Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
December 28, 2008, The First Sunday after Christmas, Year B
The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Isaiah 61:1-62:3
Psalm 147
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18

     “‘Though thou art small, O little town of Bethlehem, our hopes reside in thee.”

     In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

     Those words were spoken many centuries ago by the Prophet Micah and later they were used in the famous Christmas hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  They are still true.  Our hopes reside in Bethlehem.

     In troubled times we need hope.  In fact we need hope more than anything else.  More than universal health care, more than improved schools, more that bank bailouts and economic recovery packages and shovel-ready infrastructure projects--all of which we may very well need--but what we really need above everything else is hope.

     If we lose hope, what’s left?

     Now hope comes to us in many forms and in many ways.  Hope is one of those mediated gifts of God.  We give it to others and we receive it from others.  It’s sometimes imperfect and sometimes, tragically, we even fail to offer it to others when we should.

     When you think about hope as coming to us though others, it makes sense, really.  For we know God is working out his purpose through the ordinary means of flesh and blood.  “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” as St. John puts it in today’s Gospel.

     The miracle of God’s economy as opposed to the world’s economy is that it’s based on love and not on greed, that it’s certain and not uncertain, that it’s steady and not cyclical.

     Because of what God did for us in the Incarnation, our hope is not restricted to the afterlife. It isn’t pie in the sky. Hope is a very concrete ordinary everyday thing for us.  We live on it.  We hope for a better world in the here and now and we are committed to working toward that.  Because we are a people of hope.  

     A good parent gives hope to his or her children.  Good government should give us hope.  A doctor gives hope to his or her patients.  Friends and wives and husbands and partners and neighbors.  We all give hope to each other.  Or at least we should.  You should never take away another person’s hope.

     So when the world’s economy goes south, we naturally turn to government to help, to give us hope, but we also turn to each other for help and for hope. That’s how hope gets to us.  All our hopes derive from God but come to us through others.  Our hopes reside in Bethlehem and radiate outwards from there.  If it were not for the birth of Christ, all our hopes would be in vain. 

     Christian hope is the unquenchable conviction that we are absolutely positively going to have a future that is better than the present.  And that by struggling to make this a better world, we participate in creating that world.

     The birth of Christ is Bethlehem reminds us of that.

     How does it remind us of that?  Well, because when God became human in the tiny Middle Eastern town of Bethlehem 2000 years ago, God changed the trajectory of human history.  And changed the outcome of the story.  That’s what we believe and that’s why we hope.

     Only God could do that for us.  Only God could give us that kind of hope.

     The hope that sustains us now, before we get to the end of the story, can obviously coexist  with some pretty dark days. That’s why God gives us hope.  Anyone who watches the evening news or reads the morning paper knows that the future doesn’t  look terribly bright right now.   But still we hope.  Of course we hope!  Our hopes reside in Bethlehem.

     Bette Davis once famously said, “You better fasten your seat belts.  It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”  Well, yes, we know it’s going to be a bumpy ride, but we also know that God is with us.  Emanuel, which means “God with us.”  That gives us hope!

     We have a hope that’s deep enough and real enough to sustain us when the going gets tough, when the ride gets bumpy--a hope that is grounded in God and in His love.  No one else can bail us out.  No one else can save us.  No one else is up to the job.  Only God in Christ, only the Messiah, the One sent from God, has the power and the will and the love to give us real hope.  Hope for the future.  Hope for the world.  Hope for each one of us personally. Hope that at the end of the day, we're going to be ok.

     Only God can give us that sort of hope.

     In 2007 Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who is now Preident-elect Obama’s chief-of-staff, hosted a fund-raiser in Chicago. He said at the time that many people might be leaning toward Hillary Clinton because she’d been born in Illinois.  But his candidate offered something even better he said:  “Obama,” he joked, “had been born in a manger!”

     Now I have an important message to send the President-elect’s chief-of-staff and to all of us (me included) who might be tempted to think otherwise.  And here it is:  Barack Obama is NOT the Messiah.

     I will admit that since his election, I have invested a lot of hope in our soon-to-be president.  I think many people have.  But we all need to recognize that Barack Obama is not the Messiah.  I think he’d probably be the first to admit it.

     This point was driven home to me by the president-elect himself just a couple of weeks ago when it was announced that Mr. Obama had chosen an evangelical homophobe to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration.   I couldn’t help but wonder how the president-elect would have reacted if someone had suggested a racist clergyman.  Or an anti-Semitic clergyman. 

     No, Barack Obama is not the Messiah.  

     But this doesn’t mean that Obama may not inspire us to hope.  He can. Of course he can.  And he does that--for millions of people around the world.  But he’s not the Messiah.  

     The president-elect participates, like you and me, in the economy of God.  Fallible and politically self-serving and perhaps even egotistical and flawed as we all sometimes are, it is still our privilege to mediate God’s hope to one another.  God doesn’t shut us out from that process because we’re imperfect.  We can and we often do receive and give the hope that comes ultimately from God, a God who really was born in a manger in Bethlehem. 

     I have a friend who has a little granddaughter.  She is the light of his life and he loves singing to her.  He was telling me the other day that he likes to sing her a song called, “I Hope You Dance.”

     The last verse goes like this:

I hope you still feel small
When you stand beside the ocean.
Whenever one door closes, I hope another opens;
Promise me that you’ll give faith a chance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
 I hope you dance
I hope you dance 
I hope you dance
 
     Imagine the effect on that little girl as she listens to her grandpa, whom she undoubtedly loves very much, singing such a wonderful song about hope to her.  Imagine.

     And just as that grandfather inspires his granddaughter to hope, there is another song, a Christmas hymn, that should inspire us to hope on this First Sunday after Christmas.  It is this:

O little town of Bethlehem
how still we see thee lie;
above thy deep and dreamless sleep
the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
the everlasting Light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight.
 
     Amen.