A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOPE

When things are not going well with us, we tend to hope and pray that the situation will be reversed and that the old order will be restored even if the old order was not all that good – at least it was better than the present. That is our hope when stuck in a mess, when uttering the first word of prayer to God to get us out of the mess. Yes, we know that it can always get worse and that what we have now may be better than what can be. For certain we hope and pray that things won't get worse. We hope they will get better.

The outcome of our prayer, our hopes, our wishes and dreams is often totally in our hands. We hope to pass the final exam. It's all in our hands. Prayer won't help us pass the test; only study will. And sometimes what we hope for is both in our hands and in the hands of others. We need surgery. For our part, we hope the surgery to be successful, and hope the doctor, for her part, will do the best she can. And sometimes, after we've done our part and others have done theirs, the final outcome is still not fully in human control. It's up to God.

That kind of hope, a bad ending up good, is one we deal with all the time. So, too, are our hopes of making a present good even better. Those are universal hopes that know no time or place or circumstance or religion. Those hopes come with the territory of being human.

There is another kind of hope, however, that demands faith, first, last and always. As the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (11:1) Faith leads to hope, not the other way around. We have faith in the doctor or else we will not go under the knife. We have faith in ourselves, in our own abilities, or we will never pass the test. Faith precedes hope.

But as Christians it is the conviction of things not seen that make our hope a hope of a different kind. Such is our hope when faced with our own death, with the dying process. The conviction we have as Christians is in the resurrection, our own. Since we have no idea what death is like, we have no idea what we are hoping for when we say, when reciting the Creed, that we believe "in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.” But we believe and so we hope.

We don't like to think about dying, ever, and certainly not during this Advent season when all our thoughts are on new life, on Christmas. But the reason for Christmas, the reason why Jesus was born among us, was and is to give us hope for life beyond this life even if we do not know what that life is like. We will all surely die; but we live in faith with a different kind of hope.

Yet even more, Jesus’ life among was to give us hope in and for this life as well. We are not in control of the life to come, but we are very much in control of this life: what we do, what we say, what we believe. Advent is a reminder that if we want our hopes and dreams for this life to come true, to become realities, they will only become so if we live the life Jesus, the celebration of whose birth we anticipate, showed us how to live. Let us hope and pray we so live.