Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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We’re going to need Christmas this year. Always, around the holidays, there are those who have lost something, or someone, during the year. For them, if we don’t uphold them, the festivities brings no cheer but only a deepening sense of loneliness and grief. And always there are those poor depressed souls who, if we don’t uphold them, feel worse during the holidays because everyone else seems to feel better…and they, somehow, have missed out. These we always have. But this year everyone needs upholding. We have all lost something. Christmas 2001 will be different from Christmas 2000. We’ve lost some of our innocence, if you will. On September 11, we took a blow to our self-confidence, to our abilities, to our sense of worth. Not only did we discover ourselves to be vulnerable, but we realized that we had always been so. (We had simply lived “fat, dumb and happy.” One commentator said, “We were sucker-punched.”) And it appears that, in spite of massive efforts on our part, and we will always be more or less vulnerable. Never quite the same. We’re going to need Christmas this year.
Paul’s wrapping up his letter to his Christian friends in Rome: “May the God of hope fill you will all joy and peace in believing,” he says, “so that you may abound in hope….” (Another translation says “so that you will have overwhelming hope.”) Not simply hopeful. Not simply tilted in the direction of optimism. But abounding in hope…so much so that everything else in your life (all sadness, all disappointment, all suffering, all anger and resentment) is overwhelmed by hope. Quite a promise! I would like to live like that.

It always seems strange, of course, that the Christian message which begins with a cross is, in the long run, so optimistic. Jesus suffered, Paul suffered, the Christians in Rome had suffered for their faith. (None of this happened in a movie. The actors didn’t get up and walk away when the scene was over, wiping off the fake blood. Real flesh-and-blood people were really tortured and many died, starting with Christ himself.) So why the optimism? With all that has happened to us, in this past year, how could it be said that we might abound in hope.

We are short-range pessimists and long-range optimists, which is just the opposite of the world. The world will tell us that human beings are wonderful, that any perverse behavior on their part results from poor education, or sub-standard housing, or miscommunication, and (if we could just fix these things, which someday we will learn to do), the lion would lie down with the lamb. To get better we have to get smarter. We have to improve the outward conditions of our lives, which (in the long run) make us what we are. That’s what the world thinks. And death is death. There is no more. We pass away, and the wheel simply turns again.

Our faith doesn’t place ultimate hope in this present life. The ultimate battle against evil has been fought and won, but Satan is still around and causing great mischief. Bad things will happen in this life, and good things, too, but – for now -- the only perfect things are in heaven. We accept the cross – the cross of Jesus and the cross we all must carry. We know life isn’t always fair. We have seen miracles take place: healings of body and mind and soul, but we have also seen tragedy. “Man’s inhumanity to man,” is not an aberration. It is a fact of life, and will continue to be, until that “great day in the morning.” And that’s where our ultimate hope lies.

That doesn’t mean we go around with long faces. And it doesn’t mean we’ve given up on improving the world. We hope for good things, and expect good things, all day long (because God is good), and good things often happen. And nobody works harder than Christians to improve this world. But our ultimate hope, and faith, and trust is for the long-run. And that hope buoys us up. A New Yorker cartoon shows a woman opening a gift by the Christmas tree, her husband sitting next to her beaming. She looks up and says to him, “You’re a perfect angel. You got me exactly what I needed to exchange for what I wanted.” Sometimes we have to live with the gifts we receive. Sometimes it is possible to exchange parts of us for something better (and if we can, we should). Jesus is good at helping people with that. But the perfect gift, the crown, is still a ways off.

And we can’t always distinguish good from bad. Sometimes, here on earth, what we think are the best of times turn out to be the worst, and the times that seem terrible turn out best. How many movie stars and famous athletes are living in what appears to us to be “the best of times” – indeed in what they had thought would make for the best of times. All the money in the world and all the things, and people, money can buy. And they turn in their tickets – in suicide, or drug addiction, or alcohol abuse, or find some other way to kill themselves. Everything is wonderful all around them, but nothing is wonderful inside. On the other hand, I have heard many middle-aged couples reminisce about the early years of their marriage: when they didn’t have two cents, when the children were driving them crazy, when they were struggling to keep a job and pay for a house. The worst of times, right? That’s what they thought at the time. But now they will say, “Those were the best years of all.” We don’t always know.

Much good has come out of what seemed to be bad. Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, devastated because they were childless. And out of that aching pain and disappointment, God gave them a son. Simon Peter having fallen asleep in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus needed him most, and having run away when the chips were down, and having denied even knowing Jesus to save his own skin, was a broken man. And out of that brokeness, not out of his boasting and bravado but out of his broken heart, came a great saint. Martin Luther confined and miserable in a rigid medieval Catholicism, and out of his misery came the Protestant Reformation – and much reform in the Roman church, too. Michealangelo, telling the Pope he was a sculptor not a painter, but then (at the Pope’s insistence) lying on his back all those months, on narrow board scaffolding, painting just inches above his head. And, at the end, writing these dulsitory words in his diary: “I finished the chapel I was painting today. The Pope was pleased.” I’m sure he though those were the worst of times. But out of his misery and suffering came the Sistine Chapel, one of the world’s greatest works of art, and an inspiration to millions. They all suffered. None of them could see the good that God had planned. We don’t always know.

In 1949 John Currier was sentenced to life in prison. John couldn’t read or write. After a few years, he was placed on work release, and given to the care of a farmer who housed him, and fed him, and worked him on the farm. In 1968 John Currier was released on parole. They sent him a letter to that effect, but he couldn’t read it. So he kept on working. Then the farmer died, and John kept working for the widow. He lived in a dilapidated trailer, had a horse trough for a bathtub, and a garden hose for a shower. He worked seven days a week and for that week’s work was paid five dollars. Finally, in 1978, ten years after he was paroled, someone from the local sheriff’s office realized what had happened and told him he was free. He had wasted ten years of his life – in custody when he didn’t have to be. All because he didn’t get the message that he was free.

It happens all the time. People who work so hard to please others, or to gain wealth, or to satisfy God in some legalistic way. Who put their ultimate hope in the things of this earth, and become imprisoned by them. And still keep grinding away, even though the letter announcing their freedom arrived long ago. They are abounding in hard work. They are abounding in loyalty to their firm, and to their family, and to their friends. They are often abounding in things. Sometimes they abound in self-righteousness. But they do not abound in hope which, alone, gives a reason to live.

Advent and Christmas are good times to rethink ourselves. We have, in fact, been pardoned, but we have not understood that, so we live as if in prison. To be free means to stop struggling and put our hope in God, for what he can do today, and for the future. It is not a foolish hope, not a hope that ignores reality. It is a hope that takes all reality in and still abounds. Remarkable.