Embracing Active Hope

Dear First Pres SLO Family,

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus the Messiah, the one who came, and the one we expect.

This past Sunday I talked about Hope, traditionally the theme for the First Sunday in Advent. My main point was that our hope is found in learning to live the life that Jesus modeled for us, and that we do that best when we devote ourselves to looking at his life and love and ministry.

But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

We don’t just stumble into hope, though. Hope is something we develop and practice and learn to do better and more effectively. It’s important for any follower of Jesus, and it’s absolutely a requirement for any kind of Christian leadership.

Hope is different from optimism in a crucial way. Optimism is great—it’s good to have the positive outlook we associate with optimistic people. But the key difference is this: optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the trust that things will be fulfilled.

Our Christian hope isn’t simply that God will help us do this or that. Christian hope is our trust that God will fulfill his promises to us and to all creation. That’s a much, much bigger thing.

The musician and poet Nick Cave talks about another distinction, between hope and cynicism.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like…keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Isn’t that good and challenging and convicting, all at once? Hope isn’t neutral. Hope takes a side, and that side is with all people and all of creation. When we treat each other and the earth with care and love and respect—when we remember that God’s first response was to call all of it “good” right from the beginning—when we love God and each other with creativity and tenacity, we become living examples of Christian hope.

What a wonderful world that would be, right?

As we move together through this Advent season, may we all step into those places where some active hope will do the world some good. May we all live into that “warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.” And in the end, 

after all that loving and defending and hoping, may we all find what was true 

all along: this world—all of God’s people and creation—all of it is worth believing in.

Blessings to you this Advent season.

Pastor John