Advent is a Practice against Despair

Advent 1 C

“Budding Leaves” by Edvard Munch, Public domain

All three readings for this Sunday share an eschatological perspective. Jeremiah utters the promise that Judah will be saved and Jerusalem live in safety. Paul speaks about how we may grow in holiness for the coming of our Lord. And in Luke, Jesus speaks of our redemption drawing near. 

The words of our Gospel reading evoke two kinds of associations: one of fear (people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world), and one of hope (our redemption is drawing near).

Just like today, fear and foreboding were already present at the time of Luke’s writing and during the setting of his Gospel. It is into people’s fear that Jesus speaks of the fig tree in Springtime, of the nearness of the reign of God, and that we should stand up and raise our heads because our salvation is drawing near. Jesus is not invoking fear but offering an alternative to fear.

We may find it difficult to stand up and raise our heads, having only recently asked for so little and yet had our hopes so dashed. We may sympathize with Stanisław Lec who said that it would be laughable if we did not destroy the world before the end of the world. 

And yet, the difficulty of removing ourselves from disappointment and despair only suggests that hope is something we have to practice in order to hold on to it. As for our capacity for hope, Josef Pieper distinguishes between hopes and hope, referencing among others a Heidelberg internist who observed among terminally ill patients that when all hopes had died, they still held onto a hope. He describes hopes as that which is directed toward objects or control, while hope is aimed at being or essence. Hope then is eschatological, even in clinical observation.

In the piece, “The Calling of Crappy Citizenship: The Case for Christian Anarchy,” Richard C. Goode references a New York Times story about Eric Hagerman of southeastern Ohio (“The Man who knew too little”). 

After the 2016 election, Mr. Hagerman embarked on an experiment, which he called the blockade. He chose to untether himself from the media and to ignore current events. Our readers may feel a certain kinship with Mr. Hagerman.

Goode writes that instead of living on a steady diet of media that fed animosity toward his ideological adversaries, Mr. Hagerman reoriented his politics exclusively toward what he supports. Instead of consuming the inexorable news feed, he shifted his reading and research to the reclamation of a nearby lake once damaged by strip mining. “He has come to believe that being a news consumer doesn’t enhance society,” the Times explains. “He also believes that restoring a former coal mine and giving it to the future does.” I recall Hannah Malcolm saying something similar at our last Gathering.

If hope is indeed a practice, we can practice hope in two ways. We can follow the example of Mr. Hagerman and focus our energy on the things we can effect, things we can change in our own communities. Part of this is to find the ‘Hagermans’ who are already doing this work and to join with them to restore landscapes and habitats, to feed the hungry and house the unhoused, to protect migrant communities, or whatever God calls us to. On the surface this work may appear to be manifestations of hopes (as objects), yet these hopes represent the larger and transcendent hope for the world as God intended it. Particularly in Luke’s writing we see gentiles invited into the covenant and social distinctions leveled. People who live in fear don’t open their doors, they circle the wagons. Yet Luke’s vision of the Church is one of the Church being a carrier of hope.

This first practice of looking for the places where, working with others, we can effect change is rooted in a second practice, the gathered worship of the church. Does the practice of feeding the hungry not remind us of the table around which Jesus gathers his friends? And is this meal not also a place where we enter into communion with one another? And don’t all our meals often have a sacramental character, showing the self-giving character of God?

When Jesus speaks of the fig tree in springtime and asks us, even in the face of adversity, to stand up and raise our heads because our redemption is drawing near, I hear Jesus articulate a present eschatology in the midst of chaos. 

These practices remind us that God loves the world. In this sense worship and work in and for our communities are our protest against despair. They are an Advent thing that anticipates the reign of God, despite all else.