Advent: Hope and Optimism

Isaiah 8, starting in 8, verse 19, going through 9, verse 7.

When someone tells you to consult mediums and spirits or spiritists who whisper

and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God?

Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?

Consult God's instruction and the testimony of warning.

If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.

Distressed and hungry they will roam through the land when they are famished

they will become enraged and looking upward will curse their king and their

god then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness

and fearful gloom and they will be thrust into utter darkness.

Nevertheless this is usually where we pick up.

Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.

In the past he humbled the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali,

but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations by the way of the sea beyond the Jordan.

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the

land of deep darkness, the light has dawned.

You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy.

They rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as warriors rejoice when dividing plunder.

For as in the day of Midian's defeat, referring to the book of Judges,

you have shattered the yoke that burdens them.

The bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, every warrior's

boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning,

will be fuel for the fire.

For to us, a child is born. To us, a son is given.

And the government will be on his shoulder and he will be called Wonderful Counselor.

Mighty God everlasting father prince

of peace of the greatness of his government and

peace there will be no end he will reign on

David's throne and over his kingdom establishing and

upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever the

zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this today is Advent Sunday the beginning

of the four weeks leading up to Christmas and every year I feel this pressure

to preach something new but.

It's Advent. I don't have to give you something new to connect you to something

true. Yet I do have some new thoughts.

Karl Barth, the theologian, said unfulfilled and fulfilled promise are related

to each other, as are dawn and sunrise.

Both are promise, and in fact, the same promise.

If anywhere at all, then it is precisely in the light of the coming of Christ

that faith has become Advent faith, the expectation of future revelation.

But faith knows for whom and for what it is waiting.

It is fulfilled faith because it lays hold on the fulfilled promise.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he said this in his book about Advent.

The celebration of Advent is possibly only to those who are troubled in soul,

who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and to look forward to something

greater to come. This is Advent.

The word Advent, it comes from the Latin adventus, which means coming or arrival,

and it possesses a dual meaning for the church.

In Advent, we anticipate both the incarnation, live in this anticipation of

this reality that has already happened, and Christ's second coming,

Just as Sunday is both the first and eighth day of creation,

Advent is both the first and the last season of the church year.

Now, we don't understand that, but in the liturgical church calendar,

which I think is beautiful, there's this whole year stretched out to connect

to symbolic meaning, to the gospel story.

And the church Advent or the church liturgical calendar begins and ends with Advent.

The remembering of the beginning of all things and an acknowledgement of the end of them.

Even as Advent calls us to remember the many millennia that God's people waited

for their Messiah, we are also encouraged to wait with expectant hope for our

Savior's second coming.

The season of reflection is a reminder that in our present day and age,

we are still before Christ, perpetually inhabiting a second Advent, a second waiting.

We are still in need of a Savior to come and make all things new.

As we go through Advent over the next four weeks, we will symbolically light.

I don't have an actual wreath to light, and you don't want me playing with fire in front of all you.

But the candle this week of hope, of peace, joy, and love, and they're all culminating

in this eternal wreath that represents eternity,

humanity meeting eternity, and in the center, the Christ candle,

which embodies them all, hope, peace, joy, and love.

And today we're symbolically lighting the candle of hope, sometimes called the

prophecy candle or the expectation candle. I like our candle. I like hope.

But what is biblical hope? What is Christian hope?

And the answer is deep, and we'll dig into it.

It's not complicated, but it is deep and full of richness. But what it is not is naive optimism.

Optimism. But we're supposed to be optimists. Glaff has full, have full.

Not glaff. I forget. Speak today. So many consonants.

Optimism, to put it simply, is the attitude that believes that there's going

to be a successful outcome in any given situation. I'm optimistic.

It's going to turn out. It's going to be all right. The situation is going to

be fine. This is going to work.

Optimism is certainly not a bad thing. I would rather be an optimist than a

pessimist. A pessimist, because I hate Pepsi.

But here's the thing. When optimism replaces faith, and when optimism replaces

hope, this need, that outcomes must be, they're going to work out.

The outcome is going to work out.

When that becomes our source of faith and our source of hope,

it sets us up for an existential crisis of faith.

One of my favorite quotes in one of my favorite Christmas movies I was just

watching it for the first of probably 15 times this Christmas season. It's Polar Express.

Everybody in my family hates it. The characters, the animation freaks them out.

There's something about their eyes. It is kind of weird.

But in this one particular part in this film, this movie, this cartoon,

the boy, the heroine, hero, sorry, just bear with me.

He's trying to get to his friend who's lost her ticket, but he found her ticket.

He accidentally lost it, but he finds that he's trying to bring it to her.

He ends up following her on top of the train, but she can't be found as she's

going through the snow with the conductor.

And she stumbles upon a train-hopping hobo sitting on the top of the train,

drinking coffee through a sock.

And he sits in the, this hobo invites the boy to sit with him and they're having this conversation.

And he asks him, so what are your thoughts on the big guy on Santa Claus?

And the whole movie is about this struggle to believe, the struggle to believe in magic.

And the boy says to the man, he says, I want to believe.

Before he can finish, the man says, you want to believe, but you don't want to be let down.

You see, that's the problem with optimism as faith. It leaves us at times broken

and heartbroken and let down to the point where we get too scared to actually

attach ourselves to faith and to hope ever again,

because I want to believe, but what if I get let down?

There's a story that I want to tell about a man named Admiral Jim Stockdale.

I don't know if you've ever heard of him. If you are a businessman and you've

read philosophical business books about leadership models, you've probably heard

of the book, Good to Great.

And the book author interviews this man and his whole book revolves around what

he calls the Stockdale Paradox.

But Admiral Jim Stockdale was flying on a mission on September the 9th in 1965

over North Vietnam when his plane was struck by enemy fire.

Stockdale ejected, parachuted, and landed in a small village where he was promptly

captured as a prisoner, tortured, and taken to the infamous prisoner of war

camp nicknamed, and I quote, Hanoi Hilton. The Hanoi Hilton.

Stockdale would be in that war camp for more than seven years,

and he was dragged to that camp, dragging a shattered leg that was destroyed

in the initial beatings that he received in his imprisonment.

And he would be in that war camp for more than seven years.

He eventually got out. And some years later, the author of Good to Great,

Jim Collins, caught up with him and had a conversation with Stockdale.

Collins asked him the question, who did not make it in the prisoner of war camp?

Stockdale said, oh, that's an easy question. It was the optimists.

That sounds ridiculous, right?

Collins thought, hmm, that's odd, because everyone talks about the need for optimism.

Well, Stockdale continued, he said the optimist would say, we're going to be

out of this prison camp by Christmas.

And Christmas would come and go, and they'd still be there. And then the optimist

would say, well, we'll be out by Easter.

And Easter would come, and Easter would go.

And they died, he said, of a broken heart.

Collins asked Stockdale, well, what enabled you to persevere through the camp.

And Stockdale said, I never lost faith in the end of the story.

I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail

in the end and turn this experience into the defining moment of my life.

Stockdale said, you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end,

which you absolutely cannot afford to lose, with the honesty and discipline

to confront the brutal facts of your reality, whatever they may be.

And so in order for us to perceive or persevere through difficult times,

we need to avoid a kind of naive and toxic optimism that will break our hearts.

We also need to have the capacity to honestly confront the brutal facts of our

situation and never lose faith in the end of the story.

That's a little bit different than what I would have thought would get me through such a terrible time.

And he was the highest ranking Navy officer in prison war camps.

And because of that, and he was brave and he led these, this kind of a revolution

and he had a strict code of conduct and how the prisoners would act during times of torture.

And because of his superiority, because of his rank and because of his actions

as a revolutionary in the camps, he was brutally beaten over and over again,

yet he prevailed because he never lost sight of the end of the story.

This passage in Isaiah that I opened with is one of the staple Christmas passages

we read or hear referred to every Christmas.

We've all heard it. I've read it every single Christmas, starting in chapter

9, verse 1, where it says, nevertheless.

But the nevertheless tells us that this is connecting to a story that's already being told.

Because we don't usually start in chapter 8. Because chapter 8 is very dark.

Talks about Israel's constant rejection and turning over, ever,

and over, and over again in their faithfulness.

And it sits in a very dark period of Israel's history.

This prophecy is given in the 8th century B.C., about 750 years or so before Jesus.

As I said, they've turned in their faithfulness from their faithfulness to God,

to Yahweh, and at the moment they're living in fear as this prophecy comes into

the scene as it is released to these people.

Living in fear of the current world superpower Assyria, who is growing in might

and ferocity and was about to invade their homeland. They're terrified.

And it says in verse eight, it goes on to say how they're looking here and there

for their optimistic sources of hope, their optimistic sources of getting through this. Let me go here.

Let me go there. And you see, as I read in chapter eight, God says,

why would you not come to me?

Chapter 8, it speaks of the reality of turning to other sources of optimistic answers.

And the result is a brutal reality of darkness.

And he goes on to speak in chapter 9, in the past. He says, in the past,

I humbled the land of Zebulon and Naphtali.

But here's the thing. And then he goes on to speak of the future in this present tense.

Many Hebrew scholars, most Hebrew scholars think that Isaiah actually spoke

of this event where God has humbled Naphtali,

humbled the land of Zebulon in the past tense, but he's actually writing it

before it happened, speaking into it prophetically because God knows the beginning and the end.

Now, Zebulon and Naphtali, to connect to this dark period in Israel's story,

they resided in the north by the sea and was a likely place to begin an invasion.

Anybody who wants to invade Israel is going to start here because these two

regions are right there at the edge and by the sea.

And we know that in 730 BC, this became the very real reality.

But here's the good news with this prophecy of brutal reality also comes a word of promise,

a word of hope, a promise that though the land will be humbled because of your

unfaithfulness, because the consequence of turning to anyone but me,

these things are coming upon you.

But nevertheless the land

that is humbled now come on from that land

will god will honor this region

we know as galilee of the nations those who

walk in darkness he says have seen a great light and then some 700 and something

years later where does jesus begin his ministry in the ancient land of zebulon

and naphtali now known as galilee by the sea,

You see, Isaiah does not avoid the brutal reality of the situation.

Prophecies aren't saying, this isn't real.

Just rebuke the situation. He says, this is a brutal reality.

But at the same time, Isaiah holds on to the hope of the end of the story.

How do we live and go on in a broken world of great darkness?

Now, we don't live in a world at the present time here in the West in America

that is overcome by war, although many will tell you it's going to happen.

But we don't have to look far to see the reality, the brutal reality that the world is broken.

The darkness is real.

How do we hold on to hope in a time of unpredictability?

And how do we not just simply live in optimism that it will get better?

Because there's no way to predict what's going to happen. Some may say,

well, just, we just need this to happen and that to happen.

God's going to use those and the world is going to get better.

My friends, I've got bad news for you.

The scriptures do not promise us a better world until, until God comes again

in Jesus Christ and sums all things into himself.

We cannot predict. We cannot optimistically lay out plans to predictably make things better.

Sometimes we can, but the psychologist Philip Tedlock, I was reading about him this week.

He wrote a book called Expert Political Judgment.

Tedlock, this is already such a thing as expert political judgment.

Tedlock studied about 300 experts, prominent journalists, respected academics,

high-level advisors to the national leaders, and he studied their predictions,

their political and economic and social forecasts.

He studied them all. This is a way we can predict what's going to happen.

The study spanned two decades. This wasn't just like, we're going to do a couple

months or even just one year, two decades. That's 20 years if you don't know the math.

I had to think about it for a second, myself.

Tetlock's conclusion was summarized in an arresting punchline.

He said, the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

Say that again. The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

Tetlock's 20 years of research concluded that it was virtually impossible for

anybody to make a detailed, long-term prediction about specific events.

The world, after all, is a messy place.

Small things can have big consequences. Unforeseeable events are bound to occur,

and those unforeseeable events have consequences that are

also unforeseeable like we learned from our study of ecclesiastes everything

is smoke unpredictable fleeting in in the end ends in death this is a great

christmas message optimism alone cannot predict.

Most of the time, optimism alone as my source of hope.

It's either in totally avoiding the brutal realities of life or leading us to

any source of optimistic relief that we can find.

And we're all guilty of this at times.

A political answer. How many Christians attach God's faithfulness to a presidential funding.

Now you're saying, well, you don't like the president. I'm not saying anything.

I'm saying not even a president with all the power in the Western world can

control every outcome and trading our hope for our optimism that we're finally

going to get someone who's going to eliminate all the medical problems because he gets it.

He's going to eliminate disease and eliminate hardship and eliminate suffering. That is naive optimism.

Philosophical answers are naive optimism. Social answers.

How do I just live socially? How do I just lean into who I am as a human being

and be my true authentic self?

That is going to lead me into something good and it's going to have a beautiful

outcome and my life will be fulfilling.

The answers in progress and in science because

we live in an age since the dawn of enlightenment in the industrial revolution

whatever it's called we can see that maybe we can't predict everything but we

know we as human beings have the capacity to produce the outcomes that we want.

Got science. I love science. But science does not give us hope.

All of these things are either denying the brutal realities of our life.

And sometimes in the culture that I grew up in, which was beautiful,

we refuse to acknowledge the brutal reality of the hardness of life and the

situations that we sometimes found ourselves in. These things must be rebuked.

And I'm not saying just lay back and say, oh, kill me now, Jesus.

I'm saying that is not faith and that is not hope. That is denial and naive optimism.

We live in a world that thinks they have it all figured out.

Well, we have the highest rates of depression, the highest rates of hopelessness.

Another person in our history is a man named Andrew Carnegie.

I'm sure you've heard of him Came from the gilded age And the west in america,

And he was a scottish-born tycoon who made a fortune here in north america Some

of you know of one of our vancouver libraries or one of the vancouver libraries

is named after his family We know carnegie hall.

It's named after him Andrew carnegie was raised as a presbyterian But when he

became an adult, he was raised a Christian.

Presbyterian is also Christian.

He became an adult, he grew suspicious of religion. He had read Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

And in what was called the Gilded Age, in the time before the genocides and

the world wars of the 20th century, Carnegie was writing his autobiography.

And he received what he felt was a kind of illumination, causing him to get

rid of God and hope and those kinds of things. So I don't need hope.

He says, light came in. I got rid of the theology and the supernatural.

All is well, he wrote, since all grows better.

Everything is growing better. It's one of his famous lines, all grows better.

All is well, since all grows better.

There could be no conceivable end to man's march towards perfection.

And then the war broke out, World War I, and he had a dramatic shift of perspective.

In the last paragraph of his autobiography, he writes, As I read now what I

had previously written today, what a change.

The world is now convulsed with war. Men are slaying each other like beasts as never before.

I dare not relinquish hope. So while Carnegie assumed that the world was just,

you know, improving and getting better and better and perfect.

He had no need for God, no need for hope.

But then with war, he says, I dare not give up hope.

You see, history has a way of dismantling optimism.

Suffering reveals our need for hope.

May not, as I said, be currently living in the West, in America,

in the reality of war like he was in our country, but we cannot deny the brutal

reality of darkness, nor can we deny the realities of our own personal lives.

That is not faith. That is not hope. That's denial.

But here's the good news.

Advent. With Advent, we are not connected to optimism, but we are connected

to the reality of God's story.

Not just of His story, but in the hope of the ending.

Hope. Biblical Christian hope is living in the light of the kingdom that has

come and the promise that God will finish what he started in Christ. That is biblical hope.

There are two main Hebrew words for hope. You know, darn it,

I just messed up my outlines in some weird format.

I need a five-year-old to tell me how to change it. It's all right.

Sweet Jesus in heaven, thank you. There are two main Hebrew words for hope in the Old Testament.

Yakau, which simply means to wait. Like in Genesis where Noah had to yakau for

weeks for the floodwaters to recede. He waited.

And then kavah is the second. And it also means to wait. But it's related to

the Hebrew word kav, which means cord.

And it means when you pull a kav tight, you produce a state of tension until there's release.

That's kavah, the feeling of tension

and expectation while you wait for something to happen. That is hope.

It is this constant expectation. It's not saying that absolutely every outcome is going to work out.

It is saying, I am holding on because I know that this is going to break and

God's story is going to end the way he wants it to end.

The prophet Isaiah depicts God as a farmer who plants vines and kavahs for good

grapes, waits with expectation.

I don't see them, but I know they're coming.

Well, the prophet Micah talks about farmers who both kavah and yakah for morning

dew to give moisture to the land. I wait and I wait with expectation.

Morning is coming and with the morning comes the dew.

So in biblical Hebrew, hope is about waiting or expectation, but waiting for what?

And in the period of Israel's prophets as a nation was sinking into self-destruction,

as we read in the first part of chapter 8 earlier.

Isaiah says, at this moment, the Lord's hiding his face from Israel, so I will kavah for him.

8.17, I will wait for the Lord who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him.

I will wait, and I will hope, because I know the only hope that Israel had in

those dark days was the hope for God himself.

It's a theological fallacy to reduce the story of Christian hope simply to our

personal longed-for outcomes.

Don't get me wrong, God desires to show us his favor even this side of eternity.

But hope, Advent hope, is none other than the arrival of the incarnate embodiment

of the faithfulness of God and the promise of his return.

It's a living reality and it's living in the reality of the promise that was fulfilled.

Jesus' coming was a promise fulfilled and a sign that the promises will be fulfilled.

You see, Matthew opens Jesus' account also by connecting to part of Isaiah.

In Matthew 1, verse 22 through 23, it says, all this took place,

Matthew 1:22–23

talking about Mary's pregnancy and Joseph's wrestling with how to handle the

situation and an angel coming to him in a dream.

With that, Joseph says, I will name the boy Jesus. I will make him my own.

And it says, all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet.

The virgin will conceive and give

birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.

Now, I want to give you a little example, because sometimes we have,

I think, the wrong understanding of this word fulfilling the prophecies and

the way it was viewed and how Matthew was using this.

Matthew is not using it to say, this prophecy was given and Jesus being born

to Mary is proof that the prophecy.

That's how we would say fulfilled. It's a proof, but that's not what the word

fulfill actually means. It means to fill full. So let me give you an example.

You some, this is going to be really dangerous, fill full.

And again, Matthew's not making a point that a virgin is giving birth.

Because in actuality, the prophecy in Hebrew, when it was given those 700 years

earlier, the word virgin is not actually even used. It's just young woman.

What? Matthew's lying? No, he's not lying.

And he's connecting to a reality. He's not just connecting to one verse,

he's connecting to the fullness of Isaiah's prophecies that are connecting to

the full story of Israel.

Not that a virgin would give birth, because eventually, centuries later,

when the desert fathers in Egypt translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek,

which we get as the Septuagint, which is the Bible that Jesus would have used

and Paul would have used the Greek translated Bible.

I'm sure Jesus also read the Hebrew and the Aramaic.

But in that Bible, years later, the translators translated this word from young

woman, which could mean virgin to virgin.

A virgin could be a young woman, but it doesn't usually mean that.

And what am I saying? And why is it important that Matthew is making this connection,

not to prove something, to connect to a reality that was the full story of Israel's

story, that was the complete picture of Isaiah's prophecies?

Not that I'm going to do this, this, this, just watch, I'm going to prove this.

It was, You might be unfaithful, but I will always, despite who you are and

what you do, I will always come through.

I do not need you. The idea of a virgin was God saying, I do not need a human

being to bring my plan into being.

I will bring the story of redemption forward. And here it says that the prophecy

was filled full when Jesus came. What does that mean?

Well, in the Old Testament, they had these prophecies. And many of them that

are later seen through the lens of Christ at the time meant something very, very real.

There was something very real

that Isaiah was trying to say with this prophecy, I'll give you a sign.

And the king said, I don't want a sign. I don't want to test God because he

had already actually behind Isaiah's back gone and made his own deal to deal with Assyria.

He said, I don't need a sign. I've already figured it out. I've got optimism.

And God says, nevertheless, I will give you a sign because I will defeat your

enemies, not your deals, not your optimism.

I will defeat your enemies. I will bring it to pass and I will give you a sign.

By the time this child that is born gets to a certain age, the war will already be over.

But then we see years later, as Matthew is connecting to the fullest story of

Isaiah, the fullness of all that Isaiah is trying to communicate,

that is connecting to the entire story of Israel, that God has a plan.

Humanity has broken it. Yet God, despite of humanity, was going to make it right.

And he didn't need the help of anyone to do it.

We have a part to play in the continuing story of connecting to purpose,

but the process of redemption has nothing to do with us.

It was a work done. And you see, they had these prophecies in the Old Testament,

but it says that they were not full.

It doesn't mean they had no meaning. It says that they were incomplete.

It was kind of like in that day when those prophecies were given.

It was like a glass half empty.

It was partial. You can see the full Isaiah for sure could see as he spoke in

the future in past tense, as if it had already happened, the reality that God

was going to do something.

That was hope. It was a dark time. It was 700 years that Israel had to cling

to hope in a glass half empty.

We've seen the reality that God can do something, that God has begun something,

but we haven't seen its fullness.

And now 750 or so years later, Matthew comes and says, these things happened.

Here comes Jesus born of a virgin, not just to show that God can do miraculous

things, but to show us that God is going to move independent of us. Now he used a.

I do not need a man to bring redemption to the story.

I will do it. And it says with Jesus,

that that hope became full and the promises that they had been lived in partially

that they knew and some of those who held on and believed in God's faithfulness,

always talking about a remnant.

There were always those through captivity, always those through exile that would

cling to these prophecies and say, we haven't seen it yet, but we know that

the God of Israel, we know that Yahweh has spoken them.

We know that Yahweh has done something. And so we will wait.

We will cavil. We will hold on until we see it fulfilled.

And again, throughout all of these 700 years since the prophecy,

through the 300 to 400 years of silence after they're brought back to Jerusalem,

they're constantly waiting and they're constantly trading even those who are

holding onto it, trading hope for optimism.

There's going to be a better king in this day and age and here in Galilee by

the sea, Jerusalem, the Israelites are now dependent.

They are now enslaved again. They consider themselves still in exile,

not enslaved necessarily like in Egypt, but they are living under the boot of Rome.

And here comes Jesus, not the optimistic president that's finally going to make the right policies.

But the Prince of Peace, the Everlasting Father, the Mighty Counselor,

God himself was going to come and hope was filled full.

But here's the thing about Advent. It doesn't just cause us to look back on

the story that is finished.

Advent connects us to a sign that a glass, it was full.

The promises were filled full. but at the same time now in advent and jesus

work did not just connect us to a past but it connected us to a new glass.

Jesus' death and resurrection and his birth filled full the promises that the

king would come, that God would come to us.

And then it connected us to a new reality.

As that one was filled full, we are now living in this in-between,

living in the reality that God

has done what he promised, and he's still going to do what he promised.

I do not have to lose hope in the end of the story and his birth,

his life, his death, his resurrection are the sign that tells us, I will do it again.

I will finish the story. And of course, promises come from Coke, Diet Coke.

I'm almost done. Before Jesus, the words spoken were not in full realize.

But with God coming to us in Jesus, the promises were filled full,

connecting us to a bigger glass.

And this one is still not yet full. That's why denying the reality of the world

we live in forces us to concede that the glass is already supposed to be completely

full when there's a promise that all things will be worked out.

But today, as Jesus people, as Advent people,

for us, this side of eternity, We are connected to the reality that God has

fulfilled His promises, and He will fulfill His promises.

Optimism that must be attached to outcomes. This side of the fullness will break

our hearts, but hope will keep us through to the end of the story.

Hope that the story's ending is already guaranteed.

This will be a sign unto you. This will be a guarantee. You will find the babe

wrapped. this will be a sign unto us a son has given.

And now we can look back on all those years ago when this baby was born,

not as a sign of something fantastic, but as a sign that God is the only one

who can finish the story.

Familiar with the work of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He said, no, I'm not.

You are, because he wrote the famous serenity prayer.

And many of these words have these words on refrigerators or etched in frame pictures or pillows.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

But here's the thing, that's just the first part of the prayer.

There's more to that beautiful prayer.

And he goes on to say this, living one day at a time, enjoying the moment at

a time, accepting hardships as a pathway of peace,

taking as he did the sinful world as it is, not as I would have it,

trusting that he will make all things right as I surrender to his will,

that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with him forever in the next. Amen.

That is Advent hope.

Now, here's the thing. I don't want you to leave this thinking,

okay, so I shouldn't expect good things to happen.

I should just surrender any kind of optimism.

I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying optimism is not hope.

Never, ever stop praying, nor believing that God can invade our present situation.

That's the power of the resurrection. It shows us that God can come in and burst

into a timeline with his life and change things.

We should never stop believing that things can change even now.

But hope lives in the world as it is, filled with the light of the world to come.

That's this whole living in this half-empty glass with a full glass in the middle.

We are living in the world as it is, but yet, through the Holy Spirit in us

and the work of Christ, had the light.

Those who walk in darkness have seen a great light.

It doesn't say that there's light everywhere. It says that God turned on the lights.

And how does he turn on the lights? By those of us who live in the hope.

Says, God will have the final word and I can trust the end of the story.

Despite the outcomes, hope says, God will have the end of the story.

But here's the cool thing.

Hope actually gives us the faith to ask bigger, not smaller.

Hope doesn't now make us because I'm acknowledging the brutal reality of the world.

Hope just says, I'm just not even going to do anything. I'm just going to just

ask small and try to live just, you know, the best I can. And I know someday it'll be good.

Actually, no hope enables us to have the kind of faith to ask bigger.

You fulfilled your promise after 700 years to a virgin was born.

God came to us.

So though I will not live in naive optimism, I will leave in big faith.

And it gives us the capacity and the faith to ask big.

Why? Because hope holds tightly to the God we are praying to and loosely to

the outcomes of our prayers.

I want to see this, and I'm going to ask big God.

I'm going to ask for big healings, big miracles, big outpourings of your favor,

but I'm holding on to you, not the answer to my prayer. That is hope.

Bonhoeffer said, Advent creates people, new people.

Because you see, hope doesn't just transform us into people who can endure,

but into people that carry others into it.

Stockdale, in his recounting of the story, his story,

he tells that the ones who had a deep faith in God that he encountered in these

prison camps, who read stories like the book of Job and realize that suffering is an unavoidable,

brutal reality in this life, but that Jesus was the end of their story.

He said those were the ones who endured the brutal reality of torture,

but they were also the ones that gave others the courage and hope to go on as well.

You see, hope makes us carriers of light.

This hope that has been born in us, hope that we are no longer just dependent

on our optimistic abilities to produce outcomes,

nor are we dependent on whether or not we see outcomes, but we are dependent

on the reality that the God who fulfilled his word is the same God who is going

to fulfill the promises that he has made to make all things new.

Hope is not passive. It's missional. It makes us carriers of light.

Hope is not escapism. it's endurance.

Hope is not naive, it is resurrection shaped because the resurrection was the

event in history where God entered the world and a human being was remade.

A sign of our future when we are remade.

And hope attaches us to that reality and it makes us carriers of the light that

has dawned in the darkness.

So conclusion, what is hope?

Hope is faith in the end of the story. Hope remembers that God has already kept

his greatest promise in Christ.

He's already kept it. He promised it. It took time. His people waited.

And God did what he promised. He's kept his word in Christ.

Hope holds us steady in darkness. Hope confronts the brutal facts without losing

trust in the final victory.

Hope says God will have the last word. One of my favorite Christmas quotes is from Agnes Perrault.

She says, what is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the

present, hope for the future.

And today, as we symbolically light the candle of hope, we declare the light

has come and the light will come again.

As you go into this season of Advent, of Christmas, choose to live in hope.

I know that sounds kind of ambiguous.

Surrender your need for a perfect Christmas. I will try to do that as well.

To connect to the beauty of the fulfilled promise. I don't have to have a perfect

Christmas to live in the reality of the fulfilled promise that connects me to

a promise yet to be fulfilled.

Choose not to live in the anxiety of spending money you don't have.

I, again, will do my best to do this.

Instead, give the gift of hope by opening up your lives and your home to others.

Christmas is the time where the whole world pauses in its pain,

takes a breath, and whispers, is it possible to believe in something better?

Is magic real? Is there hope?

Does Christmas show that world that there is?

Philip Brooks once said, another one of my favorite Christmas quotes,

the world has grown weary through the years, but at Christmas, it's young.

Christmas hope, Advent hope is that hope of that little child who really believes

in the magic of Christmas,

and waits months and months and months knowing that their hope will be met with fulfilled promises.

Go ahead and stand up. Lord, today we just thank you for your faithfulness.

Lord, we pray in hope for

every situation that every family in

this room is facing that you

would intervene that you would reveal your faithfulness and we also know that

the world is unpredictable we also know that things happen and the fulfilled

promise so far was not a guarantee that from now on we will live devoid of the world as it is.

Also connects us to the reality of the world to come that we can hope for.

But now as the light of hope has dawned on our hearts, we can even live in today.

God, I pray big for you to move, but I hold tightly to you.

Come what may, I will endure. until the end of the story.

I will not lose sight of the end of the story.

You have been, you are, and you will be faithful.

You have kept your word, and you will keep your word. And you will have the final word.

So we surrender to hope.

We just thank you, Lord, today. In Jesus' name, come on, somebody, say amen.