Sermon for November 14, 2021 -The First Sunday of Advent , Year B, The Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello

Every Advent season, hope is a word that gets thrown around a lot.  It is a season of hope.  It is a season of longing and expectation, which are really just other ways of saying it is a season in which we focus our attention not on what is, but what might be, when God’s dream for the world is known “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Because we are an Easter people, we are a people of hope.  We know, theoretically at least, that how the world is, or how it seems, or what we are going through, these are but Good Fridays on the way to an empty tomb.

In the very worst of times, hope is the gift from God that allows us to get out of bed, put our feet on the floor and work another day on behalf of God’s dream.

The world can come at us with the worst it’s got to offer, but it cannot strip us of hope.  And if we still have hope, we have everything we need.

As Saint Paul writes earlier in his letter to the Hebrews, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19 NRSV).

Hope is our soul’s anchor, keeping us grounded in God’s love and grace while the boat in which we find ourselves is tossed about, seemingly out of our control.

None of this is to say that our hope is not tested and tried.  Lord knows it is.  

None of this is to say that we haven’t gone days, or weeks, or longer when it seemed the world had managed to rip the anchor of our soul from the ground and we wondered how much longer we could endure.

For many of us, for much of our lives, hope has been about a world that would be better than our current one, even as our current one was pretty good.  In earlier days, the Hope expressed at Christmas was an idea that “others” might know justice, that the hungry “somewhere” would be fed, the thirsty in other parts of the world might drink, proverbial prisoners would be visited, the hypothetical lost would be hypothetically found and the proverbially “lowly” would be proverbially lifted up.

But not this year.  This year, the hope that is set before us feels much closer to many more of us than it ever has before.

The pain and suffering of the world seems a lot less abstract.  Isolation and fear are known by a great many more of us.  

It seems as though I hear the phrase “I don’t know how much longer I can…” or “how much more can I take, can they take, can we take?”  more than I ever have these past many months.

And yet, here we are.  Here this morning, whether in person or online, because there is a hope in us that refuses to die.  There is a hope within us that tells us, a lot of evidence to the contrary it seems, that the world can be different.  And this hope tells us that, somehow, beyond our understanding or imagining, we might just have a role to play in changing the world.

We are here because hope is the anchor of our souls.  You might not feel it, it might seem lost or out of reach but it is there.  

And that Hope allows us to be, in the words of Dr. Catherine Meeks, “a half shade braver” than we thought we could be.

Whenever I am struggling with some part of my life of faith, I try to think of the teachers I have around me who might show me a way forward, or a new way of thinking about things.

I have a great many professors of hope in my life.  

But it was meeting and working alongside the clinicians and patients in the Brain Tumor Clinic at Mass General and the Brigham that showed me the power of hope in the most powerful of ways.  

Research and treatment has changed since I worked in the clinic, but a diagnosis of Glioblastoma Multiforme was a diagnosis that brought a hush to any room.  

And yet, the hope that this diagnosis inspired, in the patients and in the doctors, in the nurses and clinicians who worked with them, would set me on my heels on a fairly regular basis.

Despite the studies and the often quoted five year survival rates, these doctors and their patients met each day with a hope that this would be the day when the cancer would be defeated, and for good. And this Hope seemed to make everyone just a half shade braver.

There were some hard days in those clinic rooms.  Days when the hope for cure would become a hope for quality of life, or a hope for a day without pain, or a hope for a good death.  But there always seemed to be room for hope as the walls seemed to be crumbling around them.

Sometimes, it is the very pieces of crumbled wall that become the foundation for the birth of a new hope.

Jesus and his friends are leaving the temple and they are, understandably, awe-struck by the beauty of the building in front of them.  This beautiful structure was a physical triumph meant to stand as a symbol of God’s power and might.  This re-built temple proved that God’s presence in the world could not be defeated.  

But Jesus knew (or the writer of the Gospel knew, since it already had happened by the time Mark was written) that the temple would not stand.  The beautiful structure around them would not last, but crumble.  This would have been blasphemous to say out loud, practically proclaiming that God would be, could be defeated.

But Jesus knows that the hope that is in God, the love that is God, the peace that comes from God, none of that can be destroyed by a temple crumbling, or a war fought between nations, or an earthquake, or any other thing that might seem to indicate otherwise.  Not even his own death on a cross.

But Jesus goes further.  He says that these things that some would interpret as signs of God’s defeat would be, could be, the very “birthpangs” of God’s breaking into the world.

Maybe that’s the difference between those who can do the impossible and still hold out hope, and those who struggle to see any hope in the world at all.

Maybe those who know hope see things a bit differently.  Maybe the hard things in the world that some might see as evidence that God is absent, the hopeful see as birthpangs, holding potential to birth God into the world.

When I think about the many hard parts of the last 18 months, I can think about them as evidence in the argument against a loving God, or I can think about them as birthpangs.  Hard, excruciating pains on the wait to the birthing of God’s dream for the world, if we let them be.

Every challenging headline, every news report, every heart ache has the potential to be transformed from the last word on the subject to a birthpang on the way to God coming into the world if we meet it with hope, the anchor of our soul.

I wonder if anything in the world has ever changed for the better without a birth pang of one kind or another.  But has God’s dream for the world ever been furthered by despair?  Does anything have the possibility of changing if we don’t first see the signs all around us as the potential endings of the way things have always been so that the way they can be, might be, can have a chance in this world?

Signs of endings all around us.  Birthpangs to the inbreaking of God, if we let hope be the anchor of our souls, and commit to being just a half shade braver, together.

AMEN.