Hope Sucks

Scripture: The First Sunday of Christmas, A.D. 2014 B

Sermon:

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

A gentleman recently explained to me the meaning of Christmas as he saw it. It’s all about hope, he said.

For thousands of years before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, cultures around the world had been celebrating the winter solstice. They would gather together as families, as communities, to drink and laugh and carouse on the darkest night of the year. This, he said, was because they knew that many people might well die during the course of the coming winter. Cold temperatures, harsh storms, and limited food supplies all reminded our ancestors of just how brief and fragile life could be. The old and the sick might not last to see the spring. And if the winter proved especially harsh, no one might make it long enough to feel the sun’s warmth again.

And so in the face of all this, humanity would dance. We would sing and feast and give frivolous gifts for no other reason than to make each other happy. We were the heroic underdogs, he told me, because we had hope in a hopeless time. We tend to forget just how recent these hardships were. Only two or three generations back, winter was more than a mild inconvenience. We were completely at the mercy of a cold and unforgiving environment. But the point of Christmas, he continued, is not to remember how harsh and delicate life used to be. The point of Christmas, he insisted, was to remember that life is still brief and fragile today.

We all half-joke about tolerating the holidays with our extended families, people whom we rarely see and with whom we often have little in common. It can seem so arbitrary, getting free toys as a child, and as an adult trying to remember the name of your cousin’s new wife as you make awkward conversation. But the truth is that this might well be the last time that we see these people’s faces. That part of winter hasn’t changed. We gather on Christmas with laughing children who won’t be children for long, and with proud grandparents who may not be around for much longer. It’s all as tenuous, he said, as a snowflake on a dog’s nose.

It doesn’t occur to us “that there will never be another Christmas exactly like this one, that time will move on and people will change, and that someday your most treasured memories will be things that, at the time you experienced them, were nothing more than detached, mild annoyances.” That was his argument. That was the meaning of Christmas for him. “You don’t get many of these,” he said. “Make them count.”

And he’s right. Christmas is a time to cherish life, family, and the simple joys of hearth and home. Christmas is a time to make merry the bleakest nights of the year. But his argument was that the meaning of Christmas is hope in the face of hopelessness. He found humanity heroic because we are hopeful even when we have no reason to be. My problem with his argument is simply this: Since when has hope been a good thing?

Hope is a recipe for disaster. As a child, you hope beyond hope that your crush will love you as you love her. And when she doesn’t, you learn why it’s called a crush. As an adult, you can hope for a promotion, hope for a cure, hope for a better tomorrow. But when it doesn’t come, what has your hope given you but a farther height from which to fall?

Baseless hope is a fool’s errand. The ancients knew this. Think back to the story of Pandora’s Box. Pandora, a sort of Greek equivalent to Adam’s Eve, cannot help but peek into a box containing all of humanity’s ailments and woes. And as soon as that lid is open but a crack, out rush all the world’s calamities forever to afflict mankind. But what is left in the box? What remains to comfort Pandora in her distress? Why, nothing other than hope. Pandora still has hope. Yet when we hear this story with our modern ears, we never stop to think about why hope, of all things, would’ve been stuck in the box with all the horrors ever conceived. It’s because the Greeks saw hope itself as a woe, as a calamity, as an affliction upon mankind. Hope, the Greeks taught, will only hurt you.

You can’t just have hope. You have to have hope in something. If you just “hope,” we have terms for that: foolish, deluded, naïve. And you have to place your hope not just in something real but in something reliable. If you place your hope in a charlatan, or in a universe that doesn't care about you, you’re still just a dancing fool. Hope by itself is not laudable; it’s delusional.

Then again—maybe the universe isn’t uncaring or cruel. Maybe the universe was created good, created for you. And if so, then maybe there is something or someone higher, someone holy, who will fulfill our ancient hopes in real and trustworthy ways, even if we don’t yet know who or how. Then, maybe, our old pagan hopes might prove true. Then, maybe, our hopes might find the fulfilment for which all men have longed. This, my friends, is what shepherds found in Bethlehem one cold winter’s night. This is what wise men sought out to worship and adore.

Only in Christianity is hope considered a virtue. Only in Christianity do we dare to imagine that hope is a good thing. And the only reason that we can do this, that we can be so brave and so foolish as to set our hearts upon hope, is because we know that our hope is not in vain. We know that all our hopes are fulfilled. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” wrote St. Paul, “we are to be pitied above all men. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.” And all our hopes are all fulfilled in Him.

That’s why Jesus remains the reason for the season. Yes, people had hope before the birth of Jesus Christ: hope that life might prevail over death; hope that tomorrow might be a little better than yesterday; hope that all of our struggles and trials might mean something, might have some eternal significance, might not be forgotten and wasted, spilled out upon barren snows. If Jesus had not come—if God had not entered our world and shown us that our hopes are not in vain, that life really does mean something, that there is a purpose and an end and a love behind the great mystery of it all—then our ancient hopes would all be for naught. It would all be just one big, bad joke.

But He has come. Just as He promised He would! And He has brought with Him assurance and forgiveness and a new, eternal life. He has come into this world as the Way that never falters, the Truth that never fails, the Life that never dies. Yes, Christmas is about hope, but not a baseless hope, not a foolish hope. Christmas is about the sure and perfect hope that God is Love, the world is good, and Man has a destiny far beyond the grave.

The philosopher Seneca once wrote, “Without gods and goddesses in the heavens, the soul is not able to be sane.” That’s why there’s always religion, always gods. We have to put our hope in something higher, because we aren’t perfect and neither are any of the people we know or love or on whom we rely. So we put our hope in divinity, in something that is perfect. The only question is, will that hope be in vain?

Think of the prophets Simeon and Anna in our Gospel reading this morning. They were promised that they would see the Messiah of God’s people, the Savior of the world, before they died. And so they spent their lives in the Temple, waiting, hoping, praying for that promise to be fulfilled. We view them as heroic because they were faithful, because they trusted in the promise of God. Yet what if Christ had not come? What if they had spent their entire lives waiting to see the Messiah, only to die in disappointment and despair? What if Christmas really were about a hope that never bore any fruit? What a tragedy that would have been, all their hopes, their very lives, brought to naught.

But Christmas, brothers and sisters, is not about hope for hope’s sake. Christmas is about all of our hopes fulfilled. Because Christ has come, because the hopes of Simeon and Anna came to fruition, we can sing now with them, and with hopeful men and women of every time and place, the joyful song that only Christmas brings: “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace. Your Word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a Light to reveal you to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.”

Merry Christmas.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.