Advent 3 – Relationalrealities

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.

Advent is a time that refocuses us spiritually on the thorny experience of hope. While hope is a universal trait of the human spirit, its thorniness lies in the way hope raises both expectation and fear of disappointment.

I cannot reflect on hope and the nature of expectation without hearing the voice of my fatalistic grandmother saying don’t hope- never be disappointed. I think we all instinctively know what she means. To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of disappointment. But my grandmother’s expression, while it captures our fear of risk, nonetheless misses the essential point about hope. Hope is not primarily – a picture of a longed-for future – realizable or not. Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.

Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.

You see, hope is not a future dream – although we often think of hope in this way. Hope is a vision for a desired future but the purpose of hoping is to reorient ourselves in the present through future expectation. Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment. It’s a severe limitation on present time action and future possibility.

We are the ones we have been waiting for is a saying the origin of which has multiple attributions. We are the ones we have been waiting for is however the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book in which she comments that:

We are the ones we have been waiting for because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament. With so much greater awareness than our ancestors – and with such capacity for insight, knowledge, and empathy – we are uniquely prepared to create positive change within ourselves and our world.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was a phrase that Barack Obama borrowed – not to indicate that he or his administration were necessarily the ones desperately awaited – but that present generations of our society have the potential to really change American society’s direction of travel towards an – as yet – unrealized future. At the everyday level of experience we know the truth of this as we live through the chaos and upheaval of a period of momentous change – the kind of change that beckons us towards a future that will be so much more than a repetition of our past.

The shape of our future hope is important but too much dreaming or foreboding about the the future is a distraction. The purpose of hope is not to inhabit the future before it emerges but to focus our attention on the quality of our present time actions – both those we boldly embrace and those we fail to take.

Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment it’s a severe limitation on present time possibility. Hope is a lifetime’s work. Advent reminds us that hope also requires courage in a world that often – like my grandmother’s saying – plays up the risk of hope’s disappointment.

The book of Isaiah begins around 740 BCE with the figure known as 1st Isaiah (chapters 1-40). The book concludes with the prophecies of the 3rd Isaiah (chapters 56-66) over two centuries later after the ending of the Babylonian Exile in 515. The combined prophecies of 1st, 2nd (chapters 40-56), and 3rd Isaiah form the mainstay of Advent’s O.T. lessons. In chapter 25, appointed for the 3rd Sunday in Advent we hear 1st Isaiah’s words: Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.

Where is our God? Our God is here! How do we know God is here? We know because the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. Isaiah’s hope is ambiguous with regard to time. His use of –shall– is suggestive of future events – but events determined by actions in present time.

If our Advent hope causes us to raise our eyes heavenwards waiting for future divine rescue from the mess we are making of the world – we will miss Advent hope as a present time statement that God is already here – among us – journeying alongside us through the turbulence of the present time.

The Gospels ascribe a prophetic quality of premonition to John the Baptist because we prefer to view prophets as visionaries of future time. But the prophet speaks first and foremost into present time – no matter how future oriented his words. As we all know, the present time fear of disappointment plays havoc with our expectations. And so we see in Matthew 11 that even the legendary John the Baptist is subject to the fear of disappointed expectation. John – languishing in Herod’s prison – has become anxious because Jesus seems not to be fulfilling his expectations. The doubt arises in his mind – maybe he’d got it wrong and Jesus is not the promised one – afterall. So he sends his disciples to enquire of Jesus – are you the one or are we to wait for another?

Jesus quotes Isaiah 25 back to John telling John’s disciples to go tell him what you hear and see! The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear – and just to up the ante he adds – the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Here the point not to be missed is that Jesus takes Isaiah’s words – couched as future hope – and renders them a description of present time reality.

The point of future hope lies in the beginning of its realization in the present.

We are the ones we have been waiting for focuses our attention firmly on the present time in which hope is not a future dream but a present-time activity. Of course, there is a hidden irony here. Our usual Advent question: what are we waiting for and why are we still waiting? – is not perhaps the question after all.

The great 20^th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote:

The power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait.

On the 3rd Sunday in Advent – what are we waiting for becomes who are we waiting for? Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not to be the ones we have been waiting for – then who will be?

Tag: Advent 3

Hope is in the Waiting

For whom do we wait?