The Honey of Hope (Josh Graves)

The Honey of Hope (Josh Graves) December 17, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-04-27 at 5.29.37 PMI’m in my eighth year of leading a local church through the Advent Season. It has become–both communally and personally–the most meaningful part of the spiritual calendar. There’s something piercing about the cold, the candles, and repetition of The Magnificat. My new-found love for the Advent season is also the result of being the father of two young boys. They start counting down the birthday of Jesus as soon as the last trick-or-treaters leave our porch October 31st (defenders of all things Thanksgiving: please don’t hate).

The deepest reason I love Advent however, goes beyond the previous.

I’m a horrible wait-er. I have the patience of taxi cab driver navigating rush hour in Brooklyn. I want it now. I want it right. And I want it brought directly to me. This is the direct result of my entitlement (white male privilege is a beast to bury). I live with it every day in hopes of entitlement being crucified with Christ. Translation: I need to stop speeding. Stop expecting to get in the shortest line. Stop demanding that I get the best treatment at Jiffy Lube.

Learning to wait in the darkness of Advent has also–year after year–slowly began to teach me the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism–the inherent belief that things are better than they really are and that we can do something to improve things– is woven into the DNA of the United States. Optimism built our cities, laid the tracks for national train systems and sent astronauts to the moon. Optimism isn’t a horrible thing. It’s just flawed.

Hope is a divine gift that believes, in the fullness of time, God will be fully known and will right the world, turning all that is crooked, straight, bringing the world to its true destiny: resurrection and restoration.

Optimism is about us. Hope is about God. And, to be sure, hope is foolish. Prisoners of hope are flat-out fools.

Waiting in the darkness (my description of Advent) purifies us from optimism and dares us to peer into the deepest parts of our soul. We can and will choose despair. And, we can and will choose hope. How often we choose, in word, thought, and deed the latter over the former is crucial in the spiritual life of becoming like our brother, Jesus.

These are the choices we’re given as we work through–for instance–the story of Jesus’ birth as told in Luke. I recently read (out loud) the story again and was amazed how every paragraph in Luke is ultimately rooted in hope. Every sentence drips with the honey of hope.

In 2001, the Israeli Army surrounded Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity after Palestinian gunman barricaded themselves inside, along with 160 hostages. For a symbolic 40 days, the prisoners slept in corners, losing 30 pounds each. A priest made soup for the people. The priest used the leaves of lemon trees and the oil from the lamps. They ate every three days. Written into the marble hearth is a fourteen-point silver star that marks the believed spot of Jesus’ birth. A Latin inscription reads HERE JESUS CHRIST WAS BORN TO THE VIRGIN MARY (Bruce Feiler, Where God Was Born, 41).  The priest wasn’t schooled in optimism, he was trained in Christian hope.

Hope looks to the past, is actualized in the present, and propels us to the future. We can live for days without water. We can live for weeks without food. But we cannot live very long without hope. We might be alive but being alive is not the same thing as living.

Zombies are alive. Jesus entered the world through his mother’s birth canal–not to make moral people a little bit more moral. Rather, Jesus visited our hood to bring dead people to life. To wake us up. To say, “sleep no more!”

So, it’s cold. And, it’s dark. And we’re still here I presume because God is not finished with what God started so long ago, in the dark, in the cold.

This is why I’m a prisoner of hope. I’m arrested by Advent.

 


Browse Our Archives