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    Nov 30, 2014

    The Gift of Hope

    Passage: 1 Corinthians 15:54

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    Series: Not a Silent Night

    Category: Advent

    Keywords: christmas, hope, mary

    A discussion around the gift of hope.

    Memory is a powerful thing. A memory may be awakened by a smell or a sound or a glimpse of color. As someone said to me just the other day, memory can sneak up on you – like the day that I was in Hechinger’s and saw a seed packet display and started weeping at the loss of my grandfather who had been the family gardener.

    We are people of faith, and much of our faith is expressed as memory – memory of things that we did not experience firsthand, but powerful, nonetheless. Powerful enough to bring us to our knees in prayer, to sustain us when we are hurting, or to take us to the heights of praise and adoration.

    Yet, Adam Hamilton suggests in Not a Silent Night, the study book that many of us are reading this month, that we live in a time when there is an amnesia –a loss of memory when it comes to the season of Advent and Christmas. Perhaps that is why he wrote this study more or less backwards – looking at the birth of Jesus from the perspective of Mary’s memories of her life as Jesus’ mother.

    That amnesia was brought to national attention on Black Friday of 2008 when Jdimytai Damour was trampled by the crowd of shoppers at a Walmart in New York. Mr. Damour died and 4 others were seriously injured, including a woman who was 8 months pregnant. Adam Hamilton commented: It’s a story of Chrismas run amok, and it’s symbolic of something bigger – a kind of amnesia, illustrating how ordinary people forget the real meaning of Christmas. Hamilton says that roughly 80% of the American public identify as being Christian, so in that crowd of about 2,000 people, 1,600 of them identified as Christian, yet only 3 people in the crowd stopped to help in any way. The rest were frantic to get the bargains they had waited, some of them all night, to purchase.

    Over these next 4 weeks, we will together remind ourselves of that meaning through the eyes of Mary – the 14-year-old girl who found herself pregnant and expecting a Baby. There was talk about her baby saving people – a Savior! There was talk about God-with-Us. Have you ever wondered just what Mary understood at the beginning? How many 14-year-olds do you know who would have “gotten” that? We know that most of the grownups and religious leaders didn't get it even at the end of Jesus’ life, so how could a peasant girl of 14?

    Today we begin at the end of Mary’s life. There is only 1 mention of Mary in the Bible after the Ascension of Jesus, so there is very little solid evidence of what happened in her life after that. There is mention in other historical but non-biblical writings of Mary’s death at about age 66, and if you are interested to learn more about how the major faiths came to their understandings of Mary’s later life and death, you may want to take a look at the first video from the study – it’s set up in the Library this morning for you. Suffice it to say that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions surrounding Mary’s death do not agree with each other, and we have to remember that most of what we have now in the Bible was written quite awhile after Jesus’s death.

    Hamilton wrote this: How Mary’s death happened is not as important to me as the fact that as she approached death she undoubtedly believed that when she died, she would see her son once again.

    The gift of hope. Let there be no loss of memory when it comes to hope! Hope is surely one of the greatest gifts that has come from God, and there are so many for whom hope is elusive. There are plenty of things that threaten to devour hope: loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of security, loss of a home, the frenzy of busy, that gnawing deep in the gut that just feels like an emptiness when we pile up things and don’t find meaning.

    For Mary and for us as Christians, it was the Resurrection that changed how Mary experienced grief. The Resurrection gave her hope.

    The first Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians is one of the earliest of the books that we have in the New Testament. The new church was struggling with what the experiences meant. They were developing theology and putting the experiences in context. And the church at Thessalonica was dealing with the deaths of several key members of their church. They began to question whether this faith was true since they had all expected to be taken to Heaven to be with God right away. Paul wrote:

    Brothers and sisters, we want you to know about people who have died so that you won't mourn like others who don't have any hope. Since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so we also believe that God will bring with him those who have died in Jesus…So encourage each other with these words. (Common English Bible)

    Paul calls us to encourage one another with the hope that this life is not all there is... Encourage one another with the prospect that the world will not always be as it is now. This is part of the promise and hope of Christmas – that the One who was born in Bethlehem will set all things right one day.3 That is our hope. That is our witness. That is our mission – to be people of hope.

    Adam Hamilton ends the first chapter of his study book this way:

    Our mission at Christmas is not to get stuff for people to open on Christmas morning. It is to be people of hope who let Jesus’ light shine through them, who act as his witnesses so that others see him in us, who offer hope and help, who pray and work so that our world looks more like the kingdom Jesus proclaimed. This is what Mary would have been doing. And this is what we are called to do.

    This year, how will you offer hope to people who don’t have it? How will you offer encouragement and joy?

    So, over the next 4 weeks, I pray that we will all take up that mission. Reflect on the gift of hope each day with your household by praying prayers of hope and lighting the candle of hope on your own Advent wreath. Consider what a person of hope would look like – how a person of hope lives. Consider how a person of Advent hope spends time and money during this season. Consider how a person of hope reaches out to those in need – not just at Christmas but throughout our lives. Shape yourselves and your families to be people of hope – and then share that hope in the world.