Hope

This is the first Sunday of Advent and for many a church the theme of this day is hope. I have spent a good portion of the day thinking about hope. I think hope is often relegated to wishful thinking or starry eyed optimism. One hopes they can do well, hopes for the best, hopes that everything will work out. This hope can be dashed, lost, or given up. For hope to mean something in this world it has to sustain a barrage of blows. Hope has to be more than wishful thinking to survive.

Working in a hospital has made me realized all the more how tenuous our grasp on hope can be. Hope has to be fierce here. And even if that hope is undeterred by bad diagnoses, surgeries, and the ominous cacophony of life-sustaining machines, those hopes can still find themselves sometimes crashing into the cold reality that a loved one will not be okay. At least, not okay in the way we hope.

There is a song on Vampire Weekend’s latest album called “Hope.” I really like the song, but I wonder if I should. The plaintive refrain is “I hope you let it go / I hope you let it go / The enemy’s invincible / I hope you let it go.” Sometimes I hear those lyrics and it is a comfort to me. Other times it feels like it is just waving a white flag in the face of an unfair world.

There are many “enemies” in this life that seem nigh-invincible. Death, a prominent foe where I work, eventually comes for us all. I have seen enough school shootings and victims of racism without meaningful change that guns and white supremacy sure seem to be untouchable. The rich and the powerful seem to skate by unchecked regardless of what they do. When the bully wins, when your dream is shattered, when your loved one is lost, what is even hope? Do you just have to let it go? At the very least the song is suggesting that we have no control over that which steals, kills, and destroys.

Then Advent comes along and you read the word of prophets promising a better day. Mary jubilantly sings about the powerful being brought low. We sing of angels declaring peace on earth. We anticipate a child being born who will bring light into a darkened world. A child who will bring hope. Yet it has to be more than just wishing that things will one day be made right to mean anything in this world.

I have begun—or maybe have forgotten and begun again—to wonder if hope is not so much believing that everything will turn out alright as much as it is defiantly living that conviction out. Jesus invites his followers to live into a world of which we only catch glimpses. We are told that the Reign of God is already here but it is also achingly far away.

So we’re asked to love our enemies in a world where individuals rise to power on division and hatred. We’re asked to stand with for the vulnerable when our cultural and economic systems want to ground them underfoot. We’re asked to sit with the sick even though death comes for us. We’re asked to be compassionate against all the odds. It is a tough hope that chooses to live into that still gestating Dream that God has for this world.

I do hope that one day God will make everything alright. That God will lift up the low and wipe away every tear. Some days that hope burns more brightly than others. Yet that hope cannot just live in my head or in thoughts about the future. Otherwise it is just wishful thinking. So I have to live out that hope the best that I can. Actually we need to live out that hope the best that we can. We have to practice our hope with love, presence, listening, serving, and every other good thing under the sun. We have to practice it even if we only catch a glimpse of that hope bearing fruit.

That Vampire Weekend song has been stuck in my head all day as I have walked the hospital halls. I am not sure what to do with it. I cannot control seemingly invincible enemies. Heck, when those enemies are people, I am technically supposed to love them which is annoying but also likely the point. Yet I have found myself dragged down when the world seems to be an unjust place; wondering if it all matters. And this Advent, I hope I let that go to live out hope as best as we can.