Our Advent post for the Third Week of Advent focuses on hope, essential yet hard to describe, “a feathered thing” lifting us on our journey from exile to our ultimate home.
Emily Dickenson famously described hope this way:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard[i]
Intangible. Elusive. Hope is hard to grasp and hard to hold onto. Sometimes singing, sometimes silent (contra Emily). Something that can grow within us, something we can lose. Both a noun and a verb, hope is a thing we can have and a thing we can exercise. Without hope, we cannot flourish. Without hope, sometimes we cannot live.
When the God’s people suffered exile after the Babylonian conquest of their homeland in the 6th century BCE, they were tempted to despair: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” (Psalm 137) The prophet Jeremiah wrote a letter to the exile community assuring them that God would bring them back, but this restoration of fortune would not come until several generations in the future. In light of that promise—and God’s faithful mercies—he urged them to live hopefully:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29)
This third week of Advent, the lectionary assigns Psalm 126, written from the vantage point of people who have returned from exile many decades later, recalling:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouths were filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy.
They had returned, but evidently all was not well. Perhaps the rebuilding and resettling was proving long and arduous, fraught with uncertainty. So the Psalmist further pleads:
Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
like the watercourses in the Negeb [desert].
May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy.
In this Advent season we sing:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!
O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!
This hopeful plea is fitting. We too are in a kind of exile, away from our true and ultimate home, the place in which we will flourish and the time in which our ache for justice and shalom will be satisfied. With an echo of Psalm 126, Isaiah describes this “new heavens and earth” in second lectionary reading for this week:
No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime….
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands….
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together….
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord. (Is. 65)
In his short treatise, On Hope, philosopher Josef Peiper describes earthly life as a pilgrimage: we are always “on our way” somewhere, not truly at home in this world however well things may be going for us at a given time. Our pilgrimage is toward Isaiah’s scene, the Beatific Vision, eternal happiness, the fulfillment of that for which God has made us: intimate, joyful communion with the Three-in-One who is Light, Life, and Love. This is the Advent for which we hope.
Being on the way, says Pieper, is to be in “the inherent ‘not yet’ of [our] finite being.” We travel then between the potential of “nothingness” and the potential of beatific “being[ness].” Piper proposes: “The virtue of hope is preeminently the virtue of the status viatoris [state of being ‘on the way’]; it is the proper virtue of the ‘not yet’”[ii]
I don’t think we must simply muster hope. The apostle Paul, in I Corinthians 13, treats hope as a gift, an impartation of grace. Perhaps we find the “feathered thing” lifting its wings within us. Or maybe, riding into the wind, we draft off the stronger hope of others. Sometimes, we just cling to the tatters of hope. But Paul quietly insists that, along with faith and love, hope abides, remains.
This kind of hope is not mere wishful thinking, even though we can be prone to that. Our hope is grounded, literally, grounded in the God who took on creaturely flesh because he loves us. And grounded in the resurrected body of Jesus, who promised to make his home in us by the Spirit and to come again to take us to be with him forever.
God chose to experience exile so that we could find our home in him.
In this hope we wait, with all of our aching and longing.
[i] Collected Poems (Running Press, 1991), p. 100.
[ii] On Hope (Ignatius Press, 1977), pp. 11-12, 20-21
Previous posts in this series:
Longing: Greatness and Grace in our Leaders (for Christ the King Sunday)
Aching: Justice and Shalom in our World
Waiting: Preparation and Peacefulness within Our Hearts
Bobby Gross is the author of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (InterVarsity Press). Bobby has spent his career in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He currently serves as Senior Field Director for the Graduate & Faculty Ministries division. For 13 years he served as VP and National Director for Graduate & Faculty Ministries. Originally from Columbus, GA, Bobby and his wife Charlene have lived in Miami (FL), New York City, and now Atlanta. He graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a B.A. in American Studies and English Literature and did additional studies in theology at Regent College in Vancouver. Bobby served on the national board of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) for six years. An admitted bibliophile, Bobby also writes poetry and collects contemporary art on religious themes.