Pentecost 23C
Isaiah 65:17-25, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
Hope, Rose and Mary: These are the names my parents chose for me and my two sisters. Our household has heard the stories behind our names many times. Mary was born around Christmas. I was born as our neighbor’s garden bloomed. And Hope, the eldest, was named out of defiance and optimism. As my mom recently told the story to me, my expectant parents saw the chaos of the world. But they saw the good, too. And they chose to believe in the good. So, they named their firstborn as a reminder.
As we come to the end of the church calendar year and look forward to the Reign of Christ Sunday next week, our lectionary readings take an apocalyptic turn. And as I hold these texts in conversation with one another, I keep coming back to my sister’s name and my parents’ motivation behind it. I keep coming back to the impractical reality of hope. It strikes me that hope is both foundation of our faith and, at the same time, something that we can never truly understand and, therefore, something we must hold loosely. It is a shapeshifter. And yet, it is also unchanging at its core.
Isaiah 65:17-25 sings a sweet song of Judeo-Christian hope. “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” God speaks through the prophet (v. 17). We are shown a future where a wolf, lion and lamb live peaceably together, where tears are no more, where labor is not in vain.
While there is not quite a scholarly consensus on the origins of Isaiah 55-66, many believe this material reflects the struggles of the remnant who remained in Jerusalem and Judah with the leadership who returned from the Babylonian Exile. They have known suffering – including living under the invading armies that colonized Judah and now under the leadership of those who returned to Judah after two generations in Babylon. In the face of uncertainty, God reminds them through the writer of this passage that suffering will not last, that, as J.R.R Tolkien wrote, “in the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” Only the beauty and goodness does not stay in the heavens in this passage, it comes down to earth as God creates a new, perfect community for God’s beloveds.
That image – that there is something more to live for, that there is a greater power at work, that all will be made right is buoyant. It is at the very heart of the Christian tradition. We believe that, as Julian of Norwich wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” because of God’s love embodied by the resurrected Christ. This hope, the hope Christ embodies, is the very cornerstone of our faith. It is reality in its truest form.
But this hope can also feel impractical, dim and distant. Hope does not fill bellies. It does not stop storms. It does not keep you warm. How are we to hold on to hope in the face of all the shadows in this world? 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 and Luke 21:5-19 offer some suggestions.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 shows us that true hope is not a passive thing. While this passage has been misapplied as teaching against providing for the poor, Paul’s language is directed at those who have grown lazy in their faith, who can provide for themselves but fail to do so because they say they are too focused on waiting for Jesus to return. While a new heaven and a new earth are coming, we cannot simply sit back in our hope. Rather, God invites us, out of God’s grace, to be co-creators. Hope based in Christ requires action. It requires that we love our neighbor.
On the other hand, Luke 21:5-19 reminds us that hope often defies our expectations of what it should look like. The temple of Jesus’ time was beautiful. It had recently been refurbished by Herod the Great, a project which took 80 years and included new foundation walls and a larger space. It was a sign of strength and prosperity, which gave people hope. And yet, as Jesus foretells in Luke 21, it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.
Big, beautiful buildings or tanks or government officials can offer hope, but it is fleeting. Lasting hope comes when we learn to look at the world through Christ’s eyes and see beyond the temporary, beyond the grand, beyond tradition. Hope is seeing what others have called repulsive, what they have overlooked, and discovering that God resides in these places too.
We live in a world where loved ones get sick, where bombs destroy lives and livelihoods, where global warming ensures the suffering of animals and humans alike. Yet we as Christians believe in our core that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17-25). Hope is a reality that we build our faith on. And hope is incredibly impractical. Both things can be true. God gives us some examples in Scriptures like 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 and Luke 21:5-19 that help us hold space for that nuance and choose hope nonetheless.
