The Shape of Our Hope

The Shape of Our Hope--December 13, 2017

And Mary said, 

"My soul magnifies the Lord, 

   and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

 Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed;

    for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

        and holy is his name.

 His mercy is for those who fear him

    from generation to generation.

 He has shown strength with his arm;

    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

    and lifted up the lowly;

 he has filled the hungry with good things,

     and sent the rich away empty.

 He has helped his servant Israel,

     in remembrance of his mercy,

 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

     to Abraham and to his descendants forever." [Luke 1:46-55]

I had a proud-parent moment a few weeks ago.

We were coming to the end of the weekend that was the Christmas-tide decorating bonanza in our house, and I had said something in the presence of my children about needing to make sure we got all the boxes from decorating back down in the basement, or something like that.

And my son says, "Daddy, you know that's not what Christmas is really about...."  

I pressed him to find out what he thought, at six, Christmas was, in fact, "really about."  And, much to my surprise, my kindergarten theologian "reminded" me that it was really all about Jesus.

I was taken aback--not because I had forgotten myself that Christmas is "really about Jesus," but because I really wasn't sure what to expect out of the mouth of a child who lives in the same culture and society I do, where the clear emphasis in every commercial on television is on stuff--the acquisition of stuff, the buying and selling of stuff, and the quest for the perfect presents to give to other people to show them your "Christmas spirit."  I was, to be perfectly honest, prepared for an answer like, "Presents!" or "Santa!" or "The tree!" even some maudlin, sentimental gobbledygook about "being with your family," all of which are perhaps secondary (or lower) parts of an answer, but none of which are the bull's eye.  But there he was--telling me that Jesus was the focus--and not the fuss over whether we got the decorations up by a certain day.  He knew, in other words, that we don't just get excited about Christmas for no reason--but that there is a particular reason, a particular focus as the reason to look forward to this day.

Now, while it is still also possible that my son was just as much trying to get us to put off the boring work of putting  away boxes, that moment reminded me, both of the promise, and of the great and urgent challenge, of shaping the hope we hold onto in this season.  Saying that Christmas (or Advent, for those more liturgically-minded) is about "hope" is a sort of half-answer, because hope has a direction as well as a motion to it.  Hope is a vector, so to speak--it is not just any old thought about the future; hope is always aimed at a particular future.  

And the real question to be asking at this moment, in this season, is this: for people who are preparing for Jesus, what is the "direction," the "object," the "focus" of our hope?  What shape is our hope--and do we just take our existing wish lists and assume that Jesus' coming will give us those things, or do we let Jesus himself shape the form of our hope?  Do we allow Jesus to direct what we are hoping FOR?  And maybe we have to ask an even more basic question:  Are we clear on why we are taught to pin our hopes on Jesus, and his coming?

This is part of why I find myself needing to keep coming back to the words of Mary's song, that we sometimes call "the Magnifcat" (from its opening words in Latin).  Because these words are words of hope... and they are words of hope about Jesus, and they give us at least Mary's expectation for why and what we are all supposed to be hoping for from Jesus.

And this is the curious thing to me, the more I spend time with Mary's song: she gives a whole new shape to the hope we locate in Jesus.  Mary is teaching me to see in Jesus the table-turning reign of God.  Mary is teaching me to see that Jesus has as much to do with re-ordering the way we human beings live in community with one another as it does with life-after-death.

See, that, I think is a new piece for many of us Respectable Religious Folks.  We are used to saying that the reason for hoping in Jesus is that he is the key to a good and pleasant afterlife.  We are used to saying, "You are supposed to get excited about Jesus because he is the one who gets us into heaven!"  

And again, that is, to be sure, a part of the answer for why Jesus is worth pinning our hopes on.  But what's funny to me is that it's not really Mary's answer.  Mary may well have had some inkling of resurrection in her first-century Jewish faith, but that's not what she spends her time singing about when she gets excited about the birth of her son.  The shape of her hope has a great deal to do with the creation of a new kind of human community, where the lowly are lifted up, the poor and hungry are fed, and the powerful, the privileged, and the puffed-up are deflated like you lance a boil.  Mary sings about God re-ordering human life so that those who are on the margins are welcomed in, and those who have put themselves high up on a pedestal are brought back down to earth.  And Mary sees all of that as the way God's justice and God's mercy will come to fruition in the coming of the Messiah--her boy.  It is about the keeping of God's ancient promises to Abraham and his family line, and the care God will give for those who only have their empty-handed need to offer the Almighty.

Mary, as I say, is teaching me a new shape of my hope in Jesus.

Now, again, to be sure, we could say that with the whole of the New Testament, there is more to say about what we are hoping in Jesus for.  And yes, it includes the promise of life beyond the grip of death, and the forgiveness of sins, and phrases like "eternal life" and "resurrection."  Yes, indeed, to all of that.  But even if it is true to say that Jesus' coming means more than just what is contained in Mary's song, it cannot mean less than what Mary sings about.  And sometimes we have forgotten that, to be quite honest.

Sometimes we Respectable Religious Folks act like God doesn't give a care about what happens to the hungry, or that God's verdict on the poor is simply that "They should get jobs if they want to have a better life, and then they won't be poor."  Sometimes we Respectable Religious Folks assume that Jesus' coming is our key to a raise at work and a happy home life, as though Jesus were simply a vehicle for me to get my wishes. Sometimes we Respectable Religious Folks make the assumption that you can gauge God's favor based on the close of the Dow Jones at the end of the day. Sometimes we Respectable Religious Folks assume that if you are IN power, it must be because you have God's endorsement on you, and that's how you know who God wants running the show.  And basically, all of those boil down to saying that the shape of my hope in Jesus is just the shape of whatever I want--rather than perhaps the possibility that Jesus himself gets to show us what he has come for.

Over against all the ways we tend to make Jesus into our religious genie, there to cater to my wants and wishes, Mary's song takes a rather different tack. She takes it for granted that God is in the business of feeding the hungry with good things, and she doesn't see it happening by giving a surplus to the already-well-fed and just hoping they'll share with their hungry neighbors.  Mary's song does not envision a God who operates by trickle-down economics.  Mary, in fact, explicitly describes a God who teaches the well-fed what it is like to go without, and who unseats the powerful rather than endorsing them. 

Whatever we make of that, and however we might want to qualify her words by saying, "Well, Mary wasn't an economist, and Luke's Gospel is not intended to be a treatise on monetary policy or taxation," (and those are both fair caveats to make), we cannot simply dismiss or ignore Mary's words, just because they probably make us a little uncomfortable.  We cannot silence Mary's voice just because she has things to say that shake us from our comfortable satisfaction with the status quo.

Mary is teaching us all, if we dare to listen to her words to see that the coming of Jesus does not only open a door to life beyond death, but it also turns the tables on how our lives are lived in community together now.  She is teaching us that Jesus' coming is not only about the promise of an afterlife, but it is also about a rightful re-arranging and re-ordering of what matters to Jesus' followers in this life, too.  She gives a whole new shape to the hope we find in Jesus.

Like I found with my son and his answer about what Christmas is "really" about, it is not enough just to be "pro-Christmas"--at least, not if the reason we think we should be "pro-Christmas" is just that we get presents and have decorations and eat meals with our families.  That may be a fine cultural answer to what Christmas looks like, but for actual followers of Jesus, the shape of our expectation at Christmas is decidedly manger-like: it is about Jesus.  And the same way about our hope in Jesus himself--it's not simply that Christians are "pro-Jesus" but get to make Jesus endorse whatever I want him to give me or do for me.  Mary's song reminds us that there is a particular shape to our hope--and that it is more about God's justice and mercy than my personal wish list.

It is worth listening again, in these days, to songs like Mary's from the Scriptures, to get a fuller sense of why it is worth getting excited about the coming of Jesus.  And from there, we can let Mary's words shape our hope to reflect the One in whom our hopes are fixed.

Lord Jesus, speak to us again, not just to name you as our Lord, but to let your lordship affect the shape of our hope in you.  Teach us what to hope for, and re-orient our hearts in light of it.