I love to write. I’m not talking about stringing words together or communicating interesting thoughts, although I do love that too. I mostly love the physical act of writing, like scribbling sermons by hand, making lists and notes, or writing cards to people. I mostly love writing with fountain pens and on nice paper. In fact, I have about a dozen fountain pens with all colors of ink and I have no regrets when the ink smudges on my skin and leaves stains for a couple of days.
Since I enjoy hand-writing so much, I love the feel of writing out a to-do list and then having the satisfaction of scratching a finished item of that list. I constantly have a to-do list on my desk in my office at home and try to keep up with the tasks I have to do for work in between homeschooling my girls, running errands, and other household chores.
I was holding Ford one afternoon and had to leave my desk for a couple of hours to tend to his needs. When I returned to my desk to finish up some church work, I looked down at my to-do list: pray for so and so, write an article, finish next week’s sermon. And there, in the margin, was a note that my oldest daughter, Annaleigh, had snuck onto my busy to-do list, a list that felt overwhelming and long. There in the margins was the sentence, “I love you, Dad.”
I needed that little love note. And it reminded me that I need to look for those notes of love from God, those places where God is saying, “I love you” in the margins of my day. I need more moments of hope rather than giving in to the fear. And people throughout time have needed God’s story of hope and love, just as we do today. That’s why the Advent and Christmas theme for this year is “Be Not Afraid.” Messengers throughout the Bible had to remind God’s people that although hope and fear resided together in a chaotic world, that love would, indeed, be born. And so, for the next several weeks of Advent, leading up to Christmas, we will explore great stories of Jesus’ birth and life that seemed filled with fear, but also filled with a great deal of hope, as well.
And that’s the reality of Jesus’s birth and the reality of our own lives today. That’s why I am drawn to the Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
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
The hopes and fears of all the years happened in Jesus’s time and are happening in our time as well. Pastor Phillip Brooks penned these words over 150 years ago, seemingly knowing that hopes and fears would be a part of all people in all times. And we often think that hope and fear can’t live side by side, that we can only have one or the other. But, we know that isn’t true. We know that we are living in a time of great fear. Author Stanley R. Martin said, “But many times hope and fear are at odds with each other. What hope longs to embrace, fear pushes just out of reach. Our hopes and fears collide, much like eternity collided with time many years ago in the village of Bethlehem.”
And eternity collided in a bustling and brutal town with a simple and scared couple. “At the time of Jesus’ birth, Rome had taken this region captive. The Jewish people were under occupation and the Romans ruled strictly and harshly. Taxes constantly increased, causing many to go into debt after having their land taken from them, eventually rendering them utterly impoverished. Strife and war had defined this area for generations, and the people were aching for their Messiah to conquer. The prophets had said He would be in the City of David — in Bethlehem, the place of hopes and fears.”[1]
Eternity collided with us. And when that happened hope and fear collided as well. Mary and Joseph were, no doubt, afraid. Hopes and fears happen simultaneously when having children. When Amanda was in the hospital on bedrest, I was filled with the hope of a new baby, but feared for Amanda’s safety and health. Then Ford was born and I was filled with hope that he finally made it into the world, but also debilitating fear that he wasn’t strong enough to survive or that he would have long-term health issues. Hope and fear were intermingled. And Hope and fear are intermingled in our world today, and we aren’t quite sure how to find the hope that resides in the margins of our lives. Hope is there, but it’s difficult to see in a dirty manger, in a small town, in the dead of night. But hope is here.
I love the image in Isaiah of the Peaceable Kingdom. You all know it; the wolf will lay down with the lamb and the leopard with the goat. Opposite creatures, even enemies, are enemies no more. If that isn’t an image of hope in the midst of fear, I don’t know what is. The prophet Isaiah was writing in about 750 BCE, calling God’s people to task, chastising them for their disregard for the poor, their selfishness, and their arrogance. And as one commentator put it, “their inappropriate nationalism and pride.” Isaiah warned them about the imminent destruction of Judah if they persisted with their callous hate towards God’s created world and every person in it.
And it doesn’t matter who someone is! They could be wolf people, or leopard people, or lamb people, or goat people. They could be filled with doubt, filled with unbelief, filled with jealousy, filled with hurt. It doesn’t matter. The Hebrew people were being called by Isaiah to display hope in the middle of the fear because they were acting like a fearful people rather than a hopeful people.
It was a time of great fear in Isaiah’s day. Yet, even in that time of great fear for the Hebrew people, there was hope. There was a tiny, green plant, a stalk, a shoot, small and weak blossoming forth from an old tree stump. That small plant would regrow a faithful and obedient people, a people filled with hope rather than fear, led by a deliverer who would create God’s true and peaceable kingdom here on earth. The hopes and fears of all the years would be met in that deliverer!
And yet I know it can be difficult to see the flicker of the candle of hope. 2020 has been a year filled with fear. We’ve seen a pandemic disrupt our lives, job loss and economic volatility, overwhelming anger and agitation due to racial injustices, chaos in our electoral system, and the calamity of natural disasters and climate change. And fear sells doesn’t it. The news is covered in fear. Political parties are pushing fear. We are being taught to fear someone else because they are different or to fear the devil or fear hell or fear our neighbor. Fear sells. Fear sells alarm systems, locks, and motion lights. Fear sells guns and bombs and weapons. Fear sells propaganda and suspicion and otherness. Fear sells. There are authors and writers who capitalize on fear. One of these writers said, “Tasers, pepper spray, alarm systems, tear gas, OnStar systems, GPS systems, and let’s not forget guns. Business has never been better. People are afraid. In fact, social scientists, the people who study such things tell us that we are living in a ‘Culture of Fear,’ that is a culture that is fueled, driven, and directed not by confidence and hope but by fear.”[2]
And sure, there are some fears that are reasonable and appropriate. It is reasonable to wear a seat belt. It is reasonable and appropriate to wear a mask. It is reasonable to stop smoking if you have a fear of lung cancer. Healthy fear informs our choices so that we can make good decisions that care for ourselves and all of God’s creation. But we are also called as Christians to reject fears that are debilitating and unfounded, fears that tell us God’s world is broken and God’s people are evil. If we, indeed, do not want our fears to rule the day, we might need to look into the margins of our lives, the places where scripture resides, the places where holy love dwells, the places where good news is the news of the day, to see the message that God loves us and is present in the pain, is present in the loneliness, and is present in the depression and doubt. God loves us. That is the hope of the season.
Because, you see, perfect love casts out fear. We hear that all of the time. Perfect love casts out fear. And Jesus is that perfect love. In Advent, we celebrate Jesus coming into the world, a world that was covered in darkness, the darkness of fear. Jesus was the bright star that shown in the heavens to give hope in the bleakest of nights. The message we get from Jesus today, on this first Sunday of Advent and on every day after this one is that hope is here! Hope is here! In the middle of our fearful days, hope is here. We just need to learn how to look for it.
And I know we get tired of looking, don’t we? I know we get tired of waiting. But Advent is a time of waiting. The word Advent means the arrival of someone or something and the anticipation that comes along with that. And so, as Christians, we wait. We wait for the Christ-child to be born so that peace can finally come into this world. And so, I say again, as Christians, we wait. Waiting is difficult as it is when we have to wait for our food, or wait for someone to recover from an illness, or wait for a medical diagnosis, or wait for social revolution that God granted all of us at the beginning of creation.
But it seems that this waiting is more difficult than usual. We wait with a lot of fear. Maybe God is telling us this year, as we wait with our fears, to offer up our fears to the divine and to hear God’s comfort in the angel voices: “Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid. It is said over and over again by God’s messengers in the Bible. Do not be afraid. And we are beckoned to hear it over and over again as we live and wait in unprecedented times.
Although fear is present and palpable in today’s fraught moments, we hear the proclamations of the messengers of God to “be not afraid.” Because when we see the story of Jesus being born into a tumultuous world, we see that hope and fear live side by side. And although fear is present, we cannot forget to look for moments of hope. If we are to do as the messengers of God told us to do, we might try to notice the margins. It is in the margins of our lives that God reveals hope. We often get distracted by everything going on in our lives. Our fears overwhelm us and our to-do lists distract us. I wonder what it would be like if we looked in the margins to where God has written on our hearts and our spirits, “I love you.”
Whether you can find hope in the margins this day or not, the hopes and fears of all your years were met in Bethlehem. And that same Christ, that same savior, is in you and with you, even in the hopes and especially in the fears. Although we are afraid and weak and worried, we have a promise today. That promise goes something like this, “where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
Amen.
[1] Elisabeth Teater is a friend of Sojourners who is currently living in India.
[2] See the Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Barry Glassner; or Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, Frank Furedi; State of Fear, Michael Crichton; The Culture of Fear, Noam Chomsky, for more on the “Culture of Fear” phenomenon.