Advent 2024: Hope
Hope for the Moment
Introduction to the Series of Four Essays
When I began to think about what I would post in December, “hope during absurd times” emerged as the theme. I planned to write a series of three essays about hope and the absurd, using Albert Camus’s paradigm of the absurd as my framework. After rereading The Myth of Sisyphus, however, I realized I would do both Camus and myself a disservice by founding my argument on his.
As I prepared the initial three essays, different patterns and resonances emerged: hope was there, and so was joy, unexpectedly. Love too, and, obliquely, peace. These are the four themes of the Advent season. While I didn’t want to force my ideas into an Advent framework, the connections between them generated some interesting resonances. So I reorganized my thoughts into what is now a four-essay series connected to the four Advent weeks of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.
These are not fully-forged, systematic, or devotional posts. Instead, they are explorations of the themes as they interest me and as they intersect with my writing projects and my processing of grief. And while these essays are connected—and hopefully will build off one another—they each stand alone as well. These essays represent the edge of the envelope of my thought. May they be a blessing to you as you read.
This is Not the Hope You’re Looking For
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord,
plans for your welfare and not for harm,
to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11
I first heard Jeremiah 29:11 in college. One of my fellow students quoted it to me as justification for something. I don’t remember the context or the conversation, only the sense that this verse was a sort of guarantee that good things happen to believers. No matter what tragedies might occur, there would always be a happy ending.
Latent in Christianity is the sense that “things will work out in the end,” if not in this life, then in the life to come. Hope is a trust in this good outcome. Good things happen to those who believe and act rightly.
Parallel to this is the American Dream, which promises that if you work hard, you will become upwardly mobile, going from rags to riches (or from some riches to many riches).
Put these two ideas together, and you have a recipe for hope built on a system of reward. I hope for what I can earn. I hope for what I think I deserve. Once the moral calculus is performed, a person can start expecting those hoped-for outcomes. Hope becomes expectation becomes assumption becomes entitlement.
When suffering arrives to someone invested in this kind of hope, it is a shock. This can’t happen to me! I don’t deserve this! The world feels upside-down.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick.
Proverbs 13:12
Job the Hopeless
The Lord said to the Adversary, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” Then the Adversary answered the Lord, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”
- Job 1:8–11
Thus begins Job’s desolation. Job is pious; he cares for the spiritual welfare of his children. He is wealthy, and his possessions are a reward for his hard work. Job likely expected their continuation. His life would proceed as it had so far. And then the Event happened. He lost all his possessions and all ten of his children in a single afternoon. What became of his expectations then? What of his hopes for the future?
After he is infested with boils, after his wife asks a provocative question, after his friends sit with him in silence for a week, Job finally speaks: “Let the day perish in which I was born” (3:3). The pious man is no longer assured of his future well-being. He longs for death, for escape from his suffering.
“Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly , and are glad when they find the grave? Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in?” (3:20–23).
Job’s expectations—his hopes—for a future consistent with the present have just been shattered. What is the point of living if everything he expected the future to be has been destroyed?
His friends try to reassure him using the traditional logic, the wisdom of the day (notice any parallels to our time?):
Eliphaz: “Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope? Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? … As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause. He does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number. … How blessed is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal. He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven no harm shall touch you. … You shall know that your tent is safe, you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing. You shall know that your descendants will be many, and your offspring like the grass of the earth. You shall come to your grave in ripe old age. … See, we have searched this out; it is true. Hear, and know it for yourself” (4:6–7; 5:8–9, 17–19, 24–27).
How tone-deaf for this “friend” to assure Job of countless offspring so soon after all ten of Job’s children have died! It reminds me of people who tell bereaved parents, “You’ll have other children.” As if that’s a consolation!
This litany of blessing (and I’ve only included part of it) is a prime example of “hope as entitlement.” If you are “righteous” and “submit to God’s discipline,” everything will go well for you. It is well-attested in Scripture, particularly in the wisdom literature.
The hope of the righteous ends in gladness, but the expectation of the wicked comes to nothing (Proverbs 10:28).
No harm happens to the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble (Proverbs 12:21).
Thankfully, the Bible does not offer only one perspective on hope and suffering. Scripture speaks to the complexity of the human condition with its own cross-scriptural dialogues about various issues. Failure to recognize the diversity of “biblical” teachings distorts what the Bible actually says and can lead to harm. For every Eliphaz in Scripture, there is a Job.
Job has choice words for his friends:
“My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed, like freshets that pass away, that run dark with ice, turbid with melting snow. In time of heat they disappear; when it is hot, they vanish from their place. The caravans turn aside from their course; they go up into the waste, and perish. The caravans of Tema look, the travelers of Sheba hope. They are disappointed because they were confident; they come there and are confounded. Such you have now become to me; you see my calamity and are afraid” (6:15–21).
On the surface, Job compares his friends to evaporated streams in the desert. There is the promise of water, of comfort, but upon arrival, only disappointment is found.
At a deeper level, Job criticizes the understanding of hope he once had. Hope is “confidence” that a source of water will be available in the desert. Presumably, someone in the caravan had seen the icy snowmelt earlier. They remembered where it was and brought the caravan there to drink. Instead of relief for their thirst, “they are disappointed because they were confident.” Hope built on expectation leads to disappointment.
Note also the role of fear. “You see my calamity and are afraid.” Could it be that fear of Job’s condition leads his friends to double down on their ideology? “Job has been devastated,” his friends imply, “but this will not break our confidence in the system of reward and punishment. We can be sure that what happened to him will not happen to us.”
Perhaps we could say that the paradigm of “hope as entitlement” has its basis in fear of suffering. In this case, we might argue that hope becomes “wishful thinking” when we hope to escape suffering.
If our portion of suffering has been minimal, our first reaction to the suffering of others may be fear (or disgust). We do not want to imagine suffering in the same way. We worry that contact with the person will contaminate our lives.
If we have suffered significantly in any way, we may have an easier time responding to the suffering of others with compassion. Our hope is not in the avoidance of suffering, but in finding community in the midst of suffering.
Job does not find such community in his friends. His friends discourse according to the prevailing paradigm of hope as reward. Job rejects that paradigm because of his experience. “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay” (13:12).
People whose faiths are predicated on happiness make for dangerous friends and woefully disconnected fellow humans.
- Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, 102
The old hopes crumble, and there is nothing to replace them with. Job declares: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope” (7:6).
In the second round of dialogues, Eliphaz, clearly exasperated, asks Job, “What do you know that we do not know? What do you understand that is not clear to us?” (15:9). Job responds, “My days are past, my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart” (17:11).
If your plans have all worked out so far, you might assume God is pleased with you. You have no reason to think your future will be cut off. How can you understand someone who feels the opposite? How can you take their perspective?
Job again took up his discourse and said:
“Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me;
when his lamp shone over my head and by his light I walked through darkness;
when I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent;
when the Almighty was still with me, when my children were around me;
when my steps were washed with milk, and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!
Job 29:1–6
The Darkest Day of the Year
Children grow up. That is the illusion we believed until our son died. It wasn’t that long ago when child mortality was common even in the most medically advanced nations. Now, childhood mortality is lower than it used to be, and this may give us a false sense of security. Children grow up, right?
December 20, 2017. I watched my son Emerson in the morning. After lunch, I put him down for a nap. Allison came home from cleaning the apartment we’d just moved out of. I left for work, a 30-minute commute. The Ballard bridge (a drawbridge) was up. I waited in the midst of traffic. The bridge went down. I slowly started driving across.
That’s when Allison called me. She was crying, out of breath, desperate. She told me the paramedics were at our house, tending to our son. “Everything will be fine,” I said. Or maybe I just thought it. I believed it. I wanted to believe it. Children grow up. They get bumps and bruises, get sick and well, accumulate stories that are scary in the moment but can be laughed about later. I hoped—I expected—my child to live.
I called work and left a message: “I’m not coming in, family emergency.” I expected that the next day I would tell my coworkers all about it. I called my mom: “Pray. Spread the word.” Prayer would help. Prayer would prevent the unthinkable, the illogical, from breaking into my world.
Traffic was crawling across the newly lowered bridge. And now I had to make a U-turn. It was the longest drive of my life. I did not receive a call that Emerson was dead. So he was still alive, he was fine. Children grow up. This would just be an incident in his life. Maybe he would be in the hospital for a few days. Maybe he had a medical condition we would have to monitor. We would get through this. Emerson would get through this. Children grow up.
Because we had just moved to our new house five days prior, I did not know the fastest way home. I took the main roads, and it seemed like every light was red. When I finally got to our street, it was blocked by a firetruck, an ambulance, and a police car. Emerson would have been so thrilled to see all three emergency vehicles in one place.
For me, it was one more obstacle. I had to drive all the way around the block to get home. “Don’t park in the driveway,” Allison told me over the phone. So I parked on the street a couple houses away.
I walked up to the driveway. A police officer would not let me go inside. Allison was crying and shaking. I stayed calm, though my insides were tight and heavy as a rock. After a minute, the paramedics brought Emerson out on a stretcher. He had a breathing mask on his face. They were rushing him to the ambulance, but asked if we wanted to give him a kiss first. We did. “Don’t follow us,” they said. Then the ambulance was gone, lights flashing.
The officer asked if we wanted a ride to the hospital. “No,” I said, “We’ll take our car.” He looked concerned. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive?” “Yes,” I said. Allison and I got in our car.
I drove as quickly as I could, but getting to Seattle Children’s Hospital was also a new route for us. It is hard to describe what I felt while driving. Allison prayed through sobs next to me. I had a hard time praying or speaking. I was nervous about what would happen to Emerson. At the same time, I felt calm. He was in the hands of the paramedics, the doctors, the best that pediatric medicine could offer. He was covered by prayer, he was in God’s care. He would be okay. Children grow up.
I guess what I felt was a pressure building inside me, like a balloon being filled with air. I was holding my breath. I was strengthening my resolve, protecting myself against any thought that might suggest my child could die. I told myself, “Once we get to the hospital and see that he is fine, I will be able to relax, to let all the air out of my balloon, making some hilarious fart noise.” I could handle any medical condition he might have then. So long as he was alive. That’s all we wanted: our child to grow up, as children should.
We arrived at the ER entrance, breath held, hope taut. It was late afternoon, December 20. The sky was already dark.
Hope Deferred
So this is the danger of hope: if we hope for good but encounter evil and suffering, what becomes of our hope? “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Enough deferments and what happens?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
One response to failed hopes is despair. According to Matthew’s Gospel, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he regretted his actions and was so distressed that he killed himself. Judas saw no future. He had to escape what his life had become.
In the week after our son died, I felt such despair. The future was dead along with my hope—my expectation—that my child would grow up. The future I was supposed to experience was now like a dream, slipping through my fingers. Everything felt unreal. The future was a deep pit, a hole of oblivion leading to the center of the universe and annihilation. There was a moment when it seemed more logical to spend my future with my son in heaven than to live out my remaining days on earth without him.
Something kept us during that time.
Hope in the Present
We endured the early days. “It won’t always feel like this,” our grief counselor said. We didn’t believe her at the time. I’m not sure what got us through. Certainly our community of family and friends helped. Room to lament and mourn and weep whenever we needed. Completing simple tasks. Fresh air.
Love hopes all things.
1 Corinthians 13:7
But cleverness asserts, “still one should never give up hope.” “You hypocrite,” answers the Eternal, “why do you speak so equivocally? You know well enough that there is a hope that should be put to death…. Earthly hope should be put to death, for in just this way did man first come to be saved by the true hope.”
- Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, ch. 10
The hope of reward, hope as assumption, hope as entitlement was dead. My eyes were opened to the world as it is. Any illusions my false hopes had created were torn away. Many children grow up. Many children, like my firstborn, do not.
Was there any new hope that could replace the old? In pain, I had to release the future where my son continued to live. That was not the only future I had to release. All possible futures had to be held loosely.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.”
James 4:13–15
Instead of relying on the hoped-for future, what if we could learn to hope for the present? Instead of a distant hope for a someday reward, could we hope in the possibilities of this moment? The possibilities to be transformed, to be reconciled, to be healed? We are not in control of those positive outcomes, but could we hope for them?
It’s okay not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present. … And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.
- Joanna Macy (qtd. in Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right?, 398)
Hope as Preparation, Hope as Action
Hope can often be dismissed as “wishful thinking.” This is not unwarranted. This kind of hope can lead to inaction. “I hope things will get better. I hope God will resolve this for me. I hope things will go well for me. I hope someone will take care of that problem.”
Near the end of her latest book on climate solutions, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson writes about the way forward: “My concern is that hope is insufficient” (398). Instead, she encourages us to:
in the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “make vows to something deeper than hope.” If not hope, then what? Truth, courage, and solutions. Love. Collaboration and community. … Possibility. … I find motivation for action in glimpses of what could be, and in values instilled by my parents that say it is my responsibility to try, without any guarantees of success. …
But if you are into hope, let me stop raining on your parade, and let’s embrace author Rebecca Solnit’s definition: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. … To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
Yes. I can roll with a catalytic hope like that.
We are entering the Advent season, a season in which Christians practice a “double waiting”: we await the birth of Jesus at Christmas, but we also await the return of Christ which ushers in the new heavens and new earth, when all will be made new.
Waiting is not passive. We do not “wait and see” what will happen. In our time of waiting, we prepare. We take action.
Remember Jeremiah 29:11? “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope.” This verse is not an abstract “promise of God” that assures everything will go well for us, that our plans and desires will be fulfilled.
Jeremiah 29 details a letter sent by the prophet Jeremiah to the people of Israel who have been taken captive to Babylon. The letter itself is a prophetic message of hope to people who must have felt that their world was ended, their future cut off, their God dead. Here is how the letter begins:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city to which I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your own welfare (Jeremiah 29:4–7).
Before there is any mention of promise or hope or future, God gives the exiled Israelites tasks to do in the present. Any hope of future deliverance depends on the action the people take now. They are not told to rebel against their circumstances, but to accept them. They are to practice faithfulness to God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply,” even in these dark times. “Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:10–11).
This hope is not passive, this future is not guaranteed. The people must each moment renew their hope through action.
Side Note on Awaiting the Birth of Children
Is it not interesting that God tells the Israelites to have children as part of their work of hope? Another prophet in Jerusalem had earlier proclaimed the birth of a child as a sign of hope and future:
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined. … For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests on his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:2, 6–7).
“So ‘the child of promise’ becomes the symbol for the future of life,” writes Jürgen Moltmann. At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the child who is God-made-flesh. God’s deliverance, our hope, comes in the form of a child being born.
Perhaps what helped us endure the first year of grieving the death of our firstborn son was the appearance of our second, born ten months later. But don’t take this the wrong way. Our joy at his birth was filled with sorrow as well. Finley was born into the new future, the future in which hope was a tiny light able to shine only in the present moment. While we waited for his arrival, we had to prepare his room, the room in which his brother had died, which had been shut in mourning. We had work to do while we waited.
Hope as Wide as the Moment
To hope is to wait, but waiting has its tasks, its preparations.
Waiting … is not passive but a vigilant and watchful activity designed to keep us aware of what is really going on. … Such waiting is meant to engender a lively hope rooted in the physical as well as the psyche. It is an action, the “hop” contained within the word. To hope is to make a leap, to jump from where you are to someplace better. If you can imagine it, and dare to take that leap, you can go there—no matter how hopeless your situation may appear.
- Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, 221
Jürgen Moltmann argues that Christians do not simply wait for the afterlife. Through Christ’s resurrection from the dead, God’s new creation is breaking into our reality now.
In the power of hope, we already participate here in the eternal life of God’s future world. We already experience here that eternal life in the Spirit of the resurrection; we experience it as eternal livingness in love. So—what is left of life? We have two impressions. On the one hand there is nothing to which we can hold fast, not even ourselves. Everything passes away. … But on the other hand, nothing at all is lost. Everything remains in God. … Nothing is lost to God, not the moments of happiness, not the times of pain (108).
God will not overlook your work and the love that you showed … in serving the saints, as you still do. And we want each one of you to show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end.
Hebrews 6:10–11
Each moment is an opportunity to live more fully into love. Hope takes action and leaves the outcomes to God. Hope trusts that all things are being made new, including ourselves, our perceptions, even our hopes themselves.
Moltmann goes on to say that “it is not length of life in terms of time which reaches out to the originality which … we call eternity; it is the depth of experience in the moment” (153). In each moment, there is a new beginning touched by what Moltmann calls “eternal livingness.” If we so open ourselves to the possibilities of the moment, of the Spirit in the moment, we can be renewed. In this renewal, “we no longer cling to our memories or live in the illusory worlds of our desires, but are completely and wholly there” (154). In other words, we are present to the moment. Our hope is for the moment.
I don’t have a grand theory of hope, only my experiences and my thicket-brain making connections and following after possibility. Here is what I offer at the end:
Instead of limiting our hope to the assumption that good things will come to us as a reward, let us be present to the joy, the sorrow, the pain, the healing, the transformation in this moment.
Instead of hoping for a distant future when our problems will be solved, let’s hope through our actions in the present moment, knowing that our work is not in vain. We may hope for certain outcomes, but we hold them loosely, leaving them to God.
Instead of hoping for a distant heaven we’ll escape to when we die, let’s recognize the in-breaking of God’s new creation now. Let’s participate with the Spirit in the present moment, letting ourselves be renewed along with the rest of creation.
Tomorrow is not promised. All we can know is the present moment. If we are given this moment, then “all is not, has not been, exhausted” (Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 122). Let us hope for what might be in this moment.
A Prayer
For the darkness of waiting
of not knowing what is to come
of staying ready and quiet and attentive,
we praise you, O God:For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you.For the darkness of choosing
when you give us the moment
to speak, and act, and change,
and we cannot know what we have set in motion, but we still have to take the risk,
we praise you, O God:For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you.For the darkness of hoping
in a world which longs for you,
for the wrestling and laboring of all creation
for wholeness and justice and freedom,
we praise you, O God:For the darkness and the light
are both alike to you.- from a prayer by Janet Morley, Bread of Tomorrow: Prayers for the Church Year, 22–23
Appendix of Related Quotes
Christian hope is a ‘hope against hope’, or a hope where there is nothing left to hope for.
- Jürgen Moltmann, In the End, the Beginning, 90
I continue to be amazed at how the slightest hope, like a small breeze, will arise when despair seems most invisible.
- Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, 180
Being deprived of hope is not despairing.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 91
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.
Zechariah 9:12
Hope survives everything.
- Jürgen Moltmann, In the End, the Beginning, 99
The Word awoke us from the lethargy
which had robbed us of our hope.
- from a prayer by Julia Esquivel, Bread of Tomorrow: Prayers for the Church Year, 40
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
1 Peter 1:3
Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? And how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. Our lament as deep as our hope.
Now there is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to dwell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying. …
Even still, it’s not good to drag someone from their lament out of fear of despair. In fact, being forced too quickly out of lament can drag the soul into despair in secret.
- Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, 101–102
We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 1:2–3
“The touchstone of God at work,” writes the Carmelite Ruth Burrows, “is the ability to recognize that God is trying to get us to accept a state where we have no assurance within that all is well … where no clear path lies before us, where there is no way; a state of spiritual inadequacy experienced in its raw, humiliating bitterness.” Only when we admit that we have “no way” do we have any hope of finding one.
- Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, 263
As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
1 Timothy 6:17–19
Thank you, Nathaniel, for sharing your thoughts and insights and modeling vulnerability as a path for others to follow. Blessed Advent to you!