Hope is Advent Resistance

Hope, by its very nature, is resistance. Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is not pretending everything is fine or will be fine in the near term. As Rebecca Solnit writes,

“Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes— you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”¹

You may be thinking that as Christians we do actually know what will happen. Christ will come again and the Kingdom of God will be fully present. But if we’re honest, we only have the most general sense of what God’s desires and intentions are. And we certainly don’t exactly know God’s plans or timing. As the disciples show us, time and again, we humans have a poor grasp of what God’s kingdom, in all its weird and unpredictable possibilities, will be like. Nevertheless we live in hope.

How do we act with hope? How do we live in hope? We begin by looking to the stories of the Bible. They tell us how people in the past lived and acted in hope. Walter Bruggemann reminds us, “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” ²

So we remember. We remember with our children, our grandchildren, ourselves and each other. We read and reread; tell and retell the nativity stories. This Advent I invite you to read and reread Luke’s telling of the nativity. This footnote will take you to the text³. It’s only two chapters, just five pages. Read it as often as you are able this Advent. Let the story sink into your life.

As you read, notice that everyone in the story lives and acts in hope. Their hope, their expectation that God will be at work in the world, rescuing and redeeming Israel. They are waiting for the Messiah. They don’t know how or where the Messiah will appear. They have ideas about who the Messiah will be, but they don’t know exactly. But they do know the promises of God. They do know God has been faithful in the past. They remember, they live with hope and so they are able to act in the uncertainty of their lives.

How are these hopes and these acts, hopeful acts of resistance? Look and see how each person steps into hopeful actions without seeing the future clearly. But in their lives uncertainty they act, they do what they are able to do to help God create a different future. They are living under Roman occupation. Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, and Zechariah are poor, powerless people. And yet because they have hope, they dare to act. They resist the dominant message of Roman power as best they can in their lives. They will not topple the Roman Empire with a grand act. They are poor and powerless but they are not insignificant people. Their response to the status quo is not a given. They have choices to make.

The angel appears to Mary and asks her to bear a child. She agrees. She acts in hope without fully understanding how her child can be the Messiah. Joseph, believes what Mary told him and acts in hope. Elizabeth has hope that her baby will prepare the way for Mary’s baby, the Messiah. Zechariah, needs a little time, but he gets there in the end and acts out of hope. The shepherds believe the angels and go to see the baby acting in hope that he is the Messiah. Simeon and Anna, prophets waiting for the Messiah, and speak their songs embracing the hope that comes as baby Jesus. None of these people say, “I can’t possibly do that.” None of them say, “What I do won’t matter.” They step into the uncertainty and act out of hope, trust in God’s faithfulness and do what is theirs to do.

Perhaps the one who embraces hope the most is God. God placing their hope in people, over and over again. God dwells and acts in the uncertainty of possibility. God chooses to partner with and even depend on regular people. Mary and Joseph agree to the unimaginable task of being the parents of the Messiah. Their job is not to be famous or powerful. Or to be unusually brave or daring. Their job is to step into the uncertainty of parenthood, remembering what God has done in the past and trusting that same God they can hope for a different future.

What can we learn from the hope filled resistance of the nativity story? We have an idea about the sort of world God desires. It’s an incomplete vision, but we have a glimpse. We know how to move toward greater justice, greater compassion, greater shalom. We don’t see it completely. But we can see some of the next steps. We know what is in our capacity to do. None of us can do everything. But we all can do something, as individuals and as part of the various communities we are part of. We step into present action, uncertainly, with hope, with our memory of God’s actions in the past. We trust and hope in God’s guidance and help. We do what is ours to do, living into hope.

1. Hope in the Dark: Untold HIstories, Wild Possibilities, Rebecca Solnit, Haymarket Books: 2016 page xiv ↩︎
2. Bruggemann quoted in Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit, page xix ↩︎
3. You can read it here. ↩︎