Advent 1A; December 2, 2007

Revised Common Lectionary

The Rev. Marion E. Kanour

 The Candle of Hope:  A Meditation on Isaiah 2:1-5

“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Today we enter together the season of Advent.  It would be incorrect to think of Advent as simply the liturgical season observed by the Christian Church prior to the celebration of the Feast of the Nativity.  Described in that way, Advent is impotent—it’s just something the Church does.  What gives Advent—or anything else, for that matter—its potency is us.  What matters is our inner connection with the meaning of the season.  Harriet Hellewell made this lovely Advent wreath.  Its tradition dates back to early Germanic tribes who burned large circles of evergreens in the darkest of December hoping the gods might see the fires as prayers of petition to return the sun and its warmth and light.  They didn’t call it Advent, of course; but the gesture points toward an inner posture of waiting and hoping and praying.  Our Advent wreath is small in comparison to those huge outdoor circles of fire; but it points toward the same prayer that echoes in the human heart through the ages.  We, in many ways, still yearn for the same things—warmth and light—in our souls and in the world. 

There are five candles in the traditional Advent wreath.  We light one candle on each of the four Sundays of Advent; the fifth is lighted on Christmas Eve.  The Advent wreath has been part of our seasonal observance since the early 1500’s.  Over the years, meanings have been assigned to each of the candles and weeks of Advent.  This year I’m focusing my Advent preaching on these candles and the meaning they might hold for us.  I invite you to “pray the candles” with me each week.  Light the candle of the week within.  See where its light falls.  Offer what it illuminates as your prayer for the week.  It’s one way of finding a spiritual connection with what, otherwise, is simply an observance of the Church.

The first candle is called the Candle of Hope.  German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.”  That is to say, because of hope we believe in a better tomorrow.  We keep thinking we can get it right next time.  Nietzsche sees this as false hope and links it with what, for him, is the worst of Christian thought—the thought that ties earthly goodness to the hope of reward in heaven. There’s a way to re-frame Nietzsche’s thinking such that hope need not be false.  Christian mystic Thomas Merton succeeds in refocusing on real hope when he says, “Don’t depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it’s the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”  For Merton, hope isn’t false if it’s rightly-grounded. 

So, what of this text for today:  “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”  Are these hopeful thoughts found in Isaiah falsely-based?  Does the image they create simply serve to torment?  Is there a way to embrace the rightness of the image without the torment?  Can you hold the image long enough for it to live within you untainted by skepticism or reason?  Is it right to hope Isaiah’s prophecy can come true?  Or is that falsely-based, pie-in-the-sky thinking?  Does Isaiah simply torment us with an unachievable image?  What if we removed the image from the imaginations of our souls?  What if we banned it from all thought?  If actualizing Isaiah’s image is unachievable, as human history attests, blessedly, banning the image from our souls is equally unachievable, as human history also attests.   Isaiah’s hope is our hope, too.  I don’t know if I could bear the existential pain of a world where change was unimaginable.  The despair of that world would render it, for me, so barren as to be uninhabitable.  Human history is long-punctuated by armed conflict, torture and cruelty.  If the story ended there, we wouldn’t be here now lighting a candle for hope.  In spite of or perhaps because of the despair in our world, people of faith the world over have the courage to hope.  “It need not be this way” something within us says.  The light of today’s candle bears witness to that hope.

So did the light of Adelaide Parker’s smile.  She lived next door to my grandparents in Norfolk and so I saw her with some frequency.  She was an avid gardener as was my grandfather, which meant that the two often exchanged gardening joys and woes.  I remember one late November helping granddaddy plant bulbs.  Adelaide Parker smiled and waved as she came out her back door to do the same.  Granddaddy said what was true, “That woman has the most beautiful smile. Makes you think she means it.”  Naïvely, I asked, “Well, why wouldn’t she mean it?”  Trusting in Adelaide’s story he waved her over saying, “Why don’t you ask her?”  Which is how I came to hear the story of the miracle of Adelaide Parker’s smile.  Adelaide Parker didn’t smile as a child, though she lived a life of privilege.  She said her family often tried to get her to smile, fearing despair would overwhelm the heart of the young child and then young woman.  But nothing could bring a smile to her face.  She described her inner world of those years as bleak and colorless.  Life was without passion.  Eventually, out of duty more than anything else, Adelaide married a wealthy financier, Vincent Parker.  Still, Adelaide never smiled.  After 10 years of marriage in 1929 Vincent Parker lost everything in the Crash; the following year he killed himself.  The family worried Adelaide might take her own life, too, suggesting she live with a relative.  But Adelaide declined politely, saying she would be fine on her own.  In time, Adelaide activated her lapsed teaching certificate and began to teach 3^rd grade at J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School in Norfolk.  Actually, Adelaide said the 3^rd graders were the ones who did the teaching.  More precisely, Mrs. Parker’s class of 1933 taught their teacher to smile.  It happened unexpectedly, as most of the profound events of our lives do.  It was right before the winter break and Mrs. Parker was reading a story of the birth of the Christ child aloud to the class.  When she finished reading, one child said sadly, “He just dies in the end you know.”  Adelaide Parker said she felt an overwhelming tenderness stream through her at that moment.  Feeling the deepest of compassion for the sad child, she said with more passion than she knew she had, “We all die in the end.  It’s how you live until then that matters.”  She suddenly realized the whole class was smiling at her and then heard a child say, “Mrs. Parker, you’re smiling!” 

When Adelaide Parker connected with the sadness of another, it illumined something within.  The light of that connection shone not on her own deep sadness, but instead illumined her own profound hope.  Hope-realized beamed from Adelaide’s smile and beamed back to her in the faces of her students.  Which is the point Thomas Merton was making earlier: “In the end, it’s the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” Because of one another, we have the courage to be.  Because of one another, we can see the image painted by the prophet Isaiah.  Because of one another, we have reason to hope.

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