Hope for the Embattled

Sermon

“I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse,” Anne Lamott writes. “I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen.” (Almost Everything: Notes on Hope) Doesn’t that sort of capture the essence of hope in a nutshell? We worry, worry, worry about what might happen and simultaneously enjoy the hope of what is about to come to life.

This Advent, we’re focusing on hope, and we’re looking at some not-so-usual stories from scripture that offer signs of hope from God for the people of God. This week we’ll look at the mythic tale of the Woman Clothed with the Sun; more on her later. Next week we will hear the story of Hagar and Ishmael, characters in the saga of Abraham and Sarah. Then we will hear the story of Elizabeth and the story of Mary, both from Luke’s gospel.

Back to the Sun Woman. My goodness, I wish we had a hour just for Bible study on this story, part of the wild book of Revelation, a vision story, an allegory, a book of hope for an oppressed people. Instead, we get about fifteen minutes of a sermon, and I will try my best to do justice to this woman.

Let’s begin with an obvious question: who is this woman? She is a woman in labor, and that means she is both extraordinarily vulnerable and incredibly strong. She is the mother of an important child, a child whose life will change the course of human events. She is a woman drawn from myth, the myth from so many cultures in which the forces of evil try to overthrow the forces of life by killing the newborn king. She reminds us of Eve and Hagar, women who go to the wilderness and are cared for there by God. She is the people of Israel; she is the Christian church; she is Mary, Queen of Heaven. As one commentator says, “…she is less and more than all of these.” (Eugene Boring)

What does this story say to us about hope? Carl Sandburg put it pithily: “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” Beyond that, we see hope in this story that God never stops working to save us, to protect us, to ensure that life continues. There is also a strange hope that we human beings are not the only ones battling evil forces; there is a cosmic battle too, and God is engaging all sorts of heavenly creatures to win the day.

And why is this an Advent story? I will admit, this story does not appear in any lectionary year’s Advent readings, and yet, I think it might work. The readings for the first Sunday in Advent are always apocalyptic, about the second coming and the end of the world. They are fantastical – “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 63) “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” (Luke 21:25) “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” (Matthew 24)

Advent begins with these readings to remind us that while Christ has already come, he will come again, and his second coming will be accompanied by tumult and chaos. So maybe this story of battles in heaven at the birth of a child captures a sense of apocalypse.

And this is a birth story, and Advent is the time we prepare for the birth of Christ. Even though it takes place in the cosmos, this birth story contains all the usual elements: a woman groaning in labor, a woman at her most vulnerable, a woman showing incredible strength. She is a woman who is cared for by her God, and a woman whose child is protected by God.

So right about now I would imagine some of you are thinking something along the lines of “Yes, Beth, this is all fine and good, but I really do not see how this cosmic myth story has anything to do with my life or my faith.” And that is a fair thought. But I’m not done yet!

One of the things this story from Revelation, and the book of Revelation as a whole, does is express how the human story is part of the cosmic conflict between good and evil. So let’s now consider our own human experience of the conflict of good and evil and what role hope plays in all of that. Specifically, let’s think about hope, a “thing with feathers” as Emily Dickinson said, and how we have hope, and what threatens hope.

Hope is an orientation toward the future, toward an unknown time when things will be better somehow. Hope is a choice – we choose to despair or we choose to hope, to believe or to pray or to think that once again the sun will creep over the horizon and a new day will dawn. And hope is not optimism. Optimism, we could say, is the belief that a positive outcome is inevitable. Hope, on the other hand, is more of a motivation to persevere even if we’re not sure we will prevail in the end.

Hope is what enables us to take a step forward, even if we cannot see the road ahead of us. Hope enables us to keep on keeping on, to fight the good fight, to work for the good even though it seems pointless.

So what threatens hope? I asked my wise colleagues that question at our staff meeting on Tuesday. Fear, they said, because sometimes fear paralyzes us, and we can’t or don’t move forward. Disconnection from one another which leads to our feeling we are all alone and have no help and have no one to protect us. And lack of agency, the inability to get something done or make a change, can kill the hope we have.

We can experience dragons coming for us, threats to our hope in so many ways. Sometimes, for a thousand good reasons, we give in to the fear. But sometimes we don’t, because there is a seed of hope in our hearts that helps us to keep on.

This week my heart was broken, as were yours, by the horrific story out of Waukesha, Wisconsin. I have served a church in that city, and while no one I know personally was hurt, the entire community is in anguish by the senseless killing. I might say that the actions of that one individual were evil – motivated by the evil intent of hurting innocent people. Dancing grannies and kids excited about Christmas; evil won.

What might hope look like to the people of Waukesha, or to anyone planning to be in a Christmas parade? Fear – reasonable, understandable fear – might keep people home. Hope might look like showing up. Hope might look like Waukesha having a parade next year. Hope might look like a community that wraps itself around all those grieving and traumatized folks. Hope means continuing to celebrate this season of joy.

Because, as Charles Spurgeon once noted, “Hope itself is like a star – not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and only to be discovered in the night of adversity.”

And where is God in our hope? For many of us, God is our ultimate hope, the hope that all those promises in the Bible will be true, are true – that God is with us, till the end; that death will be no more; that we will be saved and we will be healed, whole once more.

Our hope is that God will make sure that the mother is safe, that she will bear a child with ten fingers and ten toes, that all will be protected and cared for and provided for. We hope that God will battle on our behalf all that threatens to kill our hope, that God will win, that love will win.

And in that hope we have agency; that is to say, we have the ability to act toward that hope – to pray, to be in the faith community, to ask the hard questions and listen for the hard answers. We have the ability to dream and wonder, to look around and say thank-you; we have the ability to admit that some things hurt us too much, to admit we know how very, very much we have. All those things are marks of our agency to act in hope, in hope that God is healing and loving the world even now, a hope that is born in the heavens and on earth.