“So what?” I’m not sure how old I was—maybe 6?—but I was like a broken record in the Sunday School classroom that day. God bless the teacher, because I remember meeting every answer with the same response: “So what? So what? So what?” Looking back as an adult, I can only imagine how perplexing it mus have been. What on earth are you supposed to do with a kid who keeps hanging up the lesson by asking why it matters in the first place?
But it’s a question that continues to be relevant into adulthood, even if it isn’t usually asked with such childlike bluntness. So what? Why bother? Why bother with church and the Bible and Sacraments and pledge drives? Why does any of this matter? It matters because the Gospel offers what is really a pretty provocative idea: that there is hope.
This idea is provocative because the world we see offers very little reason to hope. The great edifices and institutions of society are crumbling, with the stones of their very foundations threatening to be toppled. The standard response to “How are you?” seems to have become “Eh, I’m hanging in there.” The world is falling apart. And we may be insulated from its concrete effects, to varying degrees depending on our privilege. But at the very least we see it, “doomscrolling” through headlines of vicious hatred, all-out wars, and apocalyptic natural disasters. There seems to be a lot of reason to despair.
And the world’s philosophies are failing us as we try to make sense of it all. The vision of progressing towards a liberal utopia is being exposed as an illusion. The myth of conserving the glory of yesteryear feels like an increasingly flimsy fantasy. The ideal of overthrowing oppression in a revolution of justice is fading like a pipe dream. And the apparently pragmatic approach of simply being a good person is proving woefully inadequate in the face of true evil. When it comes to reasons to keep pressing on in life, the wisdom of the world is coming up short. No wonder people are more lonely, depressed, and wracked with anxiety than ever before in living memory.
But I say “living memory” because our readings today remind us that the hopeless state we find ourselves in is anything but new. Our bishop reminded the clergy this week that Holy Scripture was written by and for the oppressed and downtrodden—the people who were looking despair right in the face. And that really shows in the readings that we hear proclaimed as we move towards the season of Advent.
The Prophet Daniel talks about a coming “time of anguish, such as has never occurred since the nations first came into existence.” The Letter to the Hebrews is written during a time of sharp persecution and deep discouragement, as a beleaguered church looks ahead to the upheaval of the approaching, apocalyptic Day of the Lord. And in many ways—maybe most?—even today’s Gospel is kind of a downer. Stones being toppled, wars between nations, earthquakes, and famines. And all of us this just “the beginning of the birth pangs.”
It seems like there are actually quite a lot of disturbing precedents for the “unprecedented times” we’re living in. Yet in the midst of this, we also hear the author of Hebrews encourage their audience to “hold fast to the confession of our hope.” What hope? This hope is the “blessed hope of everlasting life” that our opening collect talks about. The hope we confess as Christians is the promise that God will not abandon us to the grave, but will show us the path of life towards fullness of joy and delight.
This hope is not just a hypothetical possibility offered as a feeble platitude on our Facebook feed. Our hope is a promise from God—a God who is faithful; who shows up in the darkness, again and again, through the story of Scripture, offering new life to the people of the Covenant.
Nor is this hope just a far-off whisper, lying somewhere in the future while we stumble along fighting off despair on our own. Our hope is a promise that God has already given. A promise uttered before the beginning of time as the Eternal Word that fashioned Creation. A promise revealed in time, in 1st century Palestine, as the Word-Made-Flesh, Jesus Christ our Great High Priest. A promise enduringly inscribed on our hearts by our baptism into that High Priest’s great sacrifice.
This hope of everlasting life that we confess as Christians is a provocative hope. It springs from a truly provocative idea: that God is with us. Not only is there hope, but that hope has become human—uniting God’s transcendent greatness with our frail human nature, vulnerable to suffering. In the person of Jesus, a Jewish man from Nazareth, the God who dwells in unapproachable light willingly—gladly—joins us and walks with us through the time of anguish, drawing us together and transforming our grief by decisively turning even gruesome death upside down and making it the source of everlasting life.
The Church’s confession of hope-made-human is provocative because it doesn’t just let us wait here passively. Hope in Christ isn’t just white-knuckling it through life on the vague promise that “It’ll get better.” As the author of Hebrews reminds us, our hope provokes us to love and good works. If we let it—if we hold fast to it and let it take hold of the rest of our life, our hope provokes us—energizes us, stirs us up, sharpens us—to share the gift of incarnate hope with others who are looking despair right in the face.
This provocative hope is at the core of what this Christianity thing is all about. It is something our world desperately needs. And if we set aside for a moment the question of whether Christianity is “exclusively” true, this provocative hope shines as a testament that it is at least uniquely true—that the Church has something unique that is worth sharing with others. The great treasure the Church has to offer the world is this provocative hope in the person of Jesus—this concrete, incarnate reason to keep going in life.
And it is a gift which isn’t on offer anywhere else (though Lord knows I looked for it elsewhere.) Not in materialist philosophies devoid of greater meaning. Not in nebulous spiritualities divorced from the deeply personal incarnate love of a transcendent God. Not in political theories built on human willpower. Not in fatalism that resigns itself to doing damage control. Whatever the other truths in the world, there is something unique in the hope confessed by the members of Christ Body.
A life built on this hope and defined by following Christ isn’t easy. Often, it’s actually quite inconvenient. It can mean saying no to some things we want and saying yes to some things we don’t. And the fact that the author of Hebrews urges their audience not to “neglect to meet together as is the habit of some” is a reminder that Christians have struggled with the questions “So what? Why bother? Why does this matter?” on Sunday mornings from the very beginning.
But Hebrews also reminds us that we bother because of the hope at the heart of the Gospel. This all matters because we live in a world desperately in need of a reason to hope. And the unique treasure of the Church is the Good News that this hope not only exists but is among us in Jesus Christ—the incarnate, crucified, and risen Promise of God. We keep coming back to hold fast to the confession of that hope; to encourage—provoke—one another to share it in love and good deeds, in word and action, inviting others to take refuge in the Lord who has never and will never abandon us.
Our world is hungry for hope in these disturbingly precedented times. And while the Church may not have the prestige we used to or the pat, easy answers some still pretend to, we do have the Gospel—the Good News of Jesus Christ: Emmanuel, God with us. A truly provocative hope for a despairing world.