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FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT pv

December 2, 2001

HOPE FOR THE LONG HAUL
John M. Buchanan

There is a genuine spiritual hunger loose in the world, among the advantaged as well as
among the disadvantaged. It is found in the most elegant penthouses in Manhattan. It is
found in the barrios of Managua. People hunger for release from oppression, boredom,
and lifelessness. These malaises are sometimes the result of having too little, and
sometimes the result of having too much.... It is not just spiritual hunger that is loose in
the world, however. That for which the human spirit hungers is also loose in the world.
At the heart of the Christian faith is the conviction that the human spirit is unsatisfied
with anything short of God.... The Spirit of the trrune God is and always will be the life
force of the world and all that is good and hopeful in it, which includes the hunger for
God.

Joanna Adams
Hope as the Intractable Resolve of the Spirit

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT EIN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

HOPE FOR THE LONG HAUL
DECEMBER 2, 2001

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 122

Scripture
Isaiah 2:1-5

Matthew 24:36-44

Startle us, O God, with your truth, and open our hearts and minds to your word. As we begin
again this advent journey of waiting and expecting and hoping, be with us — speak your word of
hope to us. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

As atule the preacher should not use his or her children as sermon illustrations. It can be
exploitive and embarrassing. And when it is simply irresistible, one should only refer to one’s
family rarely, respectfully and cautiously. No such rule exists for grandchildren, however.

When it comes to grandchildren, ordinarily reticent, respectfully people become shameless. I got
so tired of admiring pictures of my friends’ grandchildren that when I finally had one of my own,
I took her picture into the pulpit and made the whole congregation admire her. The Stated Clerk
of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, Clifton Kirkpatrick, had his first grandchild
two years ago and has referred to her and told stores about her in every single public speech he
has made since and Cliff makes 3 or 4 speeches a day. I heard him do it recently and afterwards
suggested that since his grandchild wasn’t a new baby anymore maybe he could let up a little bit.
“Why,” he said, “she’s new to me and besides she’s the most wonderful child on the face of the
earth and I see it as my duty to keep on telling people about her.” All of which is to set you up
for a grandchild story, but it is also a First Sunday in Advent story.

Rachel goes to school at a parochial school, Cardinal Bernadin School, because it provides a
wonderful special program for her. She loves it, the school and teachers and her classmates love
her. Last year, at just this time, as she was being tucked in for the night, her mother asked her if
she had learned any new songs and Rachel sang in the dark from her bed:

Stay awake (clap-clap)

Be ready (clap-clap)

The Lord is coming soon

Alleluia! Alleluia! (hands waving in the air, a little like a Bear’s wide receiver
after scoring the winning touchdown)

The Lord is coming soon (clap-clap)}

She loves to sing it, and will sing it at a drop of a hat, and we love it too, and the result is that
with Rachel and her sweet song — its Advent all year long.

Stay awake

Be ready

The Lord is coming soon
Alleluia! Alleluia!

The Lord is coming soon.

The Church of Jesus Christ, for centuries, has held to the peculiar notion that real time begins
today, on the first Sunday of Advent — four Sundays before Christmas. We call the rest of the
year “Ordinary Time.” Today something new begins. And it’s not just new for those of us who
know about it and name it, and sing hymns about it, and celebrate it with candles and the color
purple. It’s for the world, for human history. “In this season we are at the brink of something

utterly new, long yearned for, but beyond our capacity to enact.” [See Texts for Preaching, Year
Aj

Advent is about hope, rooted in something new God did in human history two thousand years
ago in Bethlehem, and at the same time, looking ahead to the future in which God will continue
to act lovingly, creatively, redemptively. The world, by the way, is impatient to get on with
Christmas, to recall the story briefly and then to be immersed in the year-end festivities —
which, this year, have taken on an aura of patriotic duty. But the church, in its liturgies and
hymnody and scripture — invites us to pause, to sit in the darkness for a while before the light is
here in all its beauty and brightness; to look both backward into history and into our personal
histories, and forward to the human future and our personal futures, and to prepare for the
newness of God’s gift of love.

Advent is about hope and it comes at a moment when the world desperately needs a reason to be
hopeful.

Even before September 11", there was emerging in American culture something of a crisis of
hope. Andrew Delbanco, Columbia University professor, wrote a highly acclaimed book, The
Real American Dream, A Meditation on Hope, in which he argued that, “Our hopes are a
measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished.” Professor Delbanco
thinks that our hopes have diminished a lot in recent years. He says that in the early days, the
New England Puritans set their hope in God. In the 19" century, America placed hope in the
nation “the last best hope of mankind,” Abraham Lincoln put it. But in the late 20" century,
America’s hope began to be focused on the self. He writes, “The story of American hope over
the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing.” The late 20" century, he says, “conspired
to install instant gratification as the hallmark of hope of the good life. By the time the horizon of
hope had shrunk to the scale of self-pampering.”

The theologian Douglas John Hall, a Canadian, is one of the most thoughtful analysts of
contemporary North American culture thinks that a pervasive loss of hope — what he calls a
covert despair is the spiritual hallmark of our time.

Both Delbanco and Halil agree that the evidence of our condition is consistent with what
psychology knows about hopelessness and how people without hope behave — namely either
destructively or selfishly. We know more about the violent destructiveness that comes from

hopelessness than we want to. We know how desperate and hopeless poverty breeds mindless
violence. We have experienced it in attacks on our nation. And this morning Israel reels again
in the aftermath of suicide bombings related directly to a situation of political hopelessness. The
other manifestation of hopelessness, Delbanco and Hall agree, is the desperate search to fulfill
the spiritual empty place where hope use to be, with acquisitions, material goods, stuff. I was
reminded of the news photos and television pictures, last Friday morning, the day after
Thanksgiving — of crowds of people, lined up outside shopping malls at 4:00 am, and when the
doors opened — charging into the stores with an almost religious zeal and grim determination.

And against that backdrop, which intensified this year, it seems, comes the Christian faith and
the Christian Church with its peculiar hopefulness. It is a persistent and resilient hope. And it is
very old. All over the Christian world today congregations are reading and hearing the ancient

vision of the prophet Isaiah — about a time when there will be peace in Jerusalem, particularly
poignant this morning...

“When nations will stream to the mountain of God.
When justice will reign and therefore swords will be beaten into plowshares and
spears into pruning hooks and nations shall not lift up sword against nation...

As a matter of fact, when those words were written, Jerusalem was a marginal and grimy
operation. And future prospects for Israel were anything but peaceful. So was he mad? Are we
mad or merely irrelevant to be invoking images of peace at this unique moment in time?

I would propose that nothing is more essential to the spiritual well being of our nation than the
articulation of that hope, even as we go about the necessary business of confronting terrorism. |
would propose that the resiliency of our ancient hope is precisely the faith that God continues to
break into human history, and that God’s alternative vision of weapons turned into agricultural
implements, of battlefields transformed into fertile wheat fields, is absolutely necessary for our
survival.

It reminds me of a story Fourth Church member and Elder Ann Petersen told me. Ann was
serving in the Pentagon as General Counsel for the Air Force and was present at Davis-Monthan
Air Force Base in Arizona when we began to implement the Arms Reduction Treaty with the.
Soviet Union. Ground launched cruise missiles and their mobile lauchers were laid out on the
tarmac and literally cut into pieces in the presence of American and Soviet inspectors and then
the pieces were carefully spread out on the tarmac so that Soviet surveillance satellites could see
and verify. Ann also recalled seeing in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the treaty, Soviet
titanium missile shells, now decommissioned, being used as farm silos — a literal example of
swords transformed into plowshares.

So yes, Advent hope is real hope, serious hope. And yes, sometime it is remote, so remote that
it feels unreal, almost silly. But down across the centuries, God’s people have held tightly to that
hope and it has given them resiliency and courage and life itself, even in the darkest and most
hopeless situation. -

We need that hope today, perhaps as never before. Bob Cathey who teaches theology at
McCormick Seminary spoke to our officers and told about phoning Walter Payton High School,
just a few blocks west of here, on September 11", where his daughter Laura is a 9" grader. Then
he drove downtown to pick her up. Cathey says the sight of downtown Chicago emptying out at
10:15 in the morning recalled images from his worst Cold War nightmares. His daughter Laura
told him that she was in English class when the school announced what was happening. From
her classroom she could see the Sears Tower. She said that she would glance out every few
minutes just to be sure that it was still there.

We need the hopeful vision of Advent as never before.

Be ready Jesus said. Stay awake and alert because you don’t know when God will show up. No
one, after all, expected God to come in a humble birth in the out-of-the-way little town of
Bethlehem. Nobody much recognized God’s presence in Jesus, later, as he taught and healed
and confronted and challenged. And even fewer, about nobody in fact, recognized God, as he
was betrayed, arrested, tried, convicted, and crucified. Be ready and awake and alert because no
one knows how and when God will appear. What we believe and trust is that God will come,
that God is an active participant in human history and our personal histories. We don’t know
how or when — but we trust that God will come again into our lives with love and forgiveness
and reconciliation and healing. That’s what hope is — that’s what Advent is about.

A young friend of mine, a college freshman, a fine athlete, came home for Thanksgiving with a
sad duty to perform. A high school friend who had battled cancer for years had finally died and
he was going to speak at her funeral.

Staunton chose some words about hope, very personal hope, from his favorite movie The
Shawshank Redemption. Red, played by Morgan Freeman, reflects about his friend who has
recently dug a tunnel out of the prison where they are incarcerated and is heading for Mexico —

“Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. I hope I can make it across the border. I
hope I can see my friend and shake his hand. Hope is a good thing. Maybe the
best of things. And no good things ever dies.”

And Emily Dickinson —
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without words

and never stops at all.

And Rachel’s sweet Advent song — we probably couldn’t sing it. But we could say it, together,
because this is our hope, the hope we share in Jesus Christ.

And it might even be okay to punctuate it with very un-Presbyterian hand claps and hand waves.

So if you’re feeling brave, and in the spirit of Advent’s beautiful and resilient hope — if you are
willing to throw caution to the wind, please join me:

Stay Awake (clap-clap)

Be Ready (clap-clap)

The Lord is Coming Soon.

Alleluia! Alleluia! (hand wave)

The Lord is Coming Soon! (clap-clap)

Amen.