November 29, 2020

Cate Thorn

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

Today marks Advent One and the theme is hope.

So let’s begin with an easy question, shall we? What is hope?

If we look to today’s gospel, hope, we might presume, resides the other side of suffering darkness, of stars falling and heaven being shaken, in words that will not pass away. Beware, keep alert, keep awake – hope is not yet, not in what is.

If ‘in biblical reference we do trust’ when searching what is hope, we might find ourselves in Romans 8 that reads “for in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” In hope we were saved; hope that is seen is not hope; if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience – hope in this context appears to be something we’re quite passive before.

What about hope in the context we find ourselves? Some of you may know that for the last couple of years I’ve participated in an online community of Deep Pacific Change Agents. Every 6 weeks a group of us, mainly from Australia and NZ, ‘meet’ via Zoom. It’s hosted by an American woman, Carol Sanford of some international renown. Carol shares her thinking and challenges us to test it, not to unthinkingly trust it. We learn together as we share and test her propositions through our lived experience. We met a couple of weeks ago. I was struck by a question she posed. It went something like this “How often do we work on something we don’t know how to think about?” “How often do we work on something we don’t know how to think about?”

Is this nonsense, how is it possible to work on things you don’t know how to think about? Mind you how do you hope in something that is not seen!

Let us consider … what do we want the impact of our life to be? The life we’re currently living, by the grace of God and good health, we’ll continue to live for some time. Yet we don’t know what, or perhaps how our life will play out. Yes, we can strategize and plan and imagine its shape – but we don’t know what it will actually be. And the longer we live the more we realise the unlikely, unexpected surprising happens more often than not. How many 5 year plans made since 2015 included a 2020 Covid-19 global pandemic?

Say we want our life to contribute into the world – for good. Maybe we can be more specific – for the planet/the homeless/jobless/to relieve child poverty, for our whanau, for our community. Each of these points to a life lived toward something beyond us, for a greater cause.

The reality is that what we do emerges from who we are – as individuals, as groups, as entities. Our doing emerges, expresses our thinking, our understanding, our learning. How much time do we invest paying attention to this?

Because if we want/imagine/hope for something – a way for the world to be that is unlike the way it is – for this to come into being, to be the work we do, the impact of our life, it requires us to be able to pay attention to how our thinking outworks and to learn to think differently. Because our habits, our ways of thinking, is creating our current reality.

When I pose the question, “What is hope?” I pose it here. Not into a vacuum but into a Christian context. A context that tells a story of God with us, that we’re divinely companioned. The question of hope therefore is posed into a context of presence, not absence. The reading we hear from Isaiah today is a lament. In this tradition the lament is understood to be a “profound statement of faith in God from the midst of utter human hopelessness … the worshipper prays in the midst of [their] pain” [1], believing their condition is cared about, trusting the outcome to be held in God, that they’re not abandoned. What is hope, in this context? Might it suggest hope is about having courage to remain present in all of life’s challenges? Even in deepest despair a peculiar courage and resolve arises – for something deeper resides, holds and grounds us.

The lament, we hear, is a profound statement of faith. In the context of Christian faith, what has faith to say of hope? Again, if we turn to the bible, our search might lead us to Hebrews 11 which links hope with faith. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Faith is assurance, conviction and understanding of things hoped for and not seen. Again hope seems something we’re passive before, faith is a trusting dependency that God will enact that which is hoped for. Could this be a way to interpret the world so to make sense of our human experience? Looking back we’ve created a story and we continue to tell it in like form into the future.

Yet “What is hope?” How about we ask, what is something we hope for? Say, a world without suffering? A world where honest, truthful mutually beneficial exchange prevails rather than one of incessant wrangling for power? Speaking to such aspiration Yuval Harari, author, Israeli public intellectual and historian proposes “Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things … that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony. … Scholars throughout history found this dilemma; do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity?

As a species,” he asserts, “humans prefer power to truth … we spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control. Therefore if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo Sapiens.” [2]

Interesting, a little discomforting – maybe this too is a looking back, interpreting of human experience to create a story that continues to be told into the future. Are we willing to consider that what we hope for, more often than not, is founded on what we know and it’s prejudiced by a human preference for power over truth? Most of what we hope for is what we see. And it’s creating this world we occupy.

So what of hope?

Perhaps hope give us courage to live with what is, with the way things are, plans and expectations disconcertingly interrupted, courage to remain present even in the suffering caused by living fully. For “we do not hope for what we have” Thomas Merton reminds us. “Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it.” [3]

In this season of Advent on this Sunday of hope, if we want things, our world to be otherwise, maybe it’s time to pay attention, to be alert, keep awake to our habits and ways of thinking, for in doing so we will pay attention what we do and it might make all the difference to and in the world.

[1] http://www.crivoice.org/isa64.html

[2] Yuval Noah Harari 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2019, 281-282.

[3] Thomas Merton No Man Is an Island New York: Harvest, 1983, 13-1