Hope is Worth the Risk

“Hope is Worth the Risk”

December 22, 2024

Matthew 1:18-25 | Luke 1:46-55

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Matthew 1:18-25 The Birth of Jesus the Messiah

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah[a] took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be pregnant from the Holy Spirit. 19 Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly. 20 But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

23 “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son,    and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” 24 When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife 25 but had no marital relations with her until she had given birth to a son,[b] and he named him Jesus.

Luke 1:46-55 Mary’s Song of Praise

46 And Mary[a] said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,48 for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.    Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,    and holy is his name;50 indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him    from generation to generation.51 He has shown strength with his arm;    he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones    and lifted up the lowly;53 he has filled the hungry with good things    and sent the rich away empty.54 He has come to the aid of his child Israel,    in remembrance of his mercy,55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

What was the last risky thing you did? Was it putting on a Christmas onesie and wearing it to church?  I’m just kidding, kind of.  When we find ways to be light-hearted, and sometimes that means wearing a onesie to church, we do take a risk.  But it’s a calculated risk.  You think to yourself: I may look extra festive…. But I won’t be the only one and the pastor told me to, so...  

Church is a great place for doing strange things together with other people who are doing the strange things right beside you.  Last night at our Blue Christmas service many of us took white markers and wrote on shards of blue glass.  Kind of a weird thing to do.  Definitely risky with all the sharp edges.  But the fact that none of us was doing this weird thing by ourselves and the weird thing was actually part of what made the worship of God in that moment feel more… alive.  It felt like a risk worth taking.  

I’ve been doing a deep dive lately into dystopian future fiction.  Sorry, again there’s no good transition to announce that.  …The thrust of current culture today has me thinking about our long-term prospects.  Like, what happens when hoping for a better future actually feels like a foolish thing that’s too risky to even keep doing?   I’ve returned to one particular book that I read back as an older child called The Giver by Lois Lowry.  It was written at the tail end of the Soviet era, and the book imagines a world where, in an effort to make a “better” world, all aspects of risk have been removed.  “Sameness” has been enforced in its place as the ultimate way of eliminating diversity and potential problems   Emotions and feelings have also been systematically eradicated through daily pills that everyone in the community takes.   Seeing in color has even been engineered out of the human experience as has the ability to retain painful memories.  The premise of the futuristic “utopian” community is that if you eliminate pain and difference and feelings, you eliminate risk.  You will live in a smaller world but in that world life is predictable, unemotional, and relentlessly unchanging. 

The story that unfolds is about a boy who figures out that this utopia is not all it’s cracked up to be.  He finds a way to escape but it isn’t easy.  It’s both a physical escape out of a world of sameness and manufactured safety, but also an emotional escape out of a place that has become apathetic and numb.  

The book stirred up a lot of emotions for me.  While our society today is still very free, I saw some parallels.  We don’t have a state-imposed block on our memory and feelings, but there is cultural pressure to feel less and erase the parts of our past that are painful.  On top of that, the 24-hour news cycle brings us difficult events from all over our big world that makes the solutions to these many problems feel far away and unfixable.  It makes us want to stop caring and stop feeling.   And then when we do muster up the energy to care about something, we sometimes feel chastised when we show empathy from those who show none.  When our dreams fall short, we get embarrassed that we ever thought things could be different.  Hope as a concept in the midst of a world that feels like it’s falling apart is almost laughable at times. Why would we be so foolish as to hope?  Why risk it?  

The answer to that question became clear to Jonas, the main character of The Giver. He was given a memory that had been held closely by an elder in the community.  It was a memory of long, long ago when a family gathered around a fireplace, singing songs, exchanging gifts, grandparents, children, all together, feasting and laughing.  It was a foreign concept to Jonas.  It was Christmas.  And the feeling in the room that he had never experienced before was love.  He longed for this feeling.  But finding love meant Jonas would have to leave a safe world where risk had been eliminated.  Hope for love was a risky thing.  And once he knew that it had existed in the before times, he risked everything so that he could keep the hope alive of finding it again.  It’s a great book.  I highly recommend it.  

The reality is, even though it may feel foolish, we risk hope because we must.  Once we’ve had a taste of what a better world can look like, there’s no other way through life except to hope that that dream might come true again.  

Both Mary and Joseph have dreams of what a better future can look like in this week’s scripture readings.  For Joseph it’s a dream that wakes him, so to speak.  He was living through a nightmare as he realized his wife-to-be was already pregnant and it hadn’t been a… planned pregnancy on his part, to put it mildly.   Yet it was in a dream that Joseph got the message that things could still work out.  It was in a dream that God told Joseph that hope can come in weird ways, like through the Holy Spirit bringing a baby into the world that he could have the privilege of fathering.  He would have to be willing to take a risk of going against his cultural expectations and marrying Mary anyway.   

Mary’s dream of what a better future can look like takes the form of a song. We call it the Magnificat.  A song in which she proclaims, like a bold, majestic prophet of olden days, that the world can and will be better and that her baby will be the reason why.  She speaks with authority and confidence.  She knows.  She has hope.  And she’s taking all the risks she’s given to help this baby have a fighting chance.  

Risk taking is an elemental part of the Christmas story.

A few weeks ago, I talked about a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He was a German pastor who lived and preached in the 1930s.  He was a person who knew what a better world could look like and it wasn’t through the Third Reich.  And so preached and organized for justice and peace in the face of tyranny.  He lived out the last years of his young life in a German concentration camp and yet he never gave up hope.  What foolishness we could say in retrospect.  But Bonhoeffer saw it differently.  In letters back home to his family, he compared the kind of hope he kindled with the kind of hope that came at Christmas.  Fragile hope.  In fact, in one of those letters he referenced a painting of the nativity by Albrecht Altdorfer.   

It was probably this painting, called “Nativity.” A painting of the holy family in what at first glance looks like a war zone.  The buildings are crumbling, the night sky is lit up by distant burning.  There is no roof over their heads.  The artist portrays baby Jesus as being born in desperate conditions.  It’s the portrayal of a hope that’s worth the risk.    

In truth, as Bonhoeffer knew, hope is a precarious thing.  A thing with feathers that somehow defies gravity.  A fragile, teetering desire for a better world in the midst of a reality that is so different.  A teetering hope IS the hope of Christmas.  Peace on earth will always be a tenuous desire.  There will never be a year, not in 1943, not in 2024, and probably not in our future societies that we can only fictionalize now, when worldwide peace and justice is not a tenuous desire.  We don’t not hope for it, though, just because it’s tenuous.  We hope for it because it is tenuous.  We hope for it because to not hope for it would mean giving up on the weird, miraculous things God has done in the past and God will do again.  

The nativity artwork Bonhoeffer referenced reminds me of a nativity artwork made recently, just last year, by Kelly Latimore. 

It’s an icon of the holy family in the midst of crumbling buildings.  It’s not set in the year 0 when Mary and Joseph were precariously taking risks to bring a baby into the world.  It’s not set in the 1500s when Altdorfer painted his holy family.  It’s set in the 2020s.  And the buildings continue to crumble around a holy family that’s trying to bring Jesus into the world.  

We live in a precarious world still.  Hoping things can be different when we’ve got such a lousy track record seems like a foolish thing.  And yet what else do we have?  When God sent God’s own son into a precarious world to show us the Trueness of love, can it not also be true that into every precarious moment in time, Christ depends upon us to dare to believe that things can and will be different.  Not all at once, but steadily and surely as we each do the good that is ours to do. 

I’ll close with this last story.  There is a legend that says that safe houses along the Underground Railway were often identified as such by quilts that were hung out a window or on a clothesline.  The quilts, according to legend were embedded with blocks that represented a code for those seeking safety while fleeing from slavery.  

Certain blocks gave warnings or directions.  This block, the traditional Flying Geese quilt block is a very old pattern that maybe have been part of the code, perhaps sharing a message with this block was the way of saying “this way to safety,” just as the birds fly to the north.  

This is the stuff of folk legends and yet the Truth exists still.  Having hope that things can be different often involves taking a risk.  Maybe it’s a relatively small risk, like doing light-hearted things despite serious times.  Like wearing weird festive fashion to church and knowing you won’t be alone.  But maybe it’s also about taking slightly bigger risks, like doing something with your actions that puts your hope into action but that takes out of your comfort zone.  Like giving money to organizations working in places where the buildings are crumbling.  Like standing on a street corner with a sign about justice and risking the hostile stares.  Like hanging a risky quilt hung out the window.  Taking a stand doesn’t always have to be a big action, but we cannot rule out that it will be a risky action.  Is hope worth the risk?  Yes.  Because if give up our hope for something better we become creators of the dystopia we dread.  Don’t give up your hope for something better.  This hope, though tenuous, is all that we have.

Gracious God,

You paint pictures of what could be,

but we declare those visions impossible.

You speak of the lion lying down with the lamb,

but we spout skepticism and uncertainty.

You dream of a more just day,

but we poke holes in the plan, unable to fathom that horizon.

Forgive us for losing sight of hope.

Forgive us for assuming that what we see is all there is.

Open up our hearts to see the world as you see it.

Open up our hearts to risk hope, to dream dreams,

and to not be afraid of either.

With gratitude we pray, amen.