Advent: Hoop

inviagemeente
6 hours ago
8 min read

Sondag begin Advent. Dis nie sommer net nog ‘n dag nie. Dis ‘n dag wat wag. Om te gebeur. Dis ‘n dag van wag. Nie in ‘n lang, vervelige, angstige ry in ‘n kettingwinkel om die toiletpapier-special van Black Friday op te eis nie. ‘n Wag en verwag soos op ‘n avontuur. Dis ‘n Advent-ure.

“Advent is an abrupt disruption in our 'ordinary time'...an utterly new year, new time, new life. Everything begins again...While the world around us wraps up another year hoping for increased consumer spending and waiting for annual reports on profits, the church has already stepped into a new time, to begin a season of hoping and waiting for something of much greater significance than profits or spending: Advent invites us to awaken from our numbed endurance and our domesticated expectations to consider our life afresh in the light of new gifts that God is about to give.

Advent is a season of longing for Christ. We travel back in time to wait alongside those who lived before Christ came, and we sit in the present time to wait with the world for Christ who is still coming. We notice the brokenness of this world and the jagged edges of ourselves, and allow ourselves to anticipate the Savior who is coming to make us whole.”

Walter Brueggemann

Ons sê nie 2025 het nie gebeur nie. Ons slaan nie ‘n nuwe blaadjie om en vergeet van die boek wat ons geskryf het deur die jaar nie. Ons waag net opnuut om te hoop. En “hoop” in sy Hebreeuse vorm het altyd alles te doen met “wag”. Ons sê so maklik ons wêreld het hoop nodig, maar ons leef in ‘n wêreld waarin wag ‘n vreemde verskynsel geword het – amper derdewêrelds. As jy moet wag vir iets, is dit ‘n teken van swak diens en infrastruktuur en stadige wi-fi.

In sy merkwaardige boek Keeping Hope Alive – For a tomorrow we cannot control skryf Lewis Smedes so:

“Hope is bred in the bone. Our spirits were made for hope the way our hearts were made to love and our brains were made to think and our hands were made to make things. A “life instinct” is what Karl Menninger called hope.

I do not hope because I am a Christian any more than a Jew hopes because she is a Jew. I hope because I am an anxious, struggling, suffering, longing, unfulfilled creature on the way to a future over which I have no control. My faith gives me God as my special reason to keep hoping when fear gets a grip on my soul. And it gives me, I believe, God’s own vision of good things that He promises and that I hope for. But, one way or the other, all people hunger for hope because our Maker made us all to live by hope.”

Dan vra hy die vraag: Wat is daar aan die wyse waarop God ons geskep het wat ons so ‘n behoefte gee aan hoop? Eerstens, het God ons die krag gegee om die toekoms te kan verbeel, maar nie die mag om dit te beheer nie. Ons kan goeie goed verbeel wat ons graag wil hê moet gebeur, maar ons kan nie toesien dat dit sal gebeur nie. So ook met die slegte goed wat ons vrees. Tweedens, het God ons reisigers gemaak, mense wat op pad is. Ons is die heeltyd aan’t beweeg, nie hoofsaaklik van plek tot plek nie, maar van tyd tot tyd. Ons kan dit nie ontkom nie, ons moet beweeg van nou na later en omdat ons nie weet wat “later” inhou nie, hoop ons dat môre beter sal wees as gister. Hoop is die brandstof vir ons reis.

So hoop is die geestelike krag vir ‘n “suksesvolle” lewe (vol liefde en geloof) as skepsels wat aan die een kant die goddelike vermoë ingegee is om die toekoms te kan verbeel, maar aan die ander kant sit met die menslike onvermoë om die toekoms te kan beheer.

Hoekom voel hoop dan so gevaarlik? So weerloos? Hoekom word soveel mense deur hoop geruïneer? Sonder geloof op die as-hoop gelos?

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope of the wrong thing.”

T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

St Augustine het gesê daar is twee goed wat die siel doodmaak: wanhoop en vals hoop. Die groter gemors is dat die twee ‘n dodelike aantrekkingskrag het. Hoe dieper gedompel in die wanhoop, hoe meer vatbaar vir die vals hoop en so word ‘n bose siklus in stand gehou.

Hoekom gee soveel mense op op hoop? Want daar is ‘n fundamentele verskil tussen hoop en optimisme. Of eerder: daar’s ‘n belangrike bestanddeel wat die twee aan mekaar verbind. Nick Cave skryf in Faith, Hope and Carnage: “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” Op sy wonderlike webtuiste theredhandfiles.com bied hy aan mense die geleentheid om vir hom briewe te skryf en vrae te vra. ‘n Man skryf aan hom en sê hy’s besig om sy geloof in mense en die wêreld te verloor. Hy voel leeg en sinies en sonder hoop en hy is bang om hierdie gevoel aan sy klein seuntjie oor te dra. Dan vra hy, “Glo jy nog in Ons?” Cave begin sy brief deur te sê dat hy daardie gevoelens maar alte goed ken en dat ‘n absolute verwoesting geneem het (die dood van twee van sy seuns) vir hom om hoop te vind. Sy antwoord eindig so:

“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.”

Emily Dickinson het ‘n paar gedigte geskryf oor hoop en een daarvan begin met die woorde, “Hoop is ‘n ding met vere.” Krista Tippett (wat ‘n reeks podcasts gedoen het met mense oor hoop op haar On Being platform) sê weer (in my eie woorde), “Hoop is ‘n ding met spiere.” Dis iets wat nie net so gemaak en gelaat staan is nie, dis iets wat ons moet oefen en deur te oefen word ons. “When we practice, we become.”

Cynthia Bourgeault skryf so: “In the practice of conscious love you begin to discover...a hope that is related not to outcome but to a wellspring... a source of strength that wells up from deep within you independent of all outcomes... It is a hope that can never be taken away from you because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present...”

As jy nog tyd het, lees gerus hierdie uittreksel uit ‘n boodskap van Nadia Bolz-Weber wat nooit doekies omdraai nie.

If you have anxiety now, you are almost hopeful. Because when anxiety is converted, do you know what it becomes? It becomes hope.

Whenever I am in a real mess of pain, when a relationship has ended or I am in some kind of emotional suffering, and some well-meaning Christian says “Well, when God closes a door, he opens a window,” I start immediately looking around for that open window so I can push them out of it. Which is to say, I don’t find ignoring the difficult reality of our lives in favor of some kind of blindly cheerful optimism to be hopeful; I find it to be delusional.

So, yes, it feels like hope can be risky, and connecting hope to suffering can be sketchy.

But maybe the way suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope is that suffering, endurance, and character actually free us from the burden of having to be naively optimistic. Maybe if hope isn’t a very reliable starting point, then hope is not something we strive to muster up for ourselves. Maybe real hope is always something we are surprised by. This week I started to think of hope as that which is left after all else has failed us.

My friend Cheryl Lawrie works in the prisons in Australia, so when she speaks of hope I tend to listen. She says that: “Hope, is an encounter that captivates our imagination so we can’t help but become more than who we thought we were, and find ourselves living for something that is all at once preposterous and impossible.”

And when it comes down to it, I want hope – I just want a hope that doesn’t disappoint. Don’t we want beauty and reconciliation and possibility that comes from something other than our own limitations or the limitations of others. I want a hope that isn’t really just naïve optimism. I want a hope that finds us living for something that is all at once preposterous and impossible and yet the most real and honest thing we know.

That is to say, I want God.

Because a hope that does not disappoint looks less like being idealistic about ourselves and more like being idealistic about God’s redeeming work in the world. It’s a hope that comes not from naïve optimism, but from being wrong and falling short, and experiencing betrayal and being a betrayer, and it comes from suffering and the grave and what feels like a night from which dawn could never emerge and then how God reaches into the graves we dig ourselves and each other and again loves us back to life.

The hope we have, brothers and sisters, the hope that never disappoints has nothing to do with optimism or the avoidance of suffering, is a hope that can only come from a God who has experienced birth and love and friendship and lepers and prostitutes and betrayal and suffering and death and burial and a decent into hell itself. Only a God who has born suffering can bring us any real hope of resurrection.

The Christian faith is one that does not pretend things aren’t bad. This is a faith that does not offer platitudes to those who lost children last week to suicide or a tornado. This is not a faith that produces optimism; it is a faith that produces a defiant hope that God is still writing the story and that despite darkness, a light shines and that God can redeem our crap and that beauty matters and that despite every disappointing thing we have ever done or that we have ever endured, that there is no hell from which resurrection is impossible. The Christian faith is one that kicks at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.*

*From Bruce Cockburn’s Lovers in a Dangerous Time

Klink vir my soos geboorte. Klink vir my soos Jesuskind. Lank verwag.

Bid gerus hierdie Advent-belydenis saam met hoopvolle mense regoor die wêreld:

Ons glo in God die Vader, skepper van hemel en aarde.

Die geduldige een wat nie bang is vir stilte nie,

die een wat nie elke oomblik probeer vul met aktiwiteite en lawaai nie.

Die een wat anderkant die geraas en gejaag is

en nie veg vir aandag nie.

Ons glo in God die Seun, die redder van die skepping,

wat een nag, grootliks ongemerk, in Betlehem ingeglip het,

wat dertig jaar sonder hoofopskrifte of haas geleef het,

wat dikwels tyd geneem het om alleen met sy geduldige Vader te spandeer,