2nd December 2024

Advent Hope

Advent Hope

‘Advent Hope’

A sermon by Kenneth Padley

Towards the end of 1596, a Lutheran pastor called Philip Nicolai arrived in the German town of Unna. Late 1596 was not a good time to arrive in the German town of Unna. Come the summer of 1597, the town was hammered by plague. Across the course of seven long months, some 1300 citizens died. These were days of great distress: every house was in mourning.

From the window of his parsonage Philip Nicolai looked out onto the churchyard where bodies were being buried. At the height of the epidemic, they were interring thirty people a day. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the number of funerals we do in the Cathedral every two years. Before modern medical care and vaccinations, attrition from disease was so much higher than today.

What was the response of Philip Nicolai to the plague in Unna? When confronted by all that suffering and death, did he despair? Did he run to a place of safety? No: when faced by the plague of 1597, Philip Nicolai sat down… and wrote a hymn. He wrote the words, words which we sing shortly. And he wrote the music, music later famously adapted by JS Bach as we were privileged to hear last Sunday. ‘Wachet auf! Wake, O wake – with tidings thrilling.’ The response of Philip Nicolai to the plague was nothing less than an extraordinary poem of hope. With carnage in the streets and fear at his door, Nicolai lifted his horizons, gathering a string of biblical allusions and weaving them into a timeless expression of trust in God.

  • Midnight strikes! No more delaying. Nicolai knew the immediacy of the trials which beset his parishioners.
  • Now the gates of pearl receive us. Here was a man who did not know what the next day might bring but who was determined to make the most of each.
  • Earth cannot give below / the bliss thou dost bestow. The pathos of the hymn is enhanced all the more by the fact that Nicolai was writing in memory of one particular parishioner, a loss which emblematised the corporate trauma. Wilhelm, Count of Waldeck had been one of Nicolai’s pupils but had died aged just fifteen. As a poignant epitaph, Nicolai composed his poem as a backwards acrostic. The original German verses begin Wachet, Zion and Gloria – W-Z-G – the reverse of Graf zu Waldeck, Count of Waldeck.

The reaction of Philip Nicolai to the plague in Unna is redolent of the Christian response to any time of trial. God leads the universe through the bumps of the present towards an end which is his own ultimate glory. Thus, at the dawn of a new year, on this Advent Sunday,

  • we heard the prophet Jeremiah proclaim a coming era of equity: ‘In those days … I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.’
  • And we heard Jesus find strength in the face of cataclysm: ‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations … Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’ Whatever Jesus thought would happen at the end of time, he wanted his followers to ignore the signs of decline and focus on God’s act of final reconciliation.

What might such biblical insight tell us about Advent hope? I suggest that God is reminding us of hope as optimism, hope as certainty, and hope as enabling practical response.

Firstly, hope as optimism. Traditional Christian theology associates Advent with the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. With the exception of Heaven, none of these are particularly pleasant. But in the light of Advent hope, we should be more positive. Roman Catholic academic, Eamon Duffy writes that we naturally think and talk of Christ’s return as an ‘event’, the last event of all which will bring the world to an end, and we picture it, as Jesus himself and the writers of the New Testament did, as a great court of justice, with books, a judgement seat, and so on.

However, Duffy continues, we should push beyond images to inner meaning.

Just as creation is precisely not the first in a series of events in time, but the declaration that time and event themselves have a meaning, so our faith in the return of Christ in judgement is not a belief in one more event, one more thing that happens. Instead, it is the belief that in the end God will make all events add up, that our broken world will be mended, that the longings of our hearts for justice and truth will be satisfied. How that can be we cannot know, any more than we can know how a dead man can be raised to a glorious but to us invisible life.[1]

So Christian hope is optimism because it draws us from the flaws of this present world and towards their ultimate resolution in God. That is challenging – all the more so when I move to my next claim, that Christian hope is certainty. For most people ‘hope’ is an ambiguous aspiration. But if Advent hope is about God’s future, and if God is Lord of that future in a way which we are not, then true Christian hope is nothing less than assurance of God’s plan.

And if hope as optimism and hope as certainty seem demanding, let me also tackle the misnomer that those who hope for the future are distracted from earthly realities by the delusion of ‘pie in the sky when you die’. Against this misconception, CS Lewis wrote that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some … think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read History you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great [people] who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. [Lewis concludes], it is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.[2]

So, thirdly, hope which is optimism and certainty enables practical response. The Methodist pastor Walter Wink wrote that ‘Hope imagines the future and acts as if that hope is irresistible.’ The Dean of Westminster observes that ‘the good news of the gospel is not three priorities and a working group; it is repentance, forgiveness, and salvation’. Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe said that ‘the business of the Church is to “remember” the future. Not merely to remember that there is to be a future, but mysteriously to make that future, full of grace and truth, “really present”.’[3]

Hope is optimism. Hope is certainty. And hope enables practical response. That is why we hope with expectation of the future, with trust in Christ, and with patience in waiting. Christian hope is bigger and better than we can begin to conceive. But, as Philip Nicolai knew, in Advent – the season of hope – we come close to catching a glimpse.

 

[1] Duffy, The Creed in the Catechism, 76.

[2] In Howells, Lent Companion, 54. My italics.

[3] In Hoyle, Pattern of our Calling, 38.