“Hope is Worth the Risk”

Fourth Sunday in ADvent

December 22, 2024

Luke 1:46-55

Matthew 1:18-25

Children’s Message:

I’ve got a present for you! It’s in this box. Play with box and keep ‘almost’ opening it.

Can you believe Christmas is almost here? Are you excited? How long have you been waiting? Play with box a little more.

Waiting is hard. Especially when you expect good things! One of the things we use to help us wait is an Advent Calendar. Do you have one of those? What is yours like?

A little more with the box. Did you make a Christmas list? I wonder if anything on your list is in this box. Shall we check?

You know, I always have a hard time making a Christmas list. I have everything I need. I don’t really know what I want. What do you want? Do you want me to open this box? What if it’s nothing? What if it isn’t important? What if you don’t like it? Maybe we should just keep it closed. Maybe we shouldn’t find out. Maybe…

All right. What’s inside this box? Open and look inside. Hmm. I don’t get it. Oh, you want to see, too? Do you get it? What could it mean? (inside is an angel ornament) What does an angel have to do with waiting and hoping and changing the world?

Let’s pray. Dear God, while we wait for your arrival, we hope. We hope for peace. We hope for life. We hope for love. Help us learn to act on hope even before we see your face. Amen.

Message:

Many of you know the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, about inmates of a prison. One of the residents, Andy, found a way to play music over the loud speaker and was put in the hole for two weeks for it. He calls it the easiest two weeks of his life because he had music in his head and heart to keep him afloat. He’s surprised that no one else can relate to such a feeling—a feeling that no one can take from you, no matter what. He calls that feeling hope.

His friend, Red, won’t have anything to do with hope. “Hope,” he says, “is a dangerous thing. It can drive a man insane. There’s no use for that on the inside.” It’s dangerous because when it is lost, one is left with despair.

Brene Brown calls despair a claustrophobic feeling. The emotion that says, “Nothing will ever change.” And those who seek power over others often weaponize despair, “counting on people giving up on themselves, their work, and each other.” Red says that hope is a dangerous thing, but despair is much worse. Despair steps aside and lets evil win. Despair gives up. Hope is the antidote. More than an emotion, it’s an action. It’s setting a goal—even a small one—and telling yourself, “I can do this. We can do this.”

It may be risky. It may be challenging. It may not end up like we imagined. But hope is worth the risk.

That is what Mary clung to as she felt the child inside her grow. She could have said ‘no’ to God. She could have turned away. She could have shrunk away in despair. Instead, she sung a song of hope. A song of resistance. A song of subversive challenge to the world as it is.

In an Advent sermon in 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said,

“The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings.…This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”

Mary’s Magnificat is a song of resistance against the powers that insist on keeping the poor and downtrodden in their place—the kind of power that ensures that anyone who steps out of bounds is punished. Her resistance looks ahead, whether she knows it or not, of a Messiah who will die at the hands of the so-called powerful for that very reason. He stepped out of bounds. He defied the systems that keep everyone right where the empire wants them. He challenged the status quo. And he was killed.

Her song of resistance looks ahead to the kind of power that humans cannot imagine, do not want, and completely overlook: the power of a loving God. Empires tend to make God in their image—a God of violence, retribution, vengeance, and a righteousness that only serves the few just like them. Mary’s song destroys those ideas.

So maybe Red was right. Hope IS a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous to all who hold worldly power over the vulnerable. When the British ruled India, the Magnificat was banned from being sung, spoken, read, or proclaimed for fear that it would lead to resistance. In the 1980’s Guatemala banned the Magnificat for the same reasons. In the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, women of Argentina whose sons had disappeared during the military dictatorship gathered at the Plaza de Maya in Buenos Aires every Thursday, singing resistance and seeking answers from the government. They plastered the walls with the words of the Magnificat. And it was subsequently banned from being sung or spoken there. They said it gave the common people too much hope.

Hope is a dangerous thing. And hope is worth the risk—worth the risk of disappointment; worth the risk of upsetting the powers that be; worth the risk of death, itself. It was worth the risk of the cross.

Because hope is something no one can take from us. It is grounded in our God-declared belovedness. It is held steady by the beacon of light that shines from the God of the cross. It is centered in a song that cannot be unsung—a song that magnifies God to the world.

Pastor Tobi White

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Lincoln, NE