Hope In Christ
“Hope In Christ”
First Sunday of Advent, Year C December 2, 2018
Jeremiah 33:14-16 Psalm 25:1-10 Luke 21:25-36
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
As the first Sunday of Advent, this is the beginning of the Christian year, and the texts focus on the ending, the apocalyptic visions of corrupted life coming to an end so the fullness of divine life takes hold forever. Many a Bible-pounding preacher has screamed out about the End Times by quoting some of these verses, like the one where people will see “‘The Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.” Many an emotion – especially fear – have been stirred to get people riled up enough to make a change in their life.
Yet within these verses is a quiet assurance that God is here all along, and change is part of God’s creative process from the beginning. Jesus is sharing an invitation to awareness, to a deeper type of change that invites participation in what God is already doing. As eternity intersects with time, like it does at every moment, a multi-dimensional, full body experience takes place where our hearts are rooted in love, and we’re invited to see with a new type of perception which trusts God’s mercy and love which “have been from of old.”
Suzanne Guthrie helps us enter in these scriptures on this day of Hope by asking, “Why does the new year begin with dread, darkness, portents in the sky: the sun darkened, the moon obscured, stars falling, the heavens shaken? Why does the new year begin with the ultimate ending: the end of life, the end of the world, the end of time itself? / A beginner in faith might come to church on the first Sunday in Advent expecting to catch an early glimpse of the baby Jesus. Instead, the sky roils with doom, earthquakes shaking us until our bones rattle. Why begin the liturgical year with the end of everything? / Keep awake! says the Church on the First Sunday of Advent. The very warning cuts to the heart of my deepest, unnamed fear. This fear lurking at the edges of my being arises from my implicit worry about existence itself. If I exist, I can be annihilated. Dread is the twin sister of consciousness. As soon as I realize I am awake, I know that I can die. / Surely I can choose to wake just a little, and stay oblivious to the larger questions of the puzzle of existence. Surely I can fill my life with distractions and glittery things and a thousand lesser worries, to keep that one great worry in the shadows behind the lesser ones. But the church asks me right from the first day to enter my dread, my fear of death, my existential anxiety. / On the first Sunday of Advent the Church says, Look! Keep awake! Face your profoundest fear, and then, my Love, I have something wonderful to show you! / I was not particularly thrilled when I realized that I was on a Christian path over forty years ago. But at least I knew from the beginning that not only did the church acknowledge my deepest fears, but invited me to experience my fear as a portal. Gently, gently, uncovering, unfolding, revealing.” (Suzanne Guthrie, On the Edge of Enclosure, a weekly online preaching resource, http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/advent1c.html).
Isn’t that amazing? “If I exist, I can be annihilated. Dread is the twin sister of consciousness. As soon as I realize I am awake, I know that I can die.” And fear is a portal.
As these scriptures mix the beginning with the end, God’s pattern and promise are revealed. These verses remind us God’s divine signs are there…
Signs are all around us – in the sun, the moon, and the stars (and on earth)
But on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring… Images like these echo primordial mythic tales where people know the good but they don’t choose it. Fear trips us up, every one of us.
In Luke, the passage starts with people fainting from fear and foreboding and ends with being alert and through prayer having strength to escape (things that will take place) and stand (before the Son of man).
Looking at Psalm 25, in a similar way, we find words expressing quality, and words expressing action. Quality words like: shame, ashamed, wantonly treacherous; truth, salvation, mindful, steadfast love, from of old; goodness’ sake, good, upright, humble, right, faithfulness, love, covenant. Also Action words like: lift, trust, exult, wait, make, know, teach, lead, teach, wait, do not remember, remember, is, instructs, leads, teaches, keep. Also words that express movement: your ways, your paths, the way, leads the humble, all paths of the LORD. What an amazing mix this morning of qualitative words, a sense of movement, and actions which need chosen, to move away from fear and worry and toward strength and alert awareness that involves divine Presence.
To help move us out of fear and existential angst, into a deeper hope, Cynthia Bourgeault writes about the unshakable depths of hope, saying, “Must we be whiplashed incessantly between joy and sorrow, expectation and disappointment? Is it not possible to live from a place of greater equilibrium, to find a deeper and steadier current? The good news is that this deeper current does exist and you actually can find it. . . . For me the journey to the source of hope is ultimately a theological journey: up and over the mountain to the sources of hope in the headwaters of the Christian Mystery. This journey to the wellsprings of hope is not something that will change your life in the short range, in the externals. Rather, it is something that will change your innermost way of seeing. From there, inevitably, the externals will rearrange. / The journey to the wellsprings of hope is really a journey toward the center, toward the innermost ground of our being where we meet and are met by God. / Meditation, more than any other spiritual practice, nurtures the latent capacities within us that can perceive and respond to divine hope. In the classic language of our tradition, these capacities are known as the ‘spiritual senses.’”
In other words, Cynthia is suggesting that it’s one thing to hold out hope, but for hope to really resonate, we need to cultivate receptors within us so we can receive deeply the very hope that will shape our living. Just as Jesus has said he comes to give life, and life abundant; so too, most people just bump along living life. But nurturing our “spiritual senses” makes life’s experience deeper, or more abundant, or meaningful. It has a way of opening us to God-given capacities we usually deny, or are too busy with distractions to focus on.
She continues, “Deeper than our sense of separateness and isolation is another level of awareness in us, another whole way of knowing. Thomas Keating, in his teachings on centering prayer, calls this our ‘spiritual awareness’ and contrasts it with the ‘ordinary awareness’ of our usual, egoic thinking. The simplest way of describing this other kind of awareness is that while the self-reflexive ego thinks by means of noting differences and drawing distinctions, spiritual awareness ‘thinks’ by an innate perception of kinship, of belonging to the whole. / The only thing blocking the emergence of this whole and wondrous other way of knowing is your over-reliance on your ordinary thinking. If you can just turn that off for a while, then the other will begin to take shape in you, become a reality you can actually experience. And as it does, you will know […] your absolute belonging and place in the heart of God, and that you are a part of this heart forever and cannot possibly fall out of it, no matter what may happen. / On the contemplative journey, as we swim down into those deeper waters toward the wellsprings of hope, we begin to experience and trust what it means to lay down self, to let go of ordinary awareness and surrender ourselves to the mercy of God. And as hope . . . flows out from the center, filling us with the fullness of God’s own purpose living itself into action, then we discover within ourselves the mysterious plenitude to live into action what our ordinary hearts and minds could not possibly sustain. (Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God, Cowley Publications: 2001, pgs. 2-3, 42, 43, 48, 52, 98.
As posted on https://cac.org/mystical-hope-2018-11-30/ Daily Devotional from Center for Action and Contemplation).
What kind of people does Christ call us to be? This week our Advent answer would be “People who live with HOPE.” This hope is not shallow or based on our own works or strength, we cannot sustain it; but its depth and breadth are as awesome and amazing as the God who gives this hope through Christ Jesus. God is here all along, and change is part of God’s creative process from the beginning. Jesus is sharing an invitation to awareness, to a deeper type of change that, through perception of the heart, nurtured through meditation, invites participation and action in what God is already doing. The Son of Man comes in God’s Presence with power and great glory. May we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and may God be glorified, NOW, even as forever. Amen.