Hope

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in his book. Man’s Search for Meaning, the Jewish Psychologist Viktor Frankl. He gives a first person account of his experience surviving a concentration camp during World War ii. Now, Franco was in his early twenties living in Austria with his wife. When the Nazis took over, Austria deported him and his wife, and then sent him away from his family to a series of concentration camps, first Tars, TTA, and then Auschwitz.

And then finally Turk Heim. Now the book Man’s Search for Meaning is part memoir and part psychological analysis, and it follows what Frankel observed as the spiral of despair that overtook most of the prisoners around him. So first, what Frankel observed was shock. So prisoners around him struggled to grasp their new reality of life, devoid of pleasure, and instead filled with pain.

And f Frankel noted that some didn’t survive this stage. Instead losing their grip on reality and their handle on their own mental health. Stage two was apathy. Eventually, Frankel observed a letting go of prisoners’ will to live or survive. He witnessed their loss of the fear of threat of death. Nothing could shake them.

They simply didn’t care if they lived or died anymore. Now, most prisoners stayed here at this level, but a few made it to the third stage, which Frankel calls depersonalization. This is where there’s a complete disassociation, an abandoning of personal identity, an abandoning of all memory, of all aspirations, and all visions for the future.

Frankel noted that prisoners saw themselves. They begin to see themselves. Those that reached this stage as things not beings. And if you reach this state, Frankel said that it was likely you would succumb to death, physical death within a few days. Emotionally, you were already dead. But here’s what Viktor Frankl found, the ones who survived the brutal physical conditions of the concentration camps, which included forced labor, malnutrition, starvation, beatings, the ones who were able to survive all the physical torment that went with these new conditions.

The ones who were able to resist this three stage spiral of despair weren’t those who were the healthiest. In fact, it was often those who were the most physically fit or healthy that passed away. First, it wasn’t those who were most physically fit. The ones who had the most physical endurance, the ones who survived were usually physically the weakest, but they were the ones who were able to reorient their lives around their new reality, to see their present circumstances as a means to an end, and who were able to put their current lives within the context of a broader story.

In other words. It was those who were able to find and live with 📍 hope.

Now this morning, uh, we are celebrating the first Sunday of Advent. Now Advent is a joyful season. I know that was a heavy intro. I know. I realizing that was really dark. Uh, this is happy. It’s a celebratory time. It’s Christmas. Advent is a joyful season in the church calendar that marks the weeks leading up to Christmas, just like Easter or Pentecost.

Advent has been observed and celebrated by the Christian Church going all the way back to the fifth century. Now, the word advent comes from the Latin word Adventist, which roughly translates to coming or arrival, and it refers to the season where we followers of Jesus throughout history, look back on Jesus’ first arrival through his birth at Christmas time, and we look forward right to his final arrival back to Earth to rule over the new creation.

Now, traditionally, each week the church focuses on one of the four major themes of Advent, hope, peace, joy, and love. Now, as we enter into the Christmas season, we are beginning this week, we a look at the theme of hope. What we have this morning in the passages that we just read, those two quick stories, uh, is a story of two people, 📍 a priest and a prophetess.

Now, both of these people are righteous in God’s size. Both are committed to living their lives, serving the Lord, both experience in different ways, pain and suffering. Both receive hope, breaking through their work routines, but each one responds to hope in wildly different ways. 📍 So with that first, the priest.

Look again at Luke chapter one starting in verse five. In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest of Abba’s division named Zechariah. His wife was from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both were righteous in God’s sight, living without blame, according to all the commands and requirements of the Lord, but they had no children because Elizabeth could not conceive.

And both of them were well along in years. Now, Zaria was a priest and he was someone who worked in the temple. Uh, the priests were a part of a long tradition stretching all the way back to the time of Moses in the book of Exodus. Their main job was to maintain the temple, the sacred building that represented the overlap of heaven and earth where people would come and make sacrifices in order to atone for their sins.

Zachariah’s wife Elizabeth also comes from a family of priests, specifically from the family of Aaron, Moses’ brother, and the very first official priest. So Zacharia to be a priest, married, uh, to someone else who comes from not just a family of priests, but a family that can trace their lineage all the way back to Aaron.

This made you basically doubly righteous. But before you imagine they’re idealized and romanticized perfect lives, which others in their social circles likely would’ve done Luke interjects with this devastating line, but they had no children. Now, in this time, to struggle with infertility wasn’t a medical problem.

It was seen as a spiritual one. Most, again, at this time, assumed that God blessed those who were righteous with children and material blessings. And if you didn’t have either, you weren’t righteous enough to experience this kind of suffering meant that something had likely gone horribly wrong with God’s plan for your life, and there’s a good chance it was your fault, verse eight.

When his division was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, it happened that he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and burn incense at the hour of incense. The whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Now, what Zechariah is doing here is a huge deal.

It’s a detail we kinda skip over when we’re reading the story just so we can get ahead to John the Baptist in Jesus and all that stuff, but we have to zero in because this is a huge deal in his life. The offering of incense was considered one of the highest privileges that a priest could do. In fact, it could only be done once in every priest’s life, and there’s a good chance that you weren’t even able to do it at all.

See, at this time, there were a lot of priests and not at a left temple jobs. And so in that situation, specifically with this kind of a task burning incense in the temple, the priest who was chosen for that incense burning would be, have their name drawn. So it was chosen by lot, which meant that some priests never got their names drawn and they never got to perform this sacred act.

Now the priest whose name got drawn would then go in with the other priest to the holiest part of the temple, where the other priest would then leave him while he burned incense, and everyone else would wait outside. Praying. This moment here is arguably the most important moment in Zachariah’s whole career.

Verse 11. An angel of the Lord appeared to him standing to the right of the altar of incense. That doesn’t happen. That’s not a normal thing for that to happen. When Zacharia saw him, he was terrified and overcome with fear. But the angel said to him, don’t be afraid, Zachariah, because your prayer has been heard.

Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son and you will name him John. There will be joy and delight for you, and many will rejoice at his birth for he will be great in the side of the Lord. He will never drink wine or beer. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even while he’s still in his mother’s womb.

He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him. In the spirit and power of Elijah, whoa. To turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous, to make ready for the Lord prepare a prepared people. 📍 How can I know this?

Zacharia asked the angel, if I’m an old man and my wife is well along in years, the angel answered him, why? I’m Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and tell you this. Good news. Now listen, you’ll become silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place because you do not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their proper time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So though Zacharia is at a high point in his career, he’s hopeless. See, now we get a really clear picture of who Zacharia is and what his circumstances really are. God’s promises to his people are the promises that Zechariah would’ve known. Well, the promises that would reverse the curse from the garden story at the beginning of the scriptures.

The promises to bring a Messiah, to save Israel and the world from sin, Satan and death. Those promises, at least in Zacharia’s Day, up until this point. They were far from fulfilled though God spoke clearly and often to his people throughout the Old Testament. Zechariah is living in a time when it’s been 400 years since anyone has heard anything from God.

Rome still rules over Israel with an iron fist. The coming of the Messiah is still a mystery. No prophet is given any, any new word on God’s movement, and zacharia the faithful priest, blameless in the Lord’s eyes. He’s still childless, but then he gets hope. Now, hope seems like one of those words that Christians throw around as a complacent response to tragedy or a cliche answer to questions about suffering.

Honestly, if we’re being really honest, it seems more like a meaningless placeholder than a virtue with any real substance. But what sets humanity apart? From the rest of creation is our need for hope. What the angel tries to give Zachariah here what Viktor Frankl saw as the one thing you need to survive the harshest conditions imaginable.

It’s hope. It’s the innate need that we have to look for something beyond ourselves to escape the problems within ourselves, pain, guilt, fear, and death. It’s our capacity to extend our mental and emotional faculties to something transcendent, meaning something outside of what we can see, touch, taste, smell, hear, to numb our pain, to give us purpose and to point us to something to look forward to.

Hope is anything we look to for meaning, purpose, escape. Answers, comfort. Yeah, right now we might vary in the things that we decide to put our hope in, but all of us are looking for something beyond what we can do and what we can see in order to make sense of the world around us. Whether our hope extends into eternity with God or into a weekend Netflix binge that offers a quick escape.

Whether our hope is in Christ, in his coming kingdom, or the coming high and numbing from a drink or substance, whether our hope is in the future, righting of all wrongs, the eradication of sickness and death, and the consummation of God’s union with his people. Or in the next doom scroll, the next sexual exploit or the next relationship promotion or weekend getaway.

The question we ask ourselves during Advent is not, do you have hope, but rather 📍 what is your hope actually in. Right. That’s a good word. What the angel Gabriel does here in the middle of the temple during the highlight of Zachariah’s career is confront him with that question, do you really believe what you’re doing here?

Would you believe me if I gave you hope? See, Zechariah gets an answer to his and his wife’s prayers, and they get an answer to God’s 400 years of silence. Not only will God provide Zechariah and Elizabeth with a son, which would’ve been hopeful enough, but also that son will have what Gabriel calls the spirit and power of Elijah, one of the greatest prophets in the whole Old Testament.

See, prophets look behind at God’s past faithfulness and promises in order to look ahead to God’s promised future, right? Yep. They give people hope. Which is exactly what Zacharia’s son John is gonna do. Zacharia’s wife Elizabeth, is about to give birth to someone who will continue the biblical story and then bring it to its climax in Jesus, their son John.

According to the angel Gabriel, who will also become known as John the Baptist, not only will he have a great career as a prophet, he’ll be the one to prepare the way for Jesus, meaning his job is gonna be to remind people of God’s promise to restore the world and then invite them to live in that reality here and now today, by repenting, which means aligning themselves with the rule and reign of the coming king, and being baptized as a sign of that alignment and allegiance to Jesus.

All of God’s old Testament promises are about to be fulfilled, and it’s gonna happen through zacharia, transcendent, and heavenly hope comes clashing here with the immediate and observable daily life of an old priest. Heaven and Earth colliding again in the temple. The fulfillment of God’s promises to his people reaching back centuries was about to unfold before Zechariah’s own eyes.

Zacharia the priest whose entire life has been oriented around these very promises of Yahweh, and he almost misses it.

📍 How can I know this?

The Korean Christian philosopher, bi Chohan argues that the opposite of hope isn’t despair or depression, it’s fear. He argues that we lose our capacity for hope when we give our minds, our hearts and our bodies over to the anxieties that overtake the world around us and within us. Whether it’s fear about the decline of the American empire, fear about the future of the church, or simply the fear that like Zechariah, our own personal hopes and dreams won’t actually come true.

Fear makes us incapable of receiving hope when we have the chance and it chokes out our ability to move beyond our circumstances into something else. How can I know this? That’s not a response to hope. That’s a response to fear right now. It’d be so easy and so cliche for me to stand up here and say, so put your hope in Jesus.

He is your hope. And then end with a song and be on our way. And that’s true, and I believe that. But can we just be honest for a moment? Most of us, if we’re honest, have lived long enough. With despair and disappointment and fear to know that things don’t always get better, right?

God, in our experience, at least lets us down. Yeah. Our expectations aren’t met. We’re old and childless. Unmarried or widowed, or in conditions that we never would’ve imagined ourselves in feeling like we are in our own cycle of shock, apathy and depersonalization, prayers go unanswered. Prayers that get answered and blessings that God gives are then taken away later.

Or we live our lives like zaria, righteous and blameless in God’s eyes, and yet we feel ignored by the same God that we serve and worship, life will bring suffering, or in the words of Jesus himself, in this life, you will have trouble. Replace the word trouble with anything you want. It could be a monumental tragedy that redefines our lives as we know it, a death, a loss, a divorce.

It could be a decision that immediately shakes us out of our optimism and forces our attention like zaria to the fear of an unknown future. Or it could just be disappointment and the malaise of a life you realized you’re living, that you didn’t imagine actually living the dreams you once had, you’ll never achieve.

So we settle for life as it is, and we put our vague expectations of a better future in God’s hands, or we hope, we hope for things like better weather tomorrow. We hope we get that promotion at work or that job. We feel like we bombed the interview for, we hope our spouse forgot about that dumb thing we said yesterday.

We hope our kids are better tomorrow than they are today. We hope that our football team wins, but this isn’t hope. These are spiritual band-aids on deep wounds that we ignore until we find ourselves disillusioned and depersonalized settling for good weather in a decent Netflix show to help us unwind.

Is that really what we celebrate during Advent? Is that really all that Jesus came to bring?

That leads us to 📍 the prophetess. Flip over again to Luke chapter two, verse 36. There was also a prophetess Anna. A daughter of fan Uel of the tribe of Asher. Now, she was well along in years having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and was a widow for 84 years. She did not leave the temple serving God night and day with fasting and prayers.

At that very moment, she came up and began to thank God and to speak about him to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. Now, we don’t know much about Anna the prophetess. In fact, this is the only story we have of her in the New Testament. But Luke gives us enough details to help us paint a portrait of who she was.

So first, Anna was a prophetess. Now, as a prophet, like Zechariah, the priest, Anna carries on a legacy invocation among selected men and women that goes back centuries to the time of Moses in the Book of Exodus. Now, contrary to popular belief, we’ve said this before and we will probably continue to say it again.

Profits were not primarily fortune tellers or doomsday predictors, though they did have fortunes that they foretold and doomsdays, that they did predict that wasn’t their main job. They were spokespeople for God, giving the Israelites God’s people a message directly from God himself. They would declare messages to God’s people, teach them how to follow Yahweh, this one true God, and then redirect those people when they lived out of alignment of that God’s will.

It was their duty to listen for God’s voice, to discern the movement and heart of, of the hearts and actions of God’s people, and then to teach them how to fall back in line with God’s will. Prophets were necessary because God used them to give his people hope. Since the beginning of the biblical story, the world has been increasingly warped, broken and infected by sin, Satan and death.

God’s people, the Israelites were both victims to and participants in that sin, giving themselves over to idolatry, materialism, and greed. Through the prophets. God promised to one day bring a king who would rule over God’s people, eradicate all sin and injustice in the world, and then save them from their oppressors.

But again, between the Old Testament and the new is 400 years of silence. No prophets, no message from God, no promises the that the Messiah is coming soon, just the growing Roman empire crushing the Israelites, God’s own people under their oppressive regime. Now, just before this passage, uh, passage, Jesus is born, he’s brought as is the custom among Jewish parents to the temple in Jerusalem to be dedicated to the Lord.

Now, when he’s there, another man named Simeon recognizes that this baby Jesus is the long awaited Messiah. So Simeon breaks out into a song. He declares good fortune over Jesus and his parents, and then he prophesies about all the great things that Jesus is going to do for God’s people. And Anna is there for all of it.

But like Zechariah, Anna has had her share of suffering and tragedy. Now it’s an interesting little detail that Luke includes, but at this time there’s no printing press. And so the gospel story, it’s prime real estate. What you’re able to write and include, and the fact that Luke includes this is telling the Greek here is difficult to translate, but what the text seems to be saying is that she’s an 84-year-old woman who’s also a widow, having only experienced the joy of marriage for seven short years.

Now, it seems that she’s alone, no family left, which we can assume because when hope meets her here in the temple, just like it did with Zacharia, she’s doing what she always does, praying, fasting, and worshiping the God that she’s oriented her life around. See, unlike Zacharia, Anna understands something about hope.

Her life’s anchor isn’t moved or swayed around by the tossing waves of her circumstances. It is doubtful. She imagined being a widow at 84 with no family yet left, and yet she’s here doing what she always does, praying, fasting, and worshiping the God she’s oriented her life around. See, it’s in Anna, the prophet test that we see what real hope actually looks like.

Hope is not an expectation that things will one day get better for us based on our definition of better. Though it does for Zechariah, hope cannot depend on a simple yes to all of our prayers. Hope is not vague optimism. It’s not a spiritual platitude, and it’s not a vain word that we throw around in response to tragedy or prayer requests.

Hope is against the spiritual backdrop of a beautiful world warped by sin, an act of defiance. It’s a splash of color spread out on a blank page. It’s a glimpse ahead into the deeper and more true reality that exists all around us. It’s like a clear in the fog, a peek behind the curtain, an awakening in the middle of a dark sleep hope points us to what’s ultimately true, that 📍 God is real, that God is here and God is moving.

So God is real. God is more real than anything we can see or observe or measure around us. God is true reality in him. We live and move and have our beings. What the Apostle Paul says in Acts 17, not only that, but God is here. He’s not off in the clouds, waiting for us to get our act together before he intervenes with a message about hope and optimism.

He’s near enough to care about our needs, wants and desires close enough to give Zacharia and Elizabeth a son and an answer to his 400 years of silence. And God is moving. He hasn’t set the clock to sit back and watch it tick towards the end times. He’s moving creation towards redemption as we speak.

Whether we realize it and see it or not see, hope is a reorientation of our lives around a greater story. One that includes suffering but doesn’t end with it 📍 to hope is to anchor the present orientation of our lives in a future reality. To live as if the biblical story really is true, as if the worst things that happen to us, whether infertility and tragedy.

We’re just mundanity and disappointment are not the last things that will happen to us, right? Hope is showing up to the same temple of the same God that took your husband away and then rejoicing when he fulfills his promise to save the world. Hope is Zechariah eventually saying yes to God’s declaration, that he’s gonna continue his story of salvation and that you and your old Baron wife have a part to play in that story.

Hope is Jesus’s mother, Mary, saying yes to the angel that appeared in the middle of the night, giving her a promise that her son will bring salvation to the whole world, even though that yes will bring her social ridicule, uncertainty, and pain. Hope is expecting and enduring suffering, tragedy, despair, and disappointment because those things aren’t barriers to hope.

The conduits again. The philosopher bi Chohan writing about the differences between hope and positive thinking says, 📍 unlike positive thinking, hope does not turn away from the negative aspects of life. It remains mindful of them. To hope means to put one’s trust in reality, to believe in it so that it carries with it the future.

See, hope doesn’t come before the bad thing happens. That’s optimism. That’s wishful thinking. No hope begins where our easy lives and good circumstances end. Hope comes after the letdown, the disappointment, the tragedy, the despair. See, this is what Anna got, that zacharia missed. Hope doesn’t prove itself in the answered prayer and things working out for us.

It proves itself when the prayers are unanswered. When we’re disappointed by how things turned out and we’re forced to reorient our lives around something else entirely. A commenting on the effects of the concentration camp on prisoners near Christmas time. Viktor Frankl writes this, uh, 📍 the death rate in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s 1945 increased in camp beyond all previous experience.

It was simply because the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home by Christmas. But for us, the ones who survived the meaning of life embraced the wider circles of life and death of suffering and dying. 📍 Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism.

Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. Wow. See, unlike vague optimism, hope needs suffering in order to prove itself. Disappointment and despair can actually be gifts because they are actually indicators that what we had our hope in was ultimately insufficient. That’s why Zacharia had a hard time believing the angel and why Anna continued to live her life in such a way that when hope comes to meet her, she’s ready for it.

So who are you in the story?

Are you Zechariah?

Some of us have become so disillusioned by pain, so affected by disappointment and unanswered prayers that we just can’t hope for anything more than a restful weekend and a good show to binge to help us relax. If heavenly and transcendent hope were to break through our daily lives and routines, we would respond like Zacharia.

How can I really trust this? How can I know for sure that God is real? That God is here, that He’s moving, that he’s alive, that he cares about me at all? So if that’s you, what do you do? You 📍 remind yourself of the story. See, as followers of Jesus, we get to tell and retell ourselves of God’s promises and his past faithfulness as a way to bring God’s planned future into the present.

And so like Zacharia, we do what we’re called to do, whether that’s the high point of our careers are just normal daily tasks, but we do so with a hopeful expectation that like Zacharia, the transcendence of God can break through the mundane at any moment. We keep doing what God has called us to do normal life, boring and routine, but with the posture of expectation.

Expectation that the power and presence of God could break through the normalcy of our schedules and soccer practices and work presentations and business meetings and house chores and commutes and bedtime routines that hope could redirect our boredom or are suffering. Our sorrow or our grief and point it towards the future.

See, to hope is to remind ourselves of the promise God is real, whether you feel him or not, that God is here nearer to you in your pain than you can possibly imagine, and God is moving whether you feel like it or not, right?

Are you Anna faithfully serving God and orienting your life around the biblical story affected but not disillusioned by pain and suffering? If so, what do you do? You 📍 share your hope. It’s what Anna does. In verse 38, she sees Jesus. She hears these prophecies and songs from Simeon, and then in verse 38, she begins to speak about God to all who are looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.

Everybody. She shares that hope with everybody she can. See, hope isn’t just for us to receive and live by. It’s for us to share. We get it, and then we give it away. We share with others how we ourselves are longingly awaiting Jesus’s second coming when God will right all of the world’s wrongs and put the world back to its original state.

By bringing together heaven and earth in full, our deepest longings will be fulfilled. All of our prayers will be answered, and the malaise of living in the middle of an unfinished story will be cured. Now because of this future hope, advent is a time of celebration. We wait, but while we wait, we joyfully reorient ourselves around the end of the story, keeping God’s future promises at the forefront of our minds.

So we gather with friends and family. We share meals we give generously. We play and laugh all as a foretaste of our future when Jesus will come again to fully rule and to reign.