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Sermon Preached on Christmas Eve at Midnight Mass 2008

by Father Mick Elfred

“The Audacity of Hope”

In down town Chicago sometime during the Mid 1980’s Revd Wright’s climbed into the pulpit of Trinity Church to preach his usual Sunday sermon. He began by describing a painting - “The painting depicts a woman harpist”, he said, “who at first glance appears to be sitting on top of a great mountain until you take a closer look and see that she is bruised and covered in blood. She is dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.” The Revd then told the congregation that the title of the painting was “Hope” and went on to say, “It is this world, a world where cruise a skips throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere …..That’s the world! On which hope sits!” Then Revd Wright became more personal speaking of how as a youth he had gone off the rails, been in trouble with the law but how, much to his amazement his parents could still sing, “Thank you Jesus”. He recalled his Grandmother living in abject poverty singing “There’s a bright side somewhere……..don’t rest until you find it……” It was, said Revd Wright, the audacious hope he saw at work in his family that finally brought him to Christ.

In the congregation that morning there was a young political organiser of mixed race. Although he had not been a regular church goer he was impressed by what the Black Churches were doing and he had responded to the pastor’s invitation to attend Sunday Worship that particular morning. He was sitting next to a family with two young children. As the Revd finished his sermon and the choir started singing he felt the older of the two boys lightly touch his hand and looking down he saw a slightly apprehensive face looking up at him as the young lad offered him a tissue handkerchief. He was to write latter in his autobiography “It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks”. The young idealistic organisers name was Barack Obama. Year later the sermon he heard that morning gave him a slogan for the recent election in the USA and also the title of his second book, “The Audacity of Hope”. Allow me to quote from one of his election speeches:

“In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? I'm not talking about blind optimism here -- the almost wilful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”

A couple of weeks ago a young man from the Children’s Trust came down in his electric wheelchair to meet me in Church. He was doing a project entitled “What Christmas means to you” and he had been interviewing lots of different people and making a video. He asked me if the Christmas story had inspired me to want to be a priest. My immediate thought was “no, not really; it was my God Father Uncle Arthur, himself an Anglican priest, who was an early inspiration for me”. However when I got back to the vicarage and thought about the question a bit more I started to wonder what it was about Uncle Arthur that was such an inspiration to a young and impressionable boy and I think, in part at least, it was that I recognised in him the same audacious hope that the Revd Wright was talking about and which moved the President Elect to tears. Fr Arthur Dinsdale served in the East End of London in the lice ridden squalor of the houses near the docks and then in several small villages in Dorset where he was hassled by a Bishop who wanted his living for one of his relatives. He lost his only son in the Second World War and latterly suffered from elongated periods of ill health but hope shone from his being and actually that is just what the Christmas story is all about – God’s hope in the face of a world of suffering and injustice; a hope that originates with God but can be caught by human beings.

Consider the Christmas story as we are given it in two of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke - an unmarried mother gives birth in a stinking stable in a land occupied by foreign troops: that’s the gist of it; but of course Christians believe that this child was, as St John puts it rather more philosophically, is “the Word of God. The Word who was with God in the beginning and was God, the Word made flesh”. We are invited to look at this vulnerable child born in poverty and squalor and see the “glory of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth”. The cynic of course will look at this scene and say, “you must be joking if you think that this is an answer to the world’s problems. The cynic will in his heart of hearts feel that the world will never change so the only option is to go with the flow but the reality is that hope often has very small beginnings. In his preaching Jesus was to say that the Kingdom of God was like a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, but from it would grow great things. Of course on the face of it Jesus’ mission ended in failure his hopes dashed on the cross but two thousand years later his followers are in every continent of the world announcing a faith which had crossed all barriers of race and culture. In the 1950/60’s the leaders of the civil race movement could have hardly believed that fifty years on the ethnically diverse people of America would elect a Black President. The Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr had a dream for America but he was realistic enough to know that this dream he struggled to implement, where his four children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character, would in all probability, as in the case of Jesus his saviour, cost him his life – “I may not get there with you” - the audacity of hope.

The Christmas story shows us that God has a hope for humanity and a love for humanity. In other words He believes in humanity, despite what human beings have done, are doing and will do in propagating evil and destruction. He knows what a human being can be at their very worst and also at their very best – he knows what you can be. What an audacious hope! God is so keen on human beings He enters the human condition Himself in the person of Jesus. This hope lies in the manger and is contained in that fragile human life and this child points to how hope works; it can be summed up in the word – “participation”. The first step to solving any problem is by facing it squarely and believing that no matter what it looks like or how ever long it takes it can be surmounted. For some of us things might be difficult in the next year. The news is full of gloomy predictions about the state of the economy; some may face redundancy, or trouble may come in some other form, illness, a domestic crisis, who knows? We cannot accurately predict what the future will bring despite our careful planning. The nativity story which we celebrate tonight invites us, challenges us, to face the unknown future with hope audacious as that may sometime seem. It challenges us not to turn away from a needy and broken world feeling there is nothing we can do. The world needs the likes of Revd Wright, Martin Luther King, Fr Arthur Dinsdale, Barack Obama and you and me. People are moved when they see the truth of the Christian message personified in everyday human lives; lives that are lived not in resigned cynicism but are grounded in the audacity of hope.