When I turn on the radio station during the Christmas season and hear Christmas songs, I am struck by the bittersweet sound of them. This is a time of rejoicing and celebration. This is a time to sing upbeat songs like Joy to the World… yet many of the songs both in the religious carols and the fun Christmas songs are sung in minor keys and have this melancholy feel to them. “I’ll be home for Christmas” has this sad overtone in it that states that I probably won’t be home for Christmas, but I will at least be there in spirit, so celebrate even though I am not going to be with you. My mother’s favorite Christmas song is called “Stop the Cavalry” a song about WWII and asking Winston Churchill to stop the battles so that the singer can go home to his wife who has been waiting for him three years long in the nuclear fallout zone. It is an odd song.
We have the same in our Christian music collection. Two of my favorite Christmas carols are “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Lo, How a Rose Er Bloometh”. Both in minor keys and with this sad undertone to them. Now there are good upbeat songs for Christmas, and we can celebrate with those also, but I think there is a reason for the bleakness of many Christmas songs. Christmas is a time of hope. It is a time where we hope for things to be better than they are. Hope acknowledges the state that things are in and does not ignore the problems of the world. But hope trusts that God will do something to change the world and make it into a better place. Hope has a bittersweet taste to it because it recognizes the troubles that surround it. So as we hope on Christmas, we sing songs that acknowledge the bitter as well as the sweet. A good Christmas song will not be all sweet, but the good ones are not all bitter either. They acknowledge the trouble, in the case of “I’ll be home for Christmas” they acknowledge the fact that the singer probably won’t be able to make it home to their loved ones for the holiday. But they also leave the hearer with hope, telling the hearer that if the person is unable to make it home (which they are going to try to do to the best of their ability), they will at least be there in their dreams… in spirit. Hope in the midst of despair.
I. Despair
We have spent these last four weeks, this advent season, remembering what it is that Christ brought to this world with his incarnation. He brought so much that I chose just a couple areas to talk about… We have talked about music coming out of silence, we have talked about Jesus’ light shining forth in a world that loves darkness. We have talked about God’s promises and how he always stays true to them even when we live in uncertainty. These are only the beginning and do not really do justice to that which the incarnation brought to the world… but they are a start. God was made man. The divine became mortal. God entered his creation as a part of it. The night that Jesus was born was a holy night, a night specially filled with God’s glory. Now you all know that Jesus was not born on December 25th. We don’t know when he was born, but we chose as a church hundreds of years ago to set aside a day in December to celebrate his birth. The end of December is a time of hope. Days are now getting longer and spring is approaching once again. It is not here, but it is in the near future. And so, each year we come together to celebrate the miraculous wonder of Jesus’ birth and to open presents and sit around a Christmas tree and do a number of things that make the holiday special for each of us.
But we remember that Jesus coming into the world was just the beginning, and the culmination of what we are celebrating this Christmas season comes in our celebration of Easter, when we celebrate Jesus’ return from the dead, Jesus’ resurrection. I have been encouraging you these last weeks to not only think of Jesus entering this world, but also the miraculous changes when Jesus enters your heart, how he changes and makes you complete. So today we are going to spend time talking about how God takes a place filled with despair and fills it with hope. And to do this we are going to look a little bit at Jesus’ mother, Mary.
One thing that I love about the Christmas story is the same thing I love about the whole story of Jesus. God worked in the life of Jesus in unusual ways. God continued, throughout Jesus’ life to turn people’s expectations on their head. More, he continued to use seeming defeats to bring victory. This is true in the Christmas Story almost as much as in the crucifixion. God caused an unwed girl to become pregnant. He also timed this so that the unwed girl would be traveling with her new husband (who almost divorced her for being unfaithful to him) when she was supposed to deliver this child conceived if not born out of wedlock.
Jesus was born into scandal in a part of the country his parents were not familiar with. Women were stoned for what happened to Mary. Joseph could have called her out and made a spectacle of her and she could have been killed… Joseph wasn’t the kind of man to do this, so instead he thought of divorcing her in secret so that she could have a better chance, but God explained to Joseph what was going on and he stayed with her. But people in the time knew how to count and figured out that Jesus was probably not Joseph’s son. So, among those who know Joseph and Mary, Jesus was born in disgrace, and more than Jesus being disgraced by this, Mary would have been talked about with ridicule and shame. Yet here, in today’s scripture we read Mary’s praise psalm: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior… From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name.”
This praise psalm doesn’t come from what God has already done. For God has caused Jesus to be born into scandal. Mary sings this song of praise because she knows what God is going to do through Jesus. Because she knows that Jesus is going to be the Messiah that was promised. Because she knows that she will bear the light of the world to the world. Mary believed all these things, she trusted all these things because she had hope.
II. Hope
I Corinthians 13 tells us that there are three things that we must have as followers of God. These three are faith, hope and love. We spend a lot of time on faith… for we know that it is by grace we are saved, through faith. We know that faith is the thing that brings us into relationship with God and we know that this faith is not of ourselves, it is a gift of God. We spend a lot of time on love… for Jesus tells us the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind… and the second greatest which is like it is to love your neighbor as yourself. But then we come to hope. Throughout the Bible, when hope is talked of, we are told that people place their hope in God… they trust God to do something for them that they are unable to do for themselves. Faith is belief in, love is longing for, and hope… hope is trusting.
Hope acknowledges your own inadequacies, hope acknowledges your own weaknesses, but hope trusts God to be greater than those inadequacies or weaknesses. Hope sees the world for what it is, a messed up place where sin runs rampant and we are easily distracted away from our faith. A place where we think that love is about what makes us feel good instead of something that gives to others without thought of what it will receive in return. But hope sees past this world, it sees past the present. It sees the possibilities and it trusts the promises.
This world could easily fall into despair. It would be quite simple. We see the continuation of war… after each victory, there seems to be more bloodshed. We see this country continue down a path that seems to be pushing us farther and farther from God. We see in Europe a post-Christian society where people by and large don’t think about spiritual things at all and we see our country heading that same direction. We deal with bills and medical problems and the stress that our jobs place upon us. We see the divorce rate go up and materialism grow in our society. This is all happening. This isn’t me trying to make you all feel bad about the situation… this is the way things are at this time. And there are two responses we can have to it. The first is to despair and figure that God has lost, the world is going to be turned over to secularism and we have, as a church, become obsolete. This despair is a viable option and some have decided that it is all that is left to us. These people have given up on God and given up on the church… often they have given up on themselves. In some ways I don’t blame them. If you are one of these people I don’t blame you. If you are relying on what we as individuals can do, if you are relying on human abilities, this is the only option truly open to you. But I want to tell you about the second option.
The second is to have hope, trusting that God will work wonders in us and through us. Hope does not deny the problems we deal with, it just trusts that God is greater than these problems. God is greater than any of these problems.
And therefore we have Mary singing in a place of despair about God’s greatness. Hope is what allows song and praise when things aren’t going the way we want. The apostles, after Jesus had ascended into heaven, found themselves in prison at times and dealt with horrible things, yet they sang from their prison cells… because of hope. Hope is what allows someone to enter into the darkness with a small light, trusting that the light will be enough. Hope is what we hold on to as we wait for God’s promises to be fulfilled.
III. Response
But hope does not and cannot come from ourselves. We don’t create hope and we don’t hope in ourselves. Hope is a gift from God, it is something that comes to us, like faith and love, because of his grace. Hope is not something that we can build up ourselves by keeping our thoughts uplifted. Hope is not having a rosy attitude in the face of any problem. Instead it is something that we can ask God to give us, so that we not fall into despair.
Hope calls for response, it calls for us to do something. It is something that we have received from God, and we find that we must always act upon the things we receive from God. God never just gives us something to play with and keep for ourselves. No, God wants us to use the gifts he gives us, and use them to be a light in this world. Also, God’s gifts, be them hope, love or faith, grow the stronger as they are used. Just like muscles in our body… if you exercise them, they will grow, but if you don’t they become weak. So we are called to exercise our hope… do some hope pushups.
And there is an important way to exercise our hope. John Weborg talks about this in the most recent issue of the Covenant Companion in his column. He states that prayer is the most hopeful act a Christian does. Prayer… our way to exercise our hope. Prayer is coming before the throne of God in hope that he will listen and act upon our needs. Prayer is trusting God to stay true to his promises. Prayer involves praising God… remembering how it is that God has been good to you and thanking him for this. Prayer involves calling to God to ask him to forgive us for our sins, this is a hope directly in the power of Jesus and a hope in the salvation that we are promised. Prayer involves petition, praying for God to touch the world around us with his power. This is all about hope that God hears us and that God knows what is best for us and that God will act for us when we ask him. Prayer is an act of faith and it is also an act of love, but it is all about hope.
These last four weeks we have been celebrating Advent: a time of preparation for Christ’s coming. On Thursday we will be celebrating Christmas… the actual celebration of Christ’s birth on this world. But these last four weeks have been a time to remember the importance of prayer, the importance of hope. We are not there yet. The world around us is in ruin… and nothing we can do will fix it. But God has promised to do miraculous things in this world and God can do these things. So let us be in prayer for the world around us. Let us be in prayer for those around us who need help. Let us be in prayer for ourselves, that God heals us of the things that we are struggling with. Let this prayer come from hope, hope that is from God and hope that is in God.
And living in that hope, we can join with Mary in her song, a song praising God and paying attention to the great things that God has done, as well as talking about the great things that God will do. This Christmas, I pray that we all are filled with God’s hope. I pray that we are able to see the great things that God has done, and through grace we are filled with a hope that allows us to call out to God in prayer for the world that needs him so much.
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