Sermon given 1st December 2024 by Revd Sue McCoan
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36
Advent is a time for giving, we said earlier, and a time of waiting. It is also a time of hope. And we surely need hope in our world today. But what do we mean by hope? And where are we to find it?
In the new edition of Reform magazine there is an interview with two Palestinian men who have just written a book about the life and culture of Gaza before the war. It’s partly a celebration of the richness of that culture, partly wanting to have Palestinian voices telling their own story rather than outside commentators, and partly a record because so much is being systematically destroyed. They are asked, in the interview, ‘where do you find hope?’ – in what looks like a hopeless situation. We’ll come back to their answer later.
Our bible readings show us three different kinds of hope.
The first two come from the short reading from the letter to the Thessalonian church. We don’t know much about the church community there, but it is likely that most of the people were manual labourers. In other places, there were wealthy Christians whose homes were big enough to host the church fellowship, and these people were often named in Paul’s letters. There are no names in Thessalonians; maybe that’s why Paul was particularly concerned for them.
Manual labourers worked under what we would now call zero-hours contracts – they got paid only for the hours they worked, so if they weren’t chosen for work that day, tough luck. Their hope, every day, as they lined up in front of potential employers, was that they would be picked, and be able to work and earn.
That’s a very simple level of hope, one that we can perhaps all relate to. I hope you have a lovely Christmas; I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow; I hope this sermon makes sense. We can sometimes work towards the hope being fulfilled, like the labourers keeping themselves fit for work, or me doing preparation. But essentially this kind of hope is about things working out the way we would like them. It is a wish for the future, over which we have no real control.
The second kind of hope in the letter to the Thessalonians is Paul’s hope that he might soon be able to visit. He founded the church there, and greatly admired their faith and persistence; now he longs to go back and see them all again. Circumstances have prevented him so far – or as he puts it, at the end of chapter 2, ‘Satan blocked our way’. He so much wanted to know how they were doing that he sent Timothy on his behalf, to strengthen and encourage them; he was delighted that Timothy came back with good reports of their faith and love. So now he really wants to go. In the passage we read, the hope that he might make the visit has turned into a prayer. ‘We pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face…’, ‘May our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you.’
This is a hope that is much more than Paul wanting his personal wishes fulfilled. The church in Thessaloniki is not his work but God’s. God chose these people; God turned them away from idol-worship and gave them their faith; God has called them to be witnesses and they have answered that call, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. For Paul, his intended visit is part of his own calling, part of the work he is undertaking for God. His hope, and his prayer, are directed together towards fulfilling the will of God.
This is a hope based in the present; it requires real engagement, and an ongoing process of discernment.
The third kind of hope is seen in both readings: hope in the second coming of Jesus.
It is mentioned at the end of our Thessalonians reading: ‘…that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.’ And it is the key theme of the Luke reading: ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.’
I confess I don’t often dwell on the second coming of Jesus. It has seemed to me to be too remote, too unknowable, to be of any help. So it’s been really interesting to look at it for today, and to see that it forms the context for the whole of our Christian faith.
Luke uses some wild and wonderful imagery, even quite frightening. We don’t need to get too vexed about the details. It’s the kind of imagery we find in the book of Revelation, or in Daniel, when talking about the end times, and it’s a way of saying, ‘this is like nothing else we’ve ever seen’. The key thing is that, when earthly life is complete and God’s purpose is fulfilled, Jesus will return and bring us all into his eternal kingdom. That might be the end of earthly life for the whole planet, or just for our individual lives. It is a promise that whatever happens, Jesus is there ahead of us and ready for us. In that respect, all this poetic and dramatic description is really saying the same as the more familiar passage from John 14, when Jesus tells his disciples not to be afraid, he is going to leave them to prepare a place for them, and then ‘I will come back and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also’.
This is not a hope for something – we don’t have to hope this will happen because we are told it will. This is a hope in the power of Jesus over life and death. And we can have confidence in that hope because part of it has already happened: the resurrection of Jesus.
There was Jesus, flesh and blood human being, who got tired and hungry and angry like anyone else, who was crucified, dead and buried. Soon afterwards, people who had known him for years, people who had seen his dead body sealed in the tomb, met him again. He came to them in groups, so it wasn’t an individual hallucination. He came showing his scars; able to speak, to touch and be touched, even to eat. And they knew that he was risen from the dead, that he had broken the power of death. They understood what he had said to them at the last supper, that he could lead them through death too. The resurrection is the beginning of the promise; the return of Jesus is the completion of it.
What does this hope mean, then, in the way we live our lives?
It means, on the one hand, that we need not be afraid of death. The process of dying might be messy and horrible, and I don’t want to make light of that, but death itself is not to be feared.
And on the other hand, it means we need not be afraid to live. It is very tempting, when we hear some of the dreadful things going on in the world, when we look at the climate crisis and how little is actually being done, to pull the duvet over our heads and not want to look. Some people are tempted to think, we don’t need to sort the world out because Jesus will come again and do it for us. Jesus warns us against escapism of any kind. ‘Be on guard’, he says, ‘so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life’. Or social media, or bingeing on box sets, or whatever else we do to distract ourselves. Instead, we are to be alert, ready to face any dangers that come our way. We are to live, fully, in this world, to enjoy it and celebrate it, and to do what we can to bring the kingdom of heaven where we are.
Which brings us back to the two Palestinian writers I mentioned earlier, Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, and their response to the question, where do you find hope.
Teller quotes Edward Said, the accomplished academic, who said, ‘Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral’. Mahmoud Muna says ‘hope is the most humane act of resilience […] Hope gives you agency and the drive to do something to try to improve. It is to reach out, to show solidarity, to help. He quotes Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote that hope is something we have to cultivate: ‘you plant the hope, you water, it grows. It is a process.’
The message to start us off in Advent is that we are able to hope, because of what Jesus has done and because of what he will do. And that this hope, rooted in the past and fulfilled in the future, is our strength and inspiration in the present.
Let me end with a prayer from this year’s Prayer Handbook.
May God bless us with alertness
To the signs of the times,
Able to face squarely the troubles of the world
yet hold on to courage and hope.
May God bless us with wisdom
To follow God’s ways in humility and trust.
May God bless us with love
For one another and for the whole world.
May God bless us with joy
Giving thanks for all we have been given.
May God bless us in our watching and waiting
This Advent time and always
Amen.
