whom he has identified himself, why do I imagine that I will want to be with him, and them, in heaven? Why would I want to be for all eternity in the company of those I avoided every day of my life? (Jim Forest)

 

FOR TODAY:  What do you dare to imagine of God’s vision?

 

Advent Peace,

Shelli