Keep Hope Alive

DECONSTRUCTING AND DECOLONIZING CHRISTMAS ONE ADVENT THEME AT A TIME

It feels weird not to be planning Advent talks right now. This is my second holiday season out of the pulpit, and the muscle memory of December church stress is still a thing. You would think writing talks for Christmas would be easy since it happens every year, but the opposite is true. Pastors everywhere struggle most with “high holy holidays” like Christmas and Easter because how many ways can you tell the same story differently? Will we find the sweet spot between the familiar and the novel? The expected and the surprising?

Since my current work doesn’t compel me to talk about Advent, you’d think I’d revel in skipping the aforementioned struggle. But I’m still a pastor, old habits die hard, and Advent looms large in Christian spaces even those barely recognizable as having any affiliation with the religion. I’m talking about New Thought spaces like Unity, Centers for Spiritual Living, Christian Science, Divine Science, and the like – spaces I am apparently hellbent, with others, on decolonizing.

Toward that effort, let’s take a look at some of the messages that usually get thrown around this time of year and how they might encourage spiritual bypass, uphold privilege, maintain systems of oppression, and perpetuate harm.

Hope

In a recent episode of the Pub Theology Live podcast, my co-hosts and I did a bit of a hit job on hope as we debated this Gwynne Michelle quote: "Hope is weak. It’s wishy-washy. It’s externally focused and dependent on things that we can’t control. It’s an emotional attachment to a future that may or may not happen. Ultimately, hope is something that takes us out of the present moment, away from mindfulness, and into fantasy. In short, hope is a lie and it makes you lazy." [click here to drop in on the discussion] While I generally agree with her sentiment, I’m not that mad about hope. No, we shouldn’t become emotionally attached to the illusion of an imagined certainty, but hope can be a starting point to direct our actions toward making a better future. Sometimes it’s the only pinpoint of light in a sea of darkness; a beginning sliver of belief that other possibilities exist.

But hope isn’t action. Neither is faith…