Saturday, December 7, 2013

Hope on a Rope?


Hello Everyone,

Those of you who have been reading these letters for a few years now may have noticed something: no matter how irregularly I write, no matter how busy I am with other things in my life, there will undoubtedly be a post about Advent.  It’s my favorite time of the year: the time in the Church calendar which leads up to Christmas.  It is a time of waiting and expectation and preparation, the way engagement precedes marriage or pregnancy precedes birth.  There are many reasons I like the church I’m attending, but to be honest, one of the main reasons I was initially drawn to it was because the first time I went, they gave out Advent booklets.  I love Advent and I love booklets, so I was sold!  This last Sunday was my one year churchiversary, which meant it was also the first Sunday in Advent, so here you have it, folks: this year’s Advent letter.

On the first Sunday in Advent, the Church typically celebrates hope.  What a simple, everyday word!  And yet this week, as I was listening to the sermon, I thought to myself, “I don’t think I really have the first clue about what hope is.”  After a while, a question appeared in my mind: “What would it look like to hope wildly?”  When it comes to hoping for things, I am a very careful person.  I tend to be a “don’t count your chickens before they hatch and graduate from high school or preferably college” type of person.  I feel the impulse to hope, but I don’t want to disappoint other people or myself if they don’t work out, so my hopes are tiny and contained and measured.  So when the question about wild hopes surfaced in my thoughts, I found myself wondering if I’ve ever really been completely hopeful.  It seems risky and totally counterintuitive, but also incredibly freeing.  I also felt a bit guilty: what does my lacking or inhibited hope say about my trust in God? 

When I’m confused about something, my first reaction (because I’m cool like that) is to research.  So I turned to that Advent booklet, as well as to several Scripture passages, and to some sermons and other resources I found online.  And I realized quickly that there is a difference between the way we usually use the word “hope,” and the way it is used in the Bible.  Normally, we mean it as a rough equivalent for the word “wish,” as in “I hope you have a good day” or “I hope I get this job.”  It might be a very profound desire, but it is for something uncertain.  Biblical hope is very different.  It is based on total certainty, specifically certainty that God will fulfill his promises.  (John Piper articulates this nicely in a sermon.)  

But I was still confused.  If Biblical hope is based on certainty, then why don’t we just call it “expectation” or “confidence”?  Or is it perhaps a question of a corresponding preposition (because I’m also cool like that): “hoping for” versus “hoping in”?  When I think of “wild hopes,” am I talking about Biblical hope, and if so, how is it wild if I already know that the thing will happen?  And somehow, this all seemed wrapped up in the great paradox of Advent: the idea of waiting (and hoping) for something that Christians believe has already happened, the coming of God into our world.  I kept going around in circles which is great if you’re playing Ring Around the Rosie, but it can make you pretty disoriented.

Another disorienting aspect of the week happened on Thursday.  I found out about the death of Nelson Mandela when a parent at the preschool mentioned it to me in passing.  I felt an immediate sense of loss, and when I had my break a few minutes later, I went to the kitchen and cried quietly while I unloaded the dishwasher.  I obviously didn’t know Mandela personally, but like so many other people around the world, I felt like I did.  Perhaps this is because more than any other public figure in history, Mandela’s life story has become almost synonymous with the story of his country.  To know and love South Africa (which anyone who has talked with me for more than two and a half seconds will know I do) is to know and love Mandela.  

I once told a friend that there are three stories that elicit a tearful response from me every time I encounter them: The Gospel, Charlotte’s Web, and the recent history of South Africa.  So while I was sniffling and sorting the cutlery, I reflected briefly on Mandela’s personal history, and how it connected with South Africa’s.  I was wondering why I was so sad about the loss of a man who I had never met, and who surely deserved a rest after a full and tiring 95 years.  Perhaps it was that if Mandela’s life story has become a metaphor for South Africa’s, what happens when we extend the metaphor?  Did something of South Africa die on Thursday?  Is the country somehow “less than” today than it was a week ago?  

And then it hit me: Mandela gave the world both kinds of hope simultaneously.   

His life obviously gave the world very specific hopes: that Apartheid could crumble, that South Africa could have a functioning democracy, that people could transition between the two nonviolently.  Long before he helped realize these events, he inspired deep, dear wishes in people across the globe that they may one day happen.  But he pointed to the other kind of hope too, the belief in the coming of something not-yet-but-definite, something to do with the marriage of justice and mercy, something to do with our ability to actually and actively love each other, despite the worst in all of us.  

So does his death extinguish our hopes, whatever they are?  I didn’t want to think so.  After all, that’s the great thing about biblical hope: it may diminish, but it never dies.  Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”  And that is why I find headlines like “Mandela’s Death Leaves South Africa Without Its Moral Center” (New York Times) inaccurate at best, and offensive at worst.  Saying this implies that the hope Mandela gave us was shallow, that it was dependent on him being alive, that the good he did was about what was in him more than it was about what is in all of us.  

On the contrary, Mandela’s life, at its best, gave us glimpses of that goodness now, even after his death.  Not only an inspiring story from our history, not only a glorious reality to wait for or work toward.  Richard Rohr said “The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.”  Of course, it would be lovely if Mandela could have died with the problems in South Africa and even the world neatly taken care of.  But if we are to learn anything from his life, it is to live in hope, to “live without closure,” knowing that there is a Source beyond ourselves.  

My favorite phrase that has emerged from my research on hope this week comes from a different Pope: Pope Francis as he gave his Advent address this last week.  He spoke of “the horizon of hope.”  I love the idea of hope being the looking toward a distant but real good, visible to those who would lift their gaze and look out.   


Mandela not only pointed toward that horizon, he also helped move us closer to it in very tangible ways.  It is right to mourn him, for there will never be another person like him.  But to truly honor him, we must continue to look out, beyond him, beyond ourselves, to a wild horizon that is coming and has already come.

Happy Advent, and have a good week,

Sarah/Mouse