Prayers and Sermon

December 15, 2024

Recording of Weekly Prayers:

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“Resistance of Becoming”

The Reverend Mark Sutherland

Recording of the Sermon:

Last week, I spoke about the call to follow Jesus as an inauguration of a Christian resistance movement. In the Christian resistance, there is no hiding place from the frightening realities of the world. Being part of the Christian resistance asks us to reject self-protective complicity with despair (there’s nothing to be done) and a hard-hearted conspiracy of silence in the face of evil.

Advent spiritually refocuses us on the thorny experience of hope. While hope is a universal trait of the human spirit, its thorniness lies in how hope raises both the promise of fulfillment and the fear of disappointment.

I cannot reflect on hope and the expectation of fulfillment without hearing the voice of my fatalistic grandmother: Expect nothing, and you will never be disappointed. We all instinctively know what she means.

To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of not getting – of disappointment. While my grandmother’s expression captures our fear of risk, it misses the essential point about hope. Hope is not primarily – a picture of a longed-for future fulfillment. We don’t yet know if it will or even can be realized. More crucially, hope is the compass setting that orients us in responding to present time challenges and grasping opportunities – the compass setting that tells us we are here – and from here, establishing a direction of travel ahead.

Don’t hope—never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment. It’s a severe limitation on present-time action – inhibiting our possibility thinking.

On Advent Sunday, I ended with the line– we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the ones we have been waiting for is the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which she comments that:

We are the ones we have been waiting for because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament. With so much greater awareness than our ancestors – and with such capacity for insight, knowledge, and empathy – we are uniquely prepared to create positive change within ourselves and our world.

A brief survey of current world and domestic events might lead us to question her confident assumption, yet she points to our capacity to understand and effect change – if we choose to.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was also a phrase that Barack Obama borrowed—not necessarily to indicate that he or his administration were the ones desperately awaited—but that present generations of our society have the potential to change American society’s direction of travel towards an—as yet—unrealized future. Such a future is shaped by the courage to hope.

At the everyday level of experience, we have begun to doubt the truth of this assertion as we live through the chaos and upheaval of a period saddled with the rigidity of a two-party political system and an increasingly self-serving political class disinterested in responding to voter dissatisfaction. The shape of our future hope is bedeviled by the paradox that as we increasingly dream of utopian futures, we become more cynical about the possibility of change.

The purpose of hope is not to inhabit the future before it emerges but to focus our attention on the quality of our present-time choices—both those we boldly embrace and those we fail to make. Hope is a lifetime’s work requiring courage in a world that often—like my grandmother’s saying—plays up the risk of disappointment.

In the OT reading for this third Sunday in Advent, we hear a section from the prophet Zephaniah. Zephaniah is the 9th in a group of 12 – known as the minor prophets. The designation minor refers not to the lesser importance of their message but to the shortness of their prophecies. Compared to the major prophets whose prophecies unfold at greater length – Isaiah’s cover 66 chapters; Jeremiah’s, 52; Ezekiel’s a mere 48, Zephaniah’s prophecy is only 3 chapters long – reminding us that in this case, less is more!

Zephaniah wrote in the middle of the 5th century BC, around the pivotal period of King Josiah’s reforms in the 620s. The overall mood in Zephaniah is exceedingly gloomy about the present-time outlook but holds strong hope for a future better than the past—a future in which God will save the lame and gather the outcast, changing their shame into praise and bringing them home. It’s important to note that while Zephaniah looks to divine action to rescue Israel from its current predicaments, history reminds us that divine action is effective only when channeled through human agency.

In chapter 8:7-18, Luke continues to develop a picture of

John the Baptist’s attraction to all conditions of people flocking to flee the wrath to come – seeking reassurance against future anxieties. He charges the pious, comfortable, and despised security thugs of the oppressive regime—Jewish as well as Roman—to bear fruit worthy of repentance. They ask him, “What then should we do?” John’s answer must have left them wishing they had never asked.

John lays out a template for ethical behavior as the prequel to the upwelling of God’s kingdom among them. He instructs the rich to share their abundance with those who have little. He warns those with power to manipulate the economic system against dishonesty and abuses motivated by greed. To those with police and military powers of coecian, he decries their practices of intimidation through violence and extortion with menaces, telling them to be satisfied with their wages.

John impresses upon the crowds the urgency of the moment. He warns them that the axe is already laid to the roots of the trees—a metaphor for an attack on the societal pillars supporting injustice. The hope of liberation that the crowds hear in John’s message understandably leads them to misidentify him as the Messiah. John disavows, prophesizing that there is no time to lose as one more powerful than he is following close on his heels.

Last week, I spoke about the call to follow Jesus as an inauguration of a Christian resistance movement. In the Christian resistance, there is no hiding place from the frightening realities of the world. Being part of the Christian resistance asks us to reject self-protective complicity with despair (there’s nothing to be done) and a hard-hearted conspiracy of silence in the face of evil.

Instead of passively pining for God to beam us up out of the mess we have made – as a Christian resistance – transformed by the teaching of Jesus, we embody the change we long to see. Together, we courageously face the challenges and seize the opportunities of the present time in recognition that our hope in a future where justice becomes the byword – is already working effectively upon us.

On the 3rd Sunday in Advent, we are reminded that we are already the ones we have been waiting for. Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not – then who will be?