Dialogues of Hope

December 3, 2017

Cate Thorn

Advent 1     Isaiah 64:1-9     Mark 13:24-37

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Preaching this week is a speaking from the heart more than a speaking from the head. It arises from my experience of life, sometimes encounter in ministry, sometimes just because of life and being human in the face and encounter of real life with real people. Today is the first Sunday in Advent, New Year’s church day?! Advent we know is a time of looking back, telling the story of what has been and looking forward with expectation to what is yet to come. The beginning of an intentional time of preparation from which we proclaim in this creation, pregnant with divine possibility, God comes to life, in deed and in person. God – knowable, intimately familiar with the beauty and joy, suffering and struggle that is life in this world.

As is in WH this Advent we’re to explore a theme. At the moment our world is full of dialogues of despair. The characters that populate Advent face into their worlds of despair and bring a different conversation. “The Son of Man”, John the Baptist, the angel Gabriel, Mary, and Elizabeth all bring words and actions of hope, not empty hope or wishful thinking, but hope grounded in experience and faith. This Advent we will explore what happens when we engage in a dialogue of hope.” This year, perhaps more than ever, seems to me to be one that faces us, each and every day, with hard and horrid stories of the harm we can visit on one another and on our world. Although this isn’t new there seems this last year to have been an escalation, the underground what we might’ve hoped was small rivulet of xenophobia, misogyny, nationalism bigoted prejudice and hatred has become legitimised by certain leadership. What we might’ve hoped was a depleted rivulet has quite a flow. Division, fracture, violence and brokenness appear to prevail. The ripple of effect is known in our lives, in the lives of friends, our community, our city, our country.

In this place, this set apart place of church, I wonder often if we come here in part for some respite from these hard and horrid stories, we want and need solace and succour so we can bear the burden, the weight of these things. And of course this is a good and reasonable thing, to expect to find rest and rejuvenation here. However, it also seems to me that this is the place and we, the particular community of people, with calling to bring to this place in this time those hard and horrid stories and together to speak of them, to face them, to sit together with them. To acknowledge what arises in us in response to them whether it is fear, rage, frustration, helplessness, anxiety or deep sadness. Not for us to be overwhelmed by such things but so that in this place, with our seeking and searching companions we’re able together to bear this burden, lay down its weight for a while, for it to be safe here to be our honest truthful selves open to ask, is this the only way our world can be?

These hard and horrid stories reveal the way our world is, or has become. It’s not happened by chance, it’s become this way because a particular way of telling the story of being human has prevailed. Wired for catastrophe it would be easy enough for this morning’s biblical texts to reinforce our anxiety, if we took them out of their context and time, took them literally and pasted them into our day and age it would seem nothing much has changed. In some ways that’s true and yet is it not also the case that we name the stories we hear each day as hard and horrid because there’s another story, an alternate story that has different outcomes, changes the way things are. The way things are in our world isn’t inevitable or necessarily the way things have to be.

This is where we, the particular people in our time in this place who hear this story, come in. Each Sunday in Advent we add a word, a theme, hope, peace, joy, love, we gather these things and say they issue forth in the person of Jesus ‘God with us’ born on Christmas Day. The light from the Advent wreath grows brighter as each Sunday we add a candle until on Christmas Day five are burning – fine sentiment and beauty of tradition. Symbolic of deeper significance, not empty or wishful thinking though, these things are made real in time. What would it be like, in our challenging times, for us to take seriously the lineage of our religious narrative, see it as a resource for rather than an excuse to turn away from our world? Together seek, look for with expectation to find, to make real in the world hope, peace, joy and love. Not as an exercise in sentimentality but to seek where and how these things are present, with us, able to be discerned, seen and spoken of. As church we’re named the body of Christ in the world, together we’ve the potential to be God with us, hope, peace, joy, love for and in our world. Equally in this season God is revealed as present to us, how open are our eyes to see that presence where we least expect it, as we least expect it, needing the love and our nurture of people like us to grow into the fullness of life?

Earlier this year I journeyed with a family who’d lost a beloved child to suicide, the funeral was jam packed with friends, beautiful, talented, societal fringe dwelling friends on the cusp of adulthood. Amazing young people, questioning, challenging, bursting with creative energy in music and dress and word, seeking and searching, asking and probing to understand why and how and where they could fit, have place to stand to be themselves, bring their brilliance in to being, contribute to the world. Not really fitting the mould required to conform to the expectations for success, many cruise the fringes, explore the shadow lands where certainty and safety are tested.

I was asked, well perhaps challenged after the funeral as to what I saw there, what I thought of this eccentric, unconventional, testing boundary lot of young people. “I see,” I said, “a whole lot of beautiful, talented, creative young people bursting to express themselves, to have a purpose, to be told who they are matters, they don’t have to become someone else to already belong. You can see how hard it is for them to live within the confines of convention, the scars, the tattoos, piercings, the need for substances that numb. We, our society doesn’t seem to make space for this eccentricity even as we’re in desperate need of their energy and creativity, to take their questioning seriously, for the challenge it provides us about our assumptions, about what it is we value, whether the way we live aligns us with those values - whether we do what we say. It says something about how our society has become, when too many of our beautiful young people see no place or future for them in it.

What have our young people have to look forward to, if you strip away the acquisition of money, of material possessions – the house, the car, the bach, the boat, the holidays, the nest egg for retirement, the perfect body, the holy grail of never ending youth? A litany of linear acquisition through time, providing marker posts of success that can be tagged or ticked as they are achieved, but where is the art of being human in this? Where is the ‘who I am’ that is not about ‘what I have’ in all of this?” Each of us is an intended creation, each of us is needed in our community, for our community, we are each part of a whole.

It’s true that I felt it was a challenge laid down – the question asked of me. Who am I, kitted out in religious garb in a context where most of the people gathered had little, from askance suspicion of through to outright hostility toward organised religion, to speak? Who am I, not in relationship with most there, to stand, to lead and hold them through this pivotal gathered time of their grieving farewell? It is right for me to be challenged. about how it is I perceive those before me, whether I include them as they are in any words I might speak of divine inclusion, of those beloved of God. It is right for me to be challenged, whether I’m trying to cast a religious overlay over the context that would lack integrity to the people there, speak or put in their mouths words of faith that are without meaning and seek to make them say things they don’t assent to. It is right for me to be challenged, if I void divine presence from the whole context how am I a person of integrity. It is right for me to stand silent before the hostile stare, the suspicious glance, the agony of death in the prime of life, to stand with shuddering tears and heart full lament of song, willing to bear the weight and thrust of what is real in that moment. To stay with, not turn away or slide into glib or well-practised turns of phrase that turn to dust upon their speaking.

It was as we talked and dared to venture to speak of all the things that mattered most, of disbelief and loss of hope, of beauty frustrated through lack of care and context, of displacement and struggle for identity in a world that seems only to hold up one image, one mirror of what it is to be a person of value and worth, of belonging. It was as we talked honestly and frankly and often about the failure of organised religion, naming truthfully frustrations of untruth, disillusion and disappointment that the tension shifted, the energy changed, the challenge now became, “How come there’s no place to talk about these things? Isn’t this what church should be like, what church should be about?” Maybe this is what we’re doing now, maybe this is what being church looks like - maybe we only have this moment to be that with one another. It was not expected this ‘God with us’ moment revealed in this exchange, it was not as I expected either – love, hope, peace of release and in a strange way joy of connecting. It was real though.

We’ve a story that laments suffering, fear, pain, that cries out with harsh words of accusation, anger and blame – honest, heart rending and true. We lament and cry out for we know things can be other than this way. That is the story we stand in. A story of divine presence with us, threaded through creation, through us, our life, all of life. It’s a story brought to life through people inhabiting it, strong enough together to be still and bear the weight and heft of life and still insist and speak into being the hope, peace, joy and love of God with us knowable because of one another. People willing through their bodies and in their lives to bring the life of God to life for the life of the world.