A congregation of the United Church of Canada
Yr A ~ Advent 1 ~ Romans 15:4-13 (MSG)
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride:
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side. (No wrist watches, or cell phones back then.)
And if if’s and an’s were pots and pans, the tinker would never work!
(A tinker was an itinerant tinsmith who mends household utensils.)
That’s an old English proverb from the 1500s. We’ll talk about the message in it in a few minutes, but for now I’ll just say that it’s amazing how wisdom transcends time, and how something written so long ago, in a culture that could not in its wildest dreams imagine our world today, still communicates so powerfully to us.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that Paul says in Romans 15:4, Even if it was written in Scripture long ago, you can be sure it’s written for us. God wants the combination of God’s steady, constant calling and warm, personal counsel in Scripture to come to characterize us, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next.
Scripture is meant to speak across centuries. No, I don’t think for a second that Paul imagined this pastoral letter to the church in Rome at the time would be still being talked about by us today, because he wasn’t writing ‘scripture’. He was just a church leader writing a messages to help his church strive to live ever more faithfully in challenging times. Nobody sits down to write scripture. The writings become scripture when people read them and recognize their transcendent yet useful wisdom.
And the purpose of scripture isn’t to get you into heaven by affirming every jot and tittle. Paul gives us scripture’s purpose right here in verse 4: God wants the combination of God’s steady, constant calling and warm, personal counsel in Scripture to come to characterize us, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next.
And then verse 5, May our dependably steady and warmly personal God develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all.
May our dependably steady and warmly personal God – I love that! Sadly, that’s not the language that God often gets described in. Pity. And what does this warmly personal God want to do in us? – develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all.
As I look across the spectrum of people who claim to be Christians today, well, to say they don’t get along with each other is putting it extremely mildly. There are versions of Christianity out there that sicken me. Versions that I can easily and definitively prove are actually antithetical to the teaching and Way of Jesus, like so-called Christian Nationalism. Tragically, they are usually the loudest versions, and their hypocrisy and unlovingness are damaging beyond measure to ‘the Church’.
Ok, does that mean I’m unable to get along with those branches of Christianity so therefore I’m not mature? Or maybe they aren’t? Or both? I guess our warmly personal God has a lot more work to do in me. And them. And you?
Now, do I wish things were different? Or do I hope things can be different? Hold on to those questions!
What would happen if all Christians were more mature, and we let God do that work in us? Romans 15:6, Then we’ll be a choir – not our voices only, but our very lives singing in harmony in a stunning anthem to the God and Father of our (teacher) Jesus!
And what if we took our harmony even further and not only sang in a choir filled with all flavours of Christians, but also all flavours of Jews, and Muslims, and Indigenous spiritualities, and Buddhists, and Shintos, and Confucians, and Hindus, and Wiccans, and Unitarians, and Pagans, and even atheists? What a glorious choir that would be!
In Paul’s day their world was a lot smaller than ours, and his big concern was breaking down the barrier between Judaism and this emerging Christianity. So Paul starts quoting Hebrew scriptures that emphasize reaching out, and welcoming, and being inclusive of ‘the other’. He speaks of insiders and outsiders, and how they/we can all rejoice together in harmony, in love.
And then he concludes this passage with a prayer – Romans 15:13, Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing/beloving lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!
First things first. ‘Hope’ may not mean what you think it means. Nowadays we tend to use the words ‘wish’ and ‘hope’ interchangeably. They’re not the same – especially when you read them in the bible. The word ‘wish’ appears in the bible 111 times, and every time it means ‘to desire’. The word ‘hope’ appears in the bible over 200 times, and it never means desire. What does hope mean? It means expectant trusting that something loving, something holy, something of God, will happen, in time. Wishing and hoping are very different things.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride:
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side.
And if if’s and an’s were pots and pans, the tinker would never work!
Wishes are about fantasy, and desiring things to be different, but not really willing to put in a shift to do anything about it. Wishes are lottery tickets – filled with escapist delight but with no actual expectation that the thing is going to happen. Wishes aren’t wrong – they’re fine – necessary even. To desire something, or to desire something to be different is very human. It’s just different than hope.
Hope has expectation. Hope has trust. Hope is grounded in faith in God’s lovingkindness and God’s yearning that all of creation – humans, animals, plants, everything – can live in harmony. Wishing does nothing to motivate us to action. Hope does! – because we know that we have an important role to play in bringing about that harmony. Our heart’s eyes are opened, our minds are awakened, and we can envision a world of harmony. We call it the Kingdom of God – and we know that we are already immersed in it, and so is everyone, and that the possibility that everyone can awaken to such harmony and love is real, but we have to help. That’s hope.
Does that sound good? Does that sound possible? Maybe not quickly, or even likely, but possible if enough of us caught the vision and worked toward it? Then it’s hope. And with that hopeful vision in our hearts and minds we live in expectation. That’s what the season of Advent is all about – an expectant waiting for the light and love of God to be born anew in and through each of us. There’s way too much talk out there about Christmas wishes and not nearly enough about Advent hope!
What can we do about that? We can open our hearts to hope! After worship today, or maybe in your quiet time one day this week, I invite you to do this exercise. Think about your deepest desires. What are the desires of your heart? Make a list of 4 or 5 of those. Then prayerfully, and honestly, ask yourself whether each thing is a wish or a hope? And then, and this is the harder part, for anything you identified as a wish, ponder how you might reframe that desire into a hope – an expectant confidence that God’s love and light will shine through it.
(I’m going to shift gears for a minute, but it’ll tie in right away.)
Did you know that ‘demic’ is an actual word, but it almost never gets used by itself? It’s usually preceded by prefixes like ‘pan’ for pandemic, or ‘en’ for endemic. The ‘demic’ part means “characteristic of, or pertaining to, a people or population.” As we’ve all become painfully aware, the Covid virus pertained to all people. Pan-demic.
Well, how about something much more positive? How about we make up some new words for Advent this year? Oh, how I love making up new words! The four classic themes for Advent are hope, peace, joy, and love. We light candles on our wreath signifying each theme each week leading up to Christmas. So my four new words are: hopedemic, peacedemic, joydemic, and lovedemic! It would be great if those words went viral. (sorry!)
Today we’ve been exploring what it would be like if ‘hope’ was ‘demic’. Imagine, a hope that characterized a people, that pertained to a population! How great would it be if the people or population who follow Jesus were so characterized by hope that it became a hopedemic?! The Covid pandemic has drastically changed how we live. Imagine the changes a hopedemic would bring.
The NRSV translates Romans 15:13 like this: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing/beloving, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Did you hear it? There’s a ‘so that’ in there! Anytime there’s a ‘so that’ in scripture it’s the part where everything prior comes into focus and you get the core message. All that stuff about openness to ‘the other’, and singing in harmony with one another, comes down to being filled with joy and peace and beloving – SO THAT you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
What does ‘abounding in hope’ look like in your life? In what ways would you say Faith United is ‘abounding in hope’? What would ‘abounding in hope’ look like for our country? Our world?
If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
Well, if Christians embraced and embodied a hopedemic…then harmony would be that much more likely.
Is such a worldwide transformation possible? Absolutely! We live in hope.
Amen.
