Hope is in the Waiting

On Advent Sunday, I explored the conundrum of time usually pictured as moving in a straight line, flowing only in one direction – from past to future. Drawing from a few lines of T.S.Eliot in his poem Little Gidding, I contended that our usual way of thinking about time, rather than describing reality, is simply a construction around which to organize our lives. What Eliot hints at is a notion of timelessness interrupting the linear flow of predictability: timelessness in which time bends back on itself—where memory and imagination meet, where, under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

Today on the 3rd Sunday in Advent I want to explore another conundrum – that of hope and hoping, with reference once again to a few lines of T.S. Eliot in his poem East Coker:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope – for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Eliot is pointing us toward a distinction we rarely pause to notice between the action of hoping … and the object of our hope. That distinction lies at the heart of Advent, where, between the act of hoping and the object of our hope, we encounter the experience of waiting.

When hope disappoints us, is it because, as Eliot warns, we’ve placed our hope in the wrong thing?

So the question quietly pulsing beneath the themes in Advent is this:
How do we know whether our hope is rightly placed?

Act One and Act Two

Jesus’ fellow Jews in the first century lived with a deep, transgenerational expectation of the coming one—the messiah. A small group came to believe that this long-awaited hope had finally arrived in Jesus and that the messianic age had dawned.

But there was a problem. An enormous problem. How do you proclaim a messiah … who is dead? A dead messiah was not part of anyone’s expectations, prompting the first Christians to understand the dawning of the messianic age as a two-act process.

Act One: In Jesus—through death and resurrection—God had begun the messianic age. Act Two: What had begun would be completed when the Lord returned. Only then would God bring the long hope of Israel—and the hope of all creation—to its promised fulfillment. But it’s difficult to find ourselves living in the tension between the beginning of Act one and the still distant fulfilment of Act two. And so somewhere along the way, we Christians, especially in the Western mainline, quietly jettisoned a real expectation of a second act in the fulfillment of the messianic age.

We still say the words:

He will come again to judge the living and the dead. And Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

But is this still our actual expectation? Not so much.

We no longer live with any urgency around Christ’s return. Advent has become almost entirely about Act One—the Incarnation. A sweet baby. A quiet Bethlehem. A familiar story.

So when we jettison Act Two—what do we put in its place? We replace the early Christian hope of God renewing heaven and earth with a far more comfortable expectation: that when we die, we will be transported into eternal bliss. Instead of Christ coming to us, we will go to him.
Heaven is the end. Mission accomplished.

But note the subtle shift: Hope has moved from the renewal of creation to the escape from creation. A small shift with enormous consequences.

Competing Expectations—Then and Now

When John the Baptist began preaching his fiery message of repentance, many flocked to him because they thought he might be the coming one. Every Jew lived with urgent expectation. Yet, as with all expectations, there was a wide divergence about what the messiah was actually supposed to do.

Some clung to Isaiah’s great vision of cosmic renewal, which we listened to in the first reading from Isaiah 35. This is a vision of the desert blooming, the blind seeing, the lame leaping, the whole creation singing. A kind of divine re-terraforming of the earth.

Others, humiliated under Roman occupation, longed for a more political messiah.  A military leader. A racial champion. One who would restore the fortunes of Israel and make Israel great again.

Two expectations. Two hopes. Both fervent. Both biblical. Both alive in the hearts of first-century Jews.

And into this tangle of hope comes the moment in Matthew’s Gospel—with John the Baptist, now in prison, becoming afraid, unsure, increasingly doubting.

He sends messengers to ask Jesus:
Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another?

We can imagine the roots of his doubt. John was a firebrand. He expected a messiah with a bit more muscle. A bit more judgment. A lot more nationalistic fervor.

And Jesus—wily as ever—refuses a direct answer.
He doesn’t debate. He doesn’t reassure. He doesn’t explain away the paradox. He simply says:

Go tell John what you see and hear. The blind see. The lame walk. The lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The poor receive good news.

In other words: remind John of Isaiah’s messianic expectation. The object of John’s hope is misplaced – his hope is hoping for the wrong thing.

Jesus aligns himself not with tribal ambition but with prophetic transformation. Not with national restoration but with justice, mercy, and renewal.

That same clash of expectations is alive today—very much alive—in the American church. Among large swaths of white evangelical Christianity, the hope is for a more muscular Jesus. A more tribal – a racially pure Jesus. A more nationalistic Jesus. A Jesus who will restore the fortunes of a particular nation, through political power at home and military strength abroad.

It is, as in the first century, hope for the wrong thing. And Jesus refuses to endorse it.

The Advent Question for Us

We who call ourselves mainstream Christians face the same choice John faced. The same choice the early Church faced. And the stakes today feel just as high.

Do we continue to ignore the New Testament’s two-act expectation, living with our eyes fixed solely on the reward of heavenly bliss? A single-act Christianity of personal salvation? A spirituality that floats above the world rather than being incarnated within it? Or do we recover Act Two—the expectation that Christ will return to this world, bringing justice to this society, healing to this creation?

Because the expectations we choose shape the lives we live.

If we believe the earth is simply the disposable staging ground before we depart for heaven, then why bother with justice? Why bother with creation? Why bother with anything beyond my personal ticket to ride the heaven-bound express?

But if we believe that God intends to redeem this material reality, then we understand our present responsibilities very differently – to become collaborators with God, agitators for peace with justice, stewards of the earth, and repairers of the breach. People who embody this hope – now—in real time.

So How Do We Know Whether Our Hope Is Right?

Let me return to the question that has been quietly humming underneath everything:

How do we know whether our hope is for the right or wrong thing?

Is our hope placed in some future escape from this world into heavenly bliss—while the world around us burns, and injustice deepens, and creation groans under the weight of greed and neglect?

Or is our hope placed in the renewal of all things— the healing of creation, the raising of what has fallen, the setting right of what has gone wrong?

Is our hope aligned with John’s early instinct for a tribal, forceful messiah? Or with Jesus’ prophetic vision of the messiah as the herald for the inbreaking of God’s justice, healing, and ecological restoration?

Enormous consequences flow from the hope we choose. Because hope is realized in the waiting, and in the spaciousness of waiting, future expectation folds back into present-time action.

Into the spaciousness of waiting time bends to flow back on itself — here memory and imagination meet, here under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency as we discover that the power of that for which we wait is already – I repeat, already effective within us.