Rebellions Are Built on Hope
Reflections on Luke 2.1-20
Christmas Eve 2016
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
As 2016 draws
to a close, I am seeing, hearing and reading news stories and ‘op ed’ pieces
that are apprehensive about the year to come.
Regional wars continue to create refugees and humanitarian crises
throughout the world. ‘Brexit’ and the
election of a populist candidate in the United States are causing political and
diplomatic uncertainty in the corridors of power. The gap between the wealthiest and the
poorest still grows. Climate change,
whatever part we play in it, is real and will affect all of us for generations
to come.
On this silent
night, this holy night, I cannot help but cast my imagination back through the
millennia to that cattle shed in Bethlehem.
Joseph and Mary did not live in a world too different from our own.
They lived in
a part of the Mediterranean world squeezed between the Roman and Persian
empires with their competing imperial claims and warring client states. Joseph and Mary knew demagogues and
tyrants. They knew poverty and the
fragility of personal security. They
knew the risk of bringing a child into such a world, even the Child of
Promise. Why did Joseph and Mary take
the risk? One word: Hope.
Despite all
the evidence to the contrary, Joseph and Mary knew that God’s promise of
freedom and fullness of life comes into being through people who dare to
hope. Such hope is not naïve. Hope in God’s promises looks at the world
with cool eyes that assess danger, discern falsehood and resist fear. The cool eyes of hope see the cracks in the
façade of power and greed and encourage us to plant seeds of hope in those
cracks. Each time one of these seeds
springs into life, it widens the crack and weakens the walls that fear and
intolerance try to maintain.
For two
thousand years Christians have gathered on this silent night, this holy night
to celebrate the hope incarnate in this Child of Joseph and Mary. This hope is so powerful that in affluent
societies such as ours it is trivialized and commercialized so that its radical
call for change can be ignored. This
hope is so powerful that in oppressive and intolerant societies it cannot be
proclaimed openly without courting physical danger.
Tonight we celebrate
the hope that ‘this is the end of the world as we know it’ and the beginning of
the world as God loves it. Tonight we
dare to hope that we, the seeds God plants in the walls that divide, will
flourish and will weaken all that holds human beings in thrall.
Last Sunday
Paula, our sons and I went to see ‘Rogue One’, a prequel film in the ‘Star
Wars’ saga. As so often happens, I
caught a whisper of the gospel in the film.
At a crucial moment in the story, one character says, ‘Rebellions are
built on hope.’ I won’t spoil the film
for you, but I will say that the film does what fiction does so well. It reminds us that even a small group of
people with hope can accomplish more than they can ask or imagine if they are
willing to bear the cost that hope might bring upon them.
Let us enter
the new year with hope rather than apprehension or anxiety. Let us trust that the hope that the Christ
Child has planted in our hearts will give us cool eyes to see danger, to
discern falsehood and to resist fear.
That same Child asks us to plant such seeds of hope wherever we can and
in whomever we encounter. Who
knows? Perhaps next year on this silent
night, this holy night, we shall celebrate how these seeds of justice, of
loving kindness and of humility have flourished and brought down even one small
section of the walls that injustice, self-interest and pride have sought to
build.
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