[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here, and thanks for listening.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Hey, good morning.
How you doing?
You know, I'm all right.
I don't have pneumonia. That's good.
I know Janelle already shared this, but I was sick for a very long time, like eight days. And I'm like, normally the kind of person who's very happy to be sick. Like, when I get sick, I'm like, yes, I'm sick. Like, I get to, like, stay in bed and watch Netflix and just chill for like, two days. And the fourth day, I was like, okay, enough already. Like, this is bad.
And then, like, by the sixth day, my good friend Dr. Tina texted me, hey, what's going on with you? And I was like, you know, it's kind of weird. I was really sick for three days, and then I was really great. On Monday, I, like, got up, went to work, went to teach my class in San Marcos. And the next morning I got up, I felt even worse, like, terrible. And she was like, that's like a sign of pneumonia. And I was like, nah, it's fine, you know? And then three days later, she was like, hey, I'm coming over.
So I just highly recommend that you have a medical doctor in your life who will just show up at your house, non consensually, and shove a giant needle in your left body, butt cheek that is full of antibiotics.
So that was great.
I have the microphone anyway, so pneumonia is bad, antibiotics good.
That's the mini sermon before the sermon.
As you've already heard, today is the first Sunday of Advent, and the theme of the first Sunday of Advent is hope. So we are going to chat a little bit about hope today. I want to read to you this passage from the Gospel of Luke, chapter one, verses 26 through 38. We're going to go ahead and put the passage up on the screen. If you don't have your Bible, that's okay, but let's read through it together and then I want to share with you some of what I'm noticing about this passage, and hopefully it will spark something in you too. Luke 1:26 says, in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her, that is, Gabriel came to her and said, greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you.
But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son. And you will call, or you will name him Jesus.
And he will be great, and he will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there will be no end.
Mary said to the angel, how can this be, since I'm a virgin? And the angel said to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be holy and will be called Son of God.
And now your relative Elizabeth, in her old age, is also conceived a son. And this is the sixth month for her, who is said to be barren, for nothing will be impossible with God. And then Mary said, here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your words. And then the angel departed from her. Would you just pray with me first? And then we'll jump into just what I'm noticing about this. God, we thank you for today, for this opportunity for us to gather as a congregation to be bold enough and courageous enough to kindle a bit of hope.
We pray that you would give us the strength and the courage to accept it, to receive a sense of hope within us, and to be courageous enough to kindle it and to nurture it until something new is born.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
Hope is a funny thing, because when things are really difficult, when things look really terrible, when there's a calamity that has come upon you or a disaster that seems to be impending, hope feels relatively audacious. There's a famous book with the words audacious and hope in the title.
If not audacious, then it might even feel a bit irresponsible.
Or at best, it might just seem foolish. Like the idea of hope, I think, can seem terribly foolish or even stupid in the face of just terrible consequences.
Hannah Arendt was a relatively famous philosopher in the 20th century. She was of Jewish origin, and she was rather famous, actually, for decrying hope, for calling out hope as something that we Absolutely should not engage in. She called it not only irresponsible, but blamed Hope for what happened to the Jews in World War II.
It's hard to blame her for blaming Hope at the end of World War II, after 6 million Jews were exterminated in ovens at camps like Dachau.
And that is what led her to say that hope was not only useless but actually dangerous.
But it was the stubborn, like, willingness to just hold on to hope forever and never to actually act, to never actually do anything against the tyranny of oppression or the tyranny of someone like Hitler. That hope actually is what got in the way.
It's what kept Europe at the time and even the United States from talking endlessly but doing nothing about the genocide that was happening overseas.
I think it's ironic, though, that Hannah Arendt thought that hope was dangerous, because Hannah Arendt thought birth was everything.
She sort of famously positions her entire philosophy of political action on the idea of natality. The idea that inherent in every single one of us is this memory of our birth, this rootedness in being born, and that being born became the basis for action. She says this. This is her, maybe, I think, at her most eloquent. She says the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal natural ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new people and new beginnings, the actions they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity, this natality, can bestow on human affairs, faith and hope. The reason I find that so ironic is because she placed so much importance on birth.
But something comes before birth, specifically pregnancy, conception, that is hope.
Before the birth actually comes, before the baby is born, before newness enters in the world. There has to be this extended period of waiting.
When you know what's coming.
You desire what's coming, but you can't make it come any faster than it will now. At my house, we have chickens.
Some of you know this.
We used to have six. One of them very sadly died last week.
So that means we have to live with only five new eggs every day.
But here's the beauty of chickens.
Gestation is like one day.
Like, they create a new egg every single day. So there's not much occasion for hope. You just get up every day, you go out there and you open up the little thing. There's like five new eggs, like, still warm from being in the chicken's body, which is a little gross if you think about it too long. So don't just take it inside, put it in the fridge, or better yet, eat it right away. The point is, you only have to wait a day.
But with people, you need a lot more hope because gestation is 40 weeks, which I still haven't figured out how 40 weeks equates to nine months, but I'm not very good at math.
But 40 weeks, you got to wait a long time while the woman who's carrying the baby progressively gets bigger and more uncomfortable and more like, you know, struggling and wrestling with the aches and the pains of bearing a child. But all that time, you are waiting and hoping for what's to come.
That is, I think, exactly what we're seeing in this passage.
Before the Messiah, the hoped for expected salvation of Israel comes first. There must be conception and pregnancy.
There has to be a period of waiting.
And I think that is very much what this passage is teaching us.
Mary's phrase, of course, for all of this is, how can this be?
How can this be, for I'm a virgin? This seems impossible to her, but it's not just the fact that she is, according to this story, a virgin that makes it impossible. There are other impossibilities.
In verse 28, Gabriel says, the Lord is with you. And I think she wonders, how can this be? I'm just a lowly girl.
Verse 32, the angel says, he, meaning her child will be great, will inherit the throne of David. And I think she must wonder, how can this be?
Because we are generations removed from the greatness of David, her husband's ancestor. Verse 33, the angel says, he, meaning your child will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end. And I can't help but think, she wonders, how can this be, since the house of Jacob doesn't even reign now, and Israel is now by this time, when the angel Gabriel is speaking to Mary. The Roman Empire has now ruled in Israel for about 64, 65 years.
They've been utterly conquered by a foreign empire that rolled in with its army, ready to do violence and unleash its will in order to conquer the people of this land. How can this be?
The angel says in verse 35 in answer to this, because the Holy Spirit will come upon you.
And this, I think, is the first great lesson of this passage, and that is that the Spirit of God, called the Holy Spirit in this passage. The Spirit of God is in the business of conceiving that which is impossible.
This is what the Holy Spirit does Not just to Mary, but to you and to me. This is what we mean when we say that we are inspired. The word inspired literally means to be indwelt with the divine, a sense of God. And my guess is that you know what that's like, or you wouldn't be in a place like this, sitting in uncomfortable pews, enduring stained glass images of white Jesus, and listening to a white straight guy talk to you for 30 minutes at a time. My God, you must have been inspired at some point.
Surely at some point you were inexplicably filled with a sense of awe and wonder and the awakening to the possibility of a reality that's bigger than you, to a purpose that's bigger than you are.
When that happened to you, the Holy Spirit conceived something in you too.
Gabriel says, nothing is impossible with God.
Mary responds, I think, with the second great lesson of this passage, when she says, well, then, here am I, here am I, the servant of the Lord.
Do with me what you will, send me where you will, and I'll go in this way. Mary is very reminiscent of the prophet Isaiah, who says the exact same words in Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 8. Here am I in Isaiah's passage in chapter 6. Isaiah has been worshiping, attending to the Lord in the temple as a good Jewish prophet, struggling with the reality of Israel's neglect against those who are oppressed, Israel's neglect against those who are widows, Israel's neglect against those who are orphans. In other words, Isaiah says, because Israel has forgotten how to do justice, they will come to utter ruin.
And one day in the temple, God appears to Isaiah, terrifies Isaiah, much like Gabriel, maybe scares Mary a bit and says the same thing, do not be afraid. And Isaiah is very afraid in this passage. He says, woe is me, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I exist amongst a people of unclean lips. And then there's this amazingly vivid sort of depiction of an angel that takes a pair of tongs and grabs like a hot coal off of the temple and brings it over to Isaiah and touches Isaiah's lips and says, now your lips are clean. Who can we send out into the world to bring this message of justice? And Isaiah says, like Mary, here am I, said me.
Both of these people, Mary and Isaiah, find themselves in impossible circumstances, circumstances that are far greater than the hope that we kindle inside of us when the Spirit has inspired us and to conceive some kind of possibility for the future that is better. Both of them are in these circumstances. Isaiah, just before the exile into Babylon, which lasts about 70 years, marry in the midst of her own exile, which lasts about 70 years.
And both of them respond by saying, here am I.
All of this leads me to consider the possibility, or maybe propose to you the possibility that what this passage teaches us is that hope is a pregnant woman.
That hope conceived by the spirit of God inside of us. When we encounter the goodness of God, the awe inspiring existence of God, the reality of what is good and right and true. When we experience that and hope is conceived inside of us, that that hope is still tiny, fragile, fetal.
Because of that, hope is utterly and completely dependent on our protection and our nurturing.
We don't tend to think of work with God this way.
But what if all that comes in the world that is good and right and true, all the justice that we seek for the future is something that requires our cooperation?
It requires our co creation, that like Mary, we must be willing to receive it, that we must be willing to carry it, that we must be willing, willing to gestate it.
And if that's true, then I want to suggest to you that hope is actually a great deal of work.
That it is not foolish, that it is not stupid, that it is not a roadblock to action. Hope is deeply taxing, fully embodied, creative and courageous work.
That hope is something that you do.
I think we are biased against seeing hope as work for the same reason that we are biased against seeing pregnancy as work.
Because, spoiler alert, we tend not to see women's work as real or true or good.
And I want to suggest to you for just a moment that hope is women's work.
And by that I don't mean that only women can do it.
What I mean is that hope is stereotypically feminine.
That all the things in the past that we have ascribed to women and femininity is exactly what we see as good and real and true work in this passage.
And anybody can do it, whether you locate yourself on a gender spectrum that is closer to masculinity or femininity, that you can be pregnant with the hope of God, you can do the hard, courageous, completely embodied work of hope, but that it requires that you learn how to do that from women.
It requires that you value that kind of way of being in the world enough that you admire it, that you esteem it, that you think this kind of work, compassionate, nurturing, caring, patient laboring, is actually valid and good for bringing about something new.
Because we tend to only value revolutionary ways of creating newness that looks very stereotypically masculine, that involves violence and coercion and force and conquering.
But what if.
What if how the kingdom comes is the kingdom that comes?
What if any future reality that we bring about by violence and coercion and force will be a future of violence and coercion and force?
Because how we get where we're going is where we're going.
Mary teaches me this.
Mary teaches me that the Messiah that is coming is a Messiah that is birthed by compassion and courage and care and nurturing and pregnancy.
So it should be no surprise that when that Messiah finally came, he was a Messiah of compassion and care and nurturing, who spoke out against the violence of the empire, who refused to pick up a sword, and who was crucified for it.
So I think the challenge of this passage really becomes, are we willing to learn from Mary how to bring about the future that we hope for?
Are we inspired? Are we conceiving something new and good by our encounter with the Spirit of God? Are we willing, like Mary, to say, here am I, I will attend to this reality that you have conceived inside of me?
And are we, like Mary, willing to carry that hope to term?
Are we willing to do that kind of work to bring about a better future by the Spirit and the grace of God?
Two Wednesdays ago, I would have said no.
Today, lighting these candles, receiving this communion, singing with you about the future of God, the goodness of God, I'm a little bit more willing to be pregnant.
What about you?
Amen. Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you again for today, for the goodness of these stories, for the goodness of Mary, for a young woman who is willing to give her body, her life, her work, her labor, so that something new and good can be born into the world.
I pray that as we sing these songs and lift up our prayers and encourage each other and read these words and give our hearts over to you, we pray for the courage to say, here I am.
That in the face of all that is happening in our a nation and our community, all of the threats that are coming upon us, all the ways that our siblings, even in this space, are being threatened, coming to harm, I pray that you would give us the courage to really nurture a hope for something better, to work towards that. By your grace, in Jesus name, amen.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in.
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