St Luke’s, Havelock North – Advent 2, 2007 – Sermon

Readings: Isaiah 11: 1-10, Romans 15: 4-13, Matthew 3: 1-12

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope.”

Twenty years ago, at about this point in the year, I got a phone call early in the morning to tell me that my younger brother had been involved in a motorcycle accident. He was in intensive care and they were worried about his back so later that morning they were going to fly him to Christchurch where he would be admitted to the Burwood Spinal Unit for what turned out to be several months. He hasn’t walked a step since.

Over the last twenty years I’ve watched my brother go through the most challenging of circumstances as he’s come to grips with being paralysed and everything that means and I can’t say that he always handled things well or even at all, but next year he’s getting married, and for those of us who have been able to do little more than watch from the sidelines for the past two decades, that means something.

For me personally, knowing what my brother’s been through puts my own life in perspective. I’ve had trials and challenges and hard times and sad times, but I’m still standing. I can still walk and run, with two fully functional legs, and when at times I might feel like it’s all too much I can say to myself, to quote those immortal words, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are.’

Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist from Vienna who survived the Nazi concentration camps, writes about one particular camp where the prisoners became convinced, for no real, logical reason, that the Allied forces were going to arrive and set them free that Christmas, and it kept them alive, literally. In freezing conditions with little food or warmth and the most horrendous treatment and conditions, those prisoners clung to the belief that they would be set free at Christmas and then Christmas came and the allied troops didn’t and within days everything changed. First one then two then three prisoners took their own lives. They stopped eating and exercising and by the time the allies did come, just six months later, more than half the prisoners in the camp had died.

Hopefully none of us will ever know the horrors of a concentration camp, or of breaking our spines, and I say hopefully in quite literal terms. Hope was literally the difference between life and death for those prisoners in Germany. Hope is the thing that keeps people going in the face of unthinkable horrors and unwinnable odds. Hope is the one thing that stands between light and darkness at the very worst of times, and I have personally become convinced that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more valuable in our world today.

In Dante’s Inferno the sign above the entrance to hell says, ‘Abandon hope all you who enter here’ because Dante knew, as I’ve come to believe, that hell is really nothing more or less than the complete absence of hope.

The question, of course, is what do we hope for?

I watched a TV item the other night about Joel Osteen. Osteen is one of the most popular preachers on American television at the moment and he’s famous for being nice. He preaches a version of what’s normally called the Prosperity Doctrine which says that if you live and do as God wants you to, then God will make you healthy, wealthy and wise. It’s a gospel based on a mix of Dr Phil and Donald Trump and it’s incredibly well received. Hundreds of thousands of people tune in every week to watch Joel Osteen on television and just as many flock to the former sports stadium that is his church and over the past year they have gladly handed over some 73 million US dollars because the all want what he’s offering.

It’s not just the money or the power or the healing or the happiness, what these people want, what we all really want, is hope.

If you’re sitting in a home in middle America today watching your sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters die in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course you want some hope. If you’re witnessing the spending of billions of dollars by would be presidents while people still freeze to death in the streets of major US cities, of course you want some hope. If you’re hearing over and over and over again that the planet we live on is buckling under the pressure of too many people and too much climate change, of course you want some hope.

But hope in what? Isaiah had an idea. So did John the Baptist. Isaiah’s hope was for a whole new world – a peaceable kingdom, as it’s often called – a world where the peace of creation itself was restored to the way it was in the beginning, where even the realm of nature lives in harmony, but that isn’t all.

For Joel Osteen and others who want to preach that the hope God offers is about our own personal fulfillment and enrichment, I say look again at Isaiah. Look again at the many places in scripture where it becomes crystal clear that God’s hope has incredibly little to do with whether or not I get rich.

For Isaiah the hope of God falls squarely on the side of those who need it most. In the chapter before the reading we’ve heard today we find an overwhelming condemnation of the political forces of the day, led by King Ahaz, which had focused on giving more power to the powerful and wealth to the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the destitute, the sick and the unclean. In chapter 10 Isaiah describes how God will essentially clear-fell the political landscape to make room for a whole new regime, a regime that will come from the shoot that rises from the stump of Jesse, a revival of the house of David, which will govern with righteousness and justice and compassion for those who need it most.

If we read them properly there’s no escaping the blatantly political nature of these passages. Isaiah isn’t promising that if the Israelites do as they’re told God will bless them all in their nice little homes, he’s saying God will deal justice to those who are unjust and it’s only once the political landscape is dealt with, once economic and social justice has been done, that the creation itself will be in a position to be restored.

For Isaiah the hope of God is not in what’s in it for me, but in what’s in it for those who have so much less than I do.

John the Baptist makes a similar point. He’s out there doing his thing in the wilderness, this once privileged kid from an upper middle class home, who has thrown it all away to be the last of the Old Testament prophets, preaching in the wild places, warning of the things on the way, and calling people to repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near. And they’re listening. People are coming from all directions, the old and the young, the men and the women, the poor and even the rich. A group of Pharisees bowl up wanting to be baptized – they’re listening to what he’s saying, they’re hearing the promises of a new world to come, and if anyone deserves to be a part of it they do, and John says, ‘hold it.’ You brood of vipers, he says. Who are you to try and avoid the coming judgement? What have you done to earn that right?

These are the most respectable of the respectable. They’re from the best of families with the most important of names – pillars of the community who demand respect just by the very fact that they are who they are, and John says none of it matters. It doesn’t matter who your family is or how respectable you are – none of that means anything to God. It’s the fruit you bear, it’s what you do that counts.

What are you doing to bring hope to the poor, to the sick, to the sad?

If we’re going to be honest we have to say that the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist and so many others, including Jesus himself, there’s very little hope in them for the likes of the Pharisees. There’s very little in the way of hope for the rich and the influential. Matthew’s gospel uses the story of John and the baptism of Christ as a kind of introduction to the laying out of what Jesus really stood for in the Sermon on the Mount, and there’s not a lot of hope there for some. ‘Blessed are the poor and the meek and the hungry and the mournful, but woe to you who don’t lift a hand to help them.’ For us and those like us - the privileged, the comfortable, the haves rather than the have nots – these visions of hope that we find in the likes of Isaiah, Jesus and John are actually major challenges, and a very long way from what we get from the likes of Joel Osteen.

So where is our hope?

I don’t want to deny for a moment that God offers us hope in our own personal darknesses. All of us, no matter how much money we have or where we live or what our family name might be, all of us know what it’s like to despair sometimes, and there is hope that comes from God in those situations, but it’s not the whole story.

The invitation of Advent, I believe, is to take the traditional themes of the season – peace, hope, joy and love – and explore them anew, honestly, carefully, asking ourselves what they really mean not just to us, but to God. When God promises peace, or joy, or love, what does that mean? And when God offers hope to the poor and the sick and the widow and the orphan, how do we too find hope in that?

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope.” Amen.