Today, I want you to
consider your deepest prayer related to hope for this Christmas. Why is hope so
important for your life? This life has an incomplete character. Hope suggests
its possible fulfillment. Our hope has its basis in the promise of God. Our hope
is not just for our individual lives. Our hope includes the rest of humanity
and even the entire creation. We can move toward the future with confidence,
patience, and cheerful expectation of the revelation of the will of God for
humanity. We hope for the one in whom we believe and love. While the specifics
of that future elude us, of course, we know what is most important. The content
of the future is Jesus Christ in his final form, as he completes the work begun
in his life, death and resurrection and in the sending of the Spirit. The content
of our hope is Jesus Christ coming in glory. This hope means pardon for
humanity. It means a movement out of darkness and into light. It means
transformation and eternal life. The hope is for the completion of the
reconciling act of God in Christ. Such redemption means peace between Creator
and creation. Slumbering humanity needs to awaken to the significance of the
coming of Christ as providing the basis for this hope. Christians offer their
witness and service today in light of that hope. We move toward the goal. We live
with the hope for the dawn of the great light, but we also have joy over the
little lights we experience today. The Holy Spirit is the one who awakens us to
this hope.
Your prayer for hope may
relate to something in your personal life, for Cross~Wind, for the community,
for the nation, or for the world.
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Our passage brings Christian hope
and Christian life together. Our hope for the future means we are to live a
certain way today. Paul consistently held together two horizons. He is quite
aware of the human plight of sin and darkness. He is also quite aware of the
hope for a new creation in Christ. He will point out that much of humanity is
asleep both to the plight and to the hope. Even we in the church can slumber. We
need to awaken. Every moment contains the possibility of being our time for
God. We are in the night, but waiting for the full light of day to come. If we
are really waiting for the day, then we need to live in the light of the
daylight we see coming in Christ. It will be a battle. The darkness is not yet
gone. The light is not yet fully come. So we need to put on the armor. We need
to have the mentality of a soldier when it comes to spiritual life.
We often
work with children on their Christmas wish list. It is often a very material
type of list.
Is hope on
your wish list for this Christmas?
Hope – that
things will be better next year? – In your personal life, family, church,
community, nation, and world.
What is your
deepest hope this Christmas?
Hope is more important that we
know.
St. Augustine says that hope has
two beautiful daughters: anger at the way things are and courage to see to it
they do not remain the way they are. Our dissatisfaction with the present
arises out of our hope the future.
As Reinhold Niebuhr said:
"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime." Hope
always looks ahead, to something greater and better than we have now.
If we truly
want a life-giving Christmas, drawing closer to God needs to take priority over
any material desire on this year’s wish list. For week one of Advent, I want to
invite you to focus on living into eternal hope, carrying that hope for others,
knowing that no matter what we go through, we are never alone. God will break
through our circumstances and shed light.
First, let
us admit this truth: We expend a lot of effort to keep our “real” selves a
secret.
In some
areas of our lives, we are asleep and live in darkness. We are not even
engaging the spiritual battle.
Keeping secrets, particularly ones
involving our own behavior, is a full-time job. As Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century
British writer, once noted, “He who has a secret should not only hide it, but
hide that he has to hide.”
St. Ignatius
of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, says that temptations are like secret
lovers. He uses the image of a young woman who has a good father. The secret
lover wants to stay secret, in the dark, trying to get you to do things you
know the father, who loves you and wants the best for you, would not approve.
St. Ignatius says sin is like that. Keep everything in the dark, hidden, and
secret.
I wonder if the reason Paul
encourages us to wake up is that we are asleep when it comes to dangers that
confront us spiritually. We spend too much time covering up who we really are. One way Advent might make you different
this year might be painful. You just might see the light more clearly and
therefore must face places of darkness in your life.
Second, we
need to live in the light.
In other words, we need to wake up.
I do not remember a time what it
was hard for me to get up in the morning. If I have no reason to get up early,
I will usually awaken around 5 or 6. I like being up before others in the
house. I like the quiet. I usually spend some time in personal reflection and
prayer.
Some of us are not morning persons.
You hear the alarm, and you hit the snooze button. By the way, if you find it
very difficult to wake up, people have invented some rather creative alarm
clocks. Nevertheless, according to some studies, you are setting yourself up
for a day of being less alert and productive. All of us know what that feels
like. You feel like you are sleepwalking through the day.
During this advent season, we need
to avoid being asleep to the dangers that confront us spiritually. The ancient
world often used the metaphor of sleep for spiritual inattentiveness. Jesus
himself warned against spiritual snoozing lest he return and find his weak
followers asleep instead of awake and at work (Matthew 24:43; Mark 13:36). The
kairos is getting short, says Paul, and it is time to wake up. What will it
take us to wake up and be alert to what God is calling us to be and to do?
We are more
alive some days than we are on other days. We have energies asleep within us.
Some days have things that awaken that energy. Some days do not. We may feel
like a cloud weighs upon us that inhibit our discernment, clarity, and decisiveness.
We may even think of ourselves as half-awake. We are making use of only a small
part of the resources we know we have.
I have a
suggestion. As we prepare for Christmas, name three things you will do
differently this Advent season, substituting things that bring renewed hope,
rather than depleting energy and bank accounts. Work with friends to identify
the substitutions. Chances are that friends may remember even better from past
years what was exhausting. Together, encourage one another to press on toward
the goal. For example, “Instead of spending all day Saturday shopping for the
perfect gifts, I will spend Saturday morning having coffee and devotion with
someone for whom I’ve not made time lately.” Alternatively, “I will spend time
with my children to help them develop a common wish list.” By promoting a
common wish list, children will be encouraged to negotiate with one another in
individual desires, spend time together and share their gifts.
We need to
wake up to our families. We influence our spouses, children, grandparents, and
grandchildren, far more than we know. We need to be sure that what we bring
them is the light of day, and not the night of confusion.
We need to
wake up to the moment. We need to seize the day.
Ann Wells shares the story of her sister
dying. She then shares this incident. "My brother-in-law opened the bottom
drawer of my sister's bureau and lifted out a tissue-wrapped package. "'This,' he said, 'is not a slip. This is lingerie.' "He discarded the
tissue and handed me the slip. It was exquisite: silk, handmade and trimmed
with a cobweb of lace. It still had the astronomical price tag attached. "'Jan
bought this the first time we went to New York, at least eight or nine years ago.
She never wore it. She was saving it for a special occasion. Well, I guess this
is the occasion.' "He took the slip from me and put it on the bed with the
other clothes we were taking to the mortician. His hands lingered on the soft
material for a moment, and then he slammed the drawer shut and turned to me.
"'Don't ever save anything for a special occasion. Every day you're alive
is a special occasion.' As Ann reflected upon that moment, she wrote:
I'm trying to recognize those moments
now and cherish them. I'm not 'saving'
anything; we use our good china and crystal for every special event - such as
losing a pound, getting the sink unstopped, the first camellia blossom.
"'Someday' and 'one of these days' are losing their grip on my
vocabulary. If it's worth seeing or
hearing or doing, I want to see and hear and do it now.
Please, wake
up to the moment.
We need to
wake up to God. We often discover God in the strangest places. We might
discover God in the smile of a child, the hug of a parent, or the simple
greeting in church by someone you know really meant it when he or she asked you
how things were going with you.
Third, how
can we move from good to great?
The phrase
comes from Jim Collins, who wrote a business book of that title. His point is
that “good,” or “acceptable” often becomes the enemy of greatness. Spiritually,
you may be doing OK. Yet, how can you make that transition to a fully awake,
alive, follower of Jesus Christ?
Here was one
of the observations about businesses Jim Collins made:
“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules
to manage the small percentage of the wrong people on the bus, which in turn
drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of
wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to
compensate for the incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further
drives the right people away, and so forth.”
The point is that such managing by negatives will likely
have a limited effect. People who want to break the rules will break them, no
matter what you do. What we need spiritually are reminders of those times when
we encouraged and modeled, lived as children of the day, lived fully awake, and
keep expanding those choices in our lives.
Most people will keep things as
they are, if possible. We prefer the status quo. We need to be alert, though,
to the changes taking place. Being awake is the key to surviving and thriving
in our culture.
One of the great liabilities of history
is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of
social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its
fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through
revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake,
to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.
The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide
neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as
brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.
Frankly, as
Paul puts it, salvation is nearer to us now than when we were believers.
Therefore, Paul invites his readers, and us, to put on Christ, the source of
faith, hope, and love. Instead of focusing too much upon sin, which can in fact
give it more power over you, focus on Christ. Make him more part of your life.
Take him with you, to your family, to your friends, to your work, and to wherever
you go. That will wake you up. In fact, come to think of it, it may also wake
up those around you. You will have increasingly less to hide and increasingly
more to share.
Going deeper
Romans 13:11-14 has the theme of
the special need of ethical consecration because of the approaching crisis. He
has just referred to the command to love as the primary preparation for the
“end.”
Romans
13:11-14 (NRSV)
11 Besides
this, you know what time it is, [They know the time is short, which is actually the basis
for respect for the state and for love of neighbor. Do not waste time
squabbling with either. In that sense, J.
Louis Martyn has insightfully described Paul’s vision as “bifocal.”[3]
Paul simultaneously has an eye on two horizons — that which is happening on
earth because of the enslaving power of sin in the old age and the in-breaking
of God’s kingdom into this earthly sphere. These verses reveal the apocalyptic
vision of Paul, his understanding that this present age is passing away and his
certainty that God is ushering in a new age.] how
it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. [Karl Barth has an extensive discussion of the importance of “awakening”
in conversion. Where someone is awakened and therefore wakes and rises, he has
been asleep. Christians have been asleep, just like others. What distinguishes
them is their sleeping is in the past. Yet, is there not still a Christianity
that sleeps with the world and likes it? His answer is affirmative. The
admonition here, in fact, assumes that Christians still need the admonition to
waken. Christians are those who are awake in the sense they are awakened a
first time, and then again, to their shame and good fortune. They are, in fact,
those who constantly stand in need of reawakening and who depend upon the fact
that they are continually reawakened. The sleep from which they awaken is the
relentless downward movement caused by their sloth.[4] Barth also says that the notion of
“awakening” in conversion is the result of the influence of pietism and
Methodism. He thinks it legitimate in that it has a close proximity to the
resurrection of Jesus, it suggests a specific word that awakens, and passages
like this suggest the need for continual awakening. The Kairos is the eschatological era or last days, begun by Christ's
death and resurrection and is co-extensive with the age of the church, the age
of salvation. Paul evokes the notion of
time not with the basic reference to the Greek term chronos, but to kairos. Here
he signals that this is a special sense of time, namely God's time and God's
activity in history. The "time" is technically before the second
coming. Paul refers to the time that
does not occur in time; a moment that is not moment in time.[5]
Barth will say that between the past and the future, between the times, a
“Moment” exists that is no moment in time, the eternal Moment. At that point,
time reveals its secret. Time has not come and gone, but the person is one who
has been and will be, who dies and lives, falls and stands. We are the ones who
spend our years as a tale that is told, which is the secret of time made known
in the Moment of revelation, a Moment that always is, and yet is not. Every
moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation. Yet,
distinctions within time are appropriate, for some are near and some are far. A
tension exists between the “then” and the “now,” a tension that is not just
chronological. We stand on the boundary of time. Thus, the “end” of which the
New Testament speaks is no temporal event, no legendary “destruction” of the
world, but a true end. He makes fun of the “short and perfectly harmless
chapter entitled” Eschatology, without naming Schleiermacher.[6] ] For salvation is nearer to us now than when
we became believers; [This
assertion of the imminence of the day of Jesus’ return is quite similar to what
Paul wrote in I Thessalonians (4:15; 5:4-5) and I Corinthians (7:29). In other
words, the salvation of the Roman Christians is not completely achieved. It is
emerging. This eschatological expectation places the horizon of God's activity
in Jesus Christ far beyond any individual's situation, compliance, or
non-compliance with the law. Paul signals here that God is at work and that in
Jesus Christ, God's saving purposes continue to emerge. Pannenberg finds
it interesting that while early Christians expected Christ’s coming imminently,
the delay did not shatter the foundations of their faith. Rather, through the
risen Lord and the Spirit, eschatological salvation had already become a
certainty for believers, so that the length of the remaining span of time was a
secondary matter.[7]] 12
the night is far gone, the day is near. [Waiting for the return of
Christ is like being in the night and waiting for daylight to come. Night would
be the time of spiritual sleep. The
life prior to being born in Christ into the Spirit was known as
"sleep," "darkness," and "night." The life in
Christ and in the Spirit was understood as being "awake,"
"living in the light," and "in the day." Such a metaphor of
night and day, sleep, and wakefulness captures the power of transformation that
adult Christians experience in baptism and in being bound together in the
Spirit of Christ. By evoking this contrast rhetorically, Paul both reminds the
Roman Christians who they are (as opposed to who they were), and encourages
them to be steadfast in the commitment to the life that God is calling them to
in Christ. God has achieved this transformation within them. They have been
awakened, and it is now upon them to keep in the light. Barth stresses that
this sense of the shortness of the time available arises because of Christ. The
promised reign of God drew near and came right up to them, and with it the end
of time. The new day is the event in which to which they in their time bore
witness. They continue in their time, but only as they are in the time of the
revelation, declaration, and realization of their time in its hastening toward
the end that has already come. As Barth sees it, Christ rules time, time is
short, and the duration of time is unknown to those who live in it.
Essentially, the vanishing of the night and the breaking of the day have begun
and can no longer be stopped. The same Lord stands at the beginning and the
end, he is also Lord of the time between. [8]] Let us then lay aside the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light; [reminding
us that we can separate the eschatological from the ethical, therefore,
we are to lay aside the works of darkness and, using an image drawn from warfare,
he urges them to put on the armor of light. We find the image in I Thessalonians 5:8, “But since we belong to the
day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a
helmet the hope of salvation.” In addition, in II Corinthians 6:7, we read,
“... the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and
for the left ...” Warfare and the equipment of war were common sources for
ethical metaphors among many writers in Greco-Roman antiquity. For example, the
first-century Stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus compared the challenge of
living a virtuous life to a soldier out on campaign.
Discourse
3.24.34
“Each
person’s life is a kind of campaign, and a long and complicated one at that.
You have to maintain the character of a soldier, and do each separate act at
the bidding of the general, if possible divining what he wishes.”
The
most famous example of military imagery to describe the Christian life can be
found in Ephesians 6:10-17, where the various pieces of the “armor of God” are
discussed.]
13
let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and
jealousy. [Some
other lists of such behaviors are in Romans 1:29; 9:10; 1 Corinthians 1:11;
3:3; 2 Corinthians 12:20; Galatians 5:21; Philippians 1:15. These activities all threaten the life of the
community. They are the inverse of the commandments of the law and hence
are the inverse of love. They provide
opportunities for self-interest, social divisions, and broken relationships.
These activities make for sleep. However, Paul reminds the Romans that in
Christ they have been awakened to a new life in the Spirit. We are to
live as if the new order were already here.
We must act like what we are, citizens of heaven. Karl Barth refers to Augustine, who said that
it was not self-evident that such activities as described in verse 13 are not
compatible with walking, as in the day.” He goes on to say that naïve talk
about the spiritual life of the earth church ought to be sobered by this verse,
among others. From the point of view of the Christian individual, we have here
a degree of worldliness for which the church is later condemned. He thinks we
should ask whether the worldliness of the Christian individual is not to be
seen more radically here and given its true name, whereas the true evil of the
later church consists in the fact that the humanity of its members could
disguise itself more cleverly. At any rate, a radical admonition is necessary.
Its final word is also the first word, to put on Jesus Christ.[9]] 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. [We might connect the "armor"
to the concrete manifestation of the law fulfilled as love - that is, none
other than "the Lord Jesus Christ" himself. As the dawn of "the
Day" or any day approaches, by "putting on" the mind of Christ,
Christians are completely prepared for and protected from whatever may assail
them in the next 24 hours. Or the next two millennia. “Putting on” should
remind us of baptism. In Galatians
3:27, he writes that those who are baptized “have clothed” themselves “with
Christ,” which is probably an allusion to the practice of the newly baptized
being given a white robe to put on immediately after baptism. Yet, they
must continually renew that life with which they have been clothed.]
[It at least seems that Paul
expected the return of Christ in his lifetime. Yet, as Pannenberg notes, it
also suggests that the length of time between was a secondary matter to him.
The “delay” of the coming did not seem to create a crisis. A Christian sense of
time is not just clocks and calendars.
It is the tension between God's ways and our ways, good and evil, light
and darkness. It translates into a way
of life. The trial on earth is looked upon as a night of gloom that is followed
by morning.[10]]
