Hope: She is Fierce!

Isaiah 64:1-9     Advent Prose    1 Corinthians 1:3-9      Mark 13:24-37

Today is the first Sunday of advent, the start of our new year, and our theme is hope.

Last week, we heard Jesus’ familiar words from Matthew’s gospel, that said ‘when was it we saw you hungry and gave you something to eat, or thirsty and gave you something to drink. When was it that you were in prison and we visited you…’ and we heard Jesus’ reply; ‘when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me’ and I spoke about Ned in detention, and how we can see the Christ in the faces of those most in need.  

And the thing that always broke me most, about visiting Ned, was that he had given up on hope. He had had his hopes raised and dashed too many times in the 11+ years he was locked up. For him hope was too dangerous a thing. In one of his newspaper articles Ned wrote ‘hope is like torture to me. I can’t afford it’. It seems to me that one of the biggest crimes humanity can inflict on another is to remove hope.

And while it was Ned’s own court case that finally brought a change in legislation that ruled indefinite detention as unlawful – a ruling that brought hope to so many detainees – it still didn’t give hope to Ned. It didn’t free him.

This week, on Thursday, I got the very tiniest glimpse of what he had faced, and what it is like to feel out of hope because I got a text that said, ‘He’s out’…and a follow up one that simply said ‘free’. I facetimed him and saw him standing on the right side of the wire fences, with his bags. I got a picture message of him in the taxi, driving away from detention. But I didn’t dare hope it was true until I stood side-by-side with him in the city much later that night – outside, under a huge sky. Only then did I dare to hope it was true and that his future is free and bright. And I don’t know how long it will take for Ned to have hope that this is true, or that his future is bright.

Friends, there are some truly horrific things happening in our world today; I don’t need to tell you that. Climate change, global boiling, war, racism, oppression, slavery, huge inequality between the rich who just get richer and the poor who die from poverty. There’s injustice all around, and there is gut wrenching fear.

And yet, hope seems to be relentless in her pursuit of us. It’s almost like, whatever injustice humankind inflicts on another, still hope will find her way through – like poppies pressing through the concrete – we somehow can’t move without being bombarded by the blessings of the creator. Just like the fig tree in this morning’s gospel, so hope is sprouting her own leaves everywhere I look. She is all over the place and she is totally beguiling!

Hope is a fierce beast.

She is told she is torture and cannot be afforded, and yet she whispers quietly into detention cells and writes court cases to make indefinite detention illegal for all people, forever. And she wins.

She gets put on the back-burner but she refuses to stay there.

She stands, defiant, when the dangers and difficulties and darkness of this world threaten to overwhelm her. And she just lights a tiny candle to illume the whole place.

She dares to believe that another world is not just possible, she is on her way and on a quiet day, she can hear her breathing.

And she does all she can to live in that world today – as if it is already here.

Today marks the beginning of this new season of advent – a period of waiting. But in this period of waiting, we are not waiting hope-less and we are not waiting idly.

We are waiting, with hope, for the fulfilment of the promises Jesus made to return. And as we wait, so we are spotting signs of where Jesus is already alive and well and working. For us, hope isn’t torture and it can be afforded, because we can see, in part, that which we are waiting for. God is already here – always has been, always will be – what we are waiting for is already bursting out and springing up.

And it is characterised by hope. It is hope that the day of salvation is here…and coming…that it’s something that is not just possible but is on its way. It’s hope that says ‘even after 11 years we believe your freedom is possible and we will be with you until that day comes…and beyond’. It is the hope that says, ‘for you it is torture and cannot be afforded so we will hope for you until the time you can hope too’.

The springing up of the Kingdom of God looks like light in dark places, work for the unemployed, food for the hungry, release for those who are indefinitely detained, housing for the homeless, clothing for the naked, healing for the sick – hope for those who are in the depths of despair.

The unravelling and revealing of the Kingdom of God among us is pure hope for today and the future. It is hope-filled and hope-giving.

Hope is coming. It is on its way. And hope will not disappoint us.

And as we encounter those who are without hope right now, may we offer ourselves to be bringers of it. May we commit ourselves to noticing – like with the reminder last week to see Christ in the hungry and thirsty and naked and sick and lonely and imprisoned. May we need to notice those for whom hope is torture and offer to sit alongside them and hold that candle of hope for them, until they can hold it for themselves. Or, as Jesus put it in this morning’s gospel reading – ‘what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake’.

Friends, hope is all around us and she is unstoppable.

So let’s keep awake; let’s spot it, and spread it, and be it! Amen.