A video of this sermon can be found here.

Mal 3:3-5
Psalm 126
1 Cor. 4:4-21
Luke 3:1-6

I will begin my sermon with an outrageous statement. Advent is the season of the church year that focuses on what theologians call the doctrine of eschatology – the last things – but in the last few decades we seem to be moving into an era without eschatology. If that is so, the Christian notion of eschatology seems to be increasingly irrelevant to contemporary culture.

What do I mean when I saw that the contemporary era is one without eschatology? This has not always been the case. In the mid-twentieth century, the philosopher Karl Löwith wrote a book called Meaning in History, in which he claimed that modern philosophies of history were secularized versions of a Christian theology of history.¹ Hegelianism, Marxism, the secular notion of progress – all of these were basically secularized notions of the Christian understanding of divine providence. Modern secularism believed that history was moving in a single direction toward a goal; however, the goal was not a Christian new heavens and a new earth, but some version of a secular paradise. These were eschatologies in which humanity had taken the place of God.

All of this seems to have changed in the last couple of decades. I would suggest that this is because post-modernity is no longer living on borrowed memories. A belief in a secular eschatology was possible only so long as Christian notions of history, providence, and eschatology were still somewhat taken for granted without asking where such notions came from. The philosopher Charles Taylor has claimed that we now live in a Secular Age, an age marked by what Taylor calls the “immanent frame.”² The “immanent frame” is the notion that everything in the world is part of a natural order without any reference to anything outside itself and an “immanent” causal order. The “immanent frame” is what happens when unbelief is the “default option” for how people live in post-modern culture. Within the immanent frame, secular notions of progress or any kind of optimistic vision of the direction in which history might be moving does not make real sense.

The shift from living in a world of secular progress to living exclusively in the immanent frame means that we now seem to be living in a world of “normal nihilism.” What do I mean by “normal nihilism?” In an essay written a few years ago, David Bentley Hart suggested that the nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzche had made a fundamental miscalculation. When post-modern people stopped believing in God, they did not conclude that life was meaningless or become nihilists in Nietzsche’s sense. Instead, they found ways to distract themselves. They went shopping.³ Roman Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh has suggested that consumerism is the new secular eschatology. In reality, says Cavanaugh, consumerism is the death of Christian eschatology. In consumerism, there can be no actual break with the current status quo, but only a hunger for constant superficial novelty. Consumerism wishes for everything and hopes for nothing.⁴

If the church is going to speak to a culture of normal nihilism, a secular culture in which people take the immanent frame for granted, we will need to rediscover the key themes of Christian eschatology. In an earlier generation, German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg provided some helpful hints about what that should mean. Like other theologies, Pannenberg’s theology has come and gone, but I think that he might still have something to say to us about eschatology.

First, Christian theology always takes place within the tension between two realities. On the one hand, theology has to be concerned with faithfulness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ as this is contained in Scripture. On the other hand, the God who has been revealed in Jesus Christ is also the Creator of all things. This means that theology must not only talk about what God has done in Christ, but also about God’s relation to creation, as well as the way in which theology is related to all truth whatsoever. If theology only focuses on biblical revelation, it can become sectarian and truncated – as it some versions of confessional theology. On the other hand, if theology sees its task as simply one of appropriating truth in general, it will just repeat back to the culture whatever it hears from it, as is typical of liberal theology.⁵

Pannenberg claimed that the common theme that can hold together both the particularity of revelation and the universality of God as the Creator of all is that of history. It is well-known that revelation in history was a major focus of Pannenberg’s theology, but it would be a mistake to think that Pannenberg was talking about history in some vague general sense. Rather, for biblical Israel, God was understood not only as the Creator of the world, but God had acted in particular events in the history of Israel in which God has made himself known. God is a living God, and God is known because, in history, God has both made promises and has fulfilled those promises.

It is in this tension between promise and fulfillment that Israel discovered the meaning of history. Initially, God’s promises were understood in a limited and specific way. For example, in the early days of the nation of Israel, hope was directed toward the immediate future. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they seem to have had one immediate hope, deliverance from the bondage of Egypt so that God could lead his people to the Promised Land, and make them secure in the land (Ex. 3: 7-10; 12). Later. Israel’s hopes were connected to such things as the succession of the throne of King David. The prophet Nathan promised David a successor to his throne (2 Sam. 7:11-16).

In time, however, these hopes expanded beyond immediate fulfillment. As Israel’s all-too-ordinary leaders disappointed the hopes of the people, and as Israel’s survival as a nation was first threatened by outside invasion, and ultimately Israel went into exile, the hope that was originally grounded in ordinary political rulers, kings like David or his descendants, did not fade; instead, Israel’s prophets began to make promises of a hope that could not be fulfilled in ordinary history.

God’s initial promises to Israel as a nation thus became universalized. The prophets proclaimed that nothing short of a complete remaking of the universe would do to satisfy shattered hopes; when hope was satisfied, the wolf would lie down with the lamb, the child would play over the den of the poisonous asp and would not be hurt. The righteous descendant of David would be no longer a merely ordinary king, but an emissary who rules on behalf of God in an earthly paradise (Isa. 11). Only the Creator could bring about such a reversal of the way things are. The particularity of God’s revelation to Israel was combined with the understanding that God is Creator of all to imagine a future that would mean salvation for the entire creation.

New Testament Christianity stands in continuity with this Old Testament understanding of eschatology, but with a significant twist, and we see this in Jesus’ proclamation of the presence of the kingdom of God. Though Jesus looked forward to the future coming of God’s kingdom, as did other Jews of his time, he also believed something radically different about this future. Jesus claimed that glimpses of God’s future kingdom of fulfilled hopes and reversed values were already present, already being anticipated in his own deeds and words. So Jesus acted as if the poor and the meek were already blessed, he healed the sick, and he brought God’s mercy to the sinners with whom he ate and drank, even as the future Davidic King was supposed to do (Matt. 5:3-10; Luke 4:16-19; 7:18-23; 11:20).

In particular, it is in the light of the death and resurrection of Jesus that Israel’s hope for the future was reinterpreted. The resurrection of Jesus means that the resurrection of all people that the Old Testament prophets predicted would take place at the end of history had now appeared in this one man Jesus. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the New Testament church saw in him the righteous King like David who would fulfill Old Testament prophecy. In addition, the New Testament went further than this. Jesus’ resurrection was not only an anticipation of humanity’s future, but the resurrection made clear that in the person of Jesus, the God who had created and was going to recreate the world, had become one of us as a fellow creature. The resurrection made clear that Jesus was the Son of his Father, the One who, though he had existed in the form of God, had emptied himself to become a Servant to die on a cross, and who, after his death, was exalted to the right hand of God to receive the name above every name. This risen Jesus would return to reign as king. He is the one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:6-11).

That the church has continued to believe that Jesus was, and is, and will be the King of the Jews, the righteous descendant of David, was founded on the belief that Jesus had overcome death. That death still reigns so often is a continual challenge to the assertion that Jesus is King; that “Jesus is King” is the church’s affirmation that death will not have the last word. The church has continued to exist only because it believes that Jesus’ Kingship will not always be hidden, because it believes he will return and set all things right. Jesus offers present hope only because in the end he offers cosmic hope.

We can see this connection between God’s particular revelation in the history of Israel and Jesus and the eschatological fulfillment of creation in a couple of today’s lectionary readings. The reading from Malachi talks about a messenger who will prepare the way of the Lord, a Lord who will come suddenly to his temple (Mal. 3:1). Christians certainly have interpreted this messenger as John the Baptist, and the Lord who comes to his temple is easily read as a reference to Jesus’ own cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem. But then the passage goes on to describe this coming Lord in images of the eschatological judgment of the Old Testament Day of the Lord: he will purify the Sons of Levi and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord (Mal. 3:2-4). The Luke passage points to John the Baptist as fulfilling the promise of Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’” (Luke 3:4). But the further context of the original passage in Isaiah is certainly looking forward to something eschatological and universal that would have to go beyond what happened when John baptized Jesus: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low . . . . And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” (Luke 3:5-6; Is. 40:3-5).

There you have it. Promise and fulfillment. Particularity and universality. An Old Testament promise that had been fulfilled in Jesus, but looking forward to a time when the glory of the Lord will be revealed to all flesh. In recent years there has been a recovered emphasis on the figural reading of the Old Testament, but one could equally call this an eschatological reading of the Old Testament.

What implications might Christian hope have for a secular culture that has lost eschatology?

First, we need to be clear that Christian hope is an ambivalent virtue. Hope is not an immediate product of our experience; rather, hope contradicts what our experience now tells us. We don’t now see the poor lifted up, the mournful comforted, or the meek in charge of the earth. We don’t yet see God exercising his judgment as is promised in the passage from Malachi (Mal. 3:5). There are still plenty of adulterers, plenty of people who lie blatantly and get away with it, lots of employers who abuse their employees, too many people who make the lives of widows and orphans even more miserable, and others who are more than willing to shut the door on refugees fleeing from tyrants and homelessness.

Hope only exists when we are denied for the present that for which we long and dream. As long as we have what we want, and life is well, we can afford to be indifferent about the future. It is only when the present is a threat that we think about a better future. We find, then, that we must choose between hope and despair. Hope is grounded in the assurance that eventually we will obtain what we lack now; despair is grounded in the fear that we will not.

Christian hope is not only ambivalent, it is neither utopian nor conservative. What do I mean by that? Hope is not a simple fulfillment of our this-worldly dreams. But neither is hope a nostalgic longing for an imagined way things used to be. The future we hope for is not something conjured up or ushered in by human effort, and, when we’re honest, we have to admit that the past was far from perfect. Modern consumerism is a blatant liar when it claims to fulfill our hopes because the kinds of things that could fulfill our deepest longings cannot be bought and sold for money.

Christian hope presupposes then the fulfilling of a grander vision than the restructuring of mere economic or political realities. Christian hope presupposes the remaking of the entire universe. A hope that is not cosmic cannot provide the kind of final satisfaction toward which hope pushes. Even if it were possible that our goals and dreams for ourselves and for society might someday be fulfilled, at the end of the road there would still be death, and death puts an end to all dreams and hopes. We cannot have hope for even our everyday dreams without the cosmic hope that eventually all is not futile, and that all will be well. When a mother tells her crying child that everything will be all right, she is offering the assurance of nothing less than a cosmic hope.

And cosmic hope gives the lie to the post-modern secular age. Charles Taylor speaks of occasional glimpses of transcendence that can pierce the immanent frame, so that even secularists sometimes hope for something more. William Cavanaugh suggests that consumerism is a false form of spirituality. The unsatisfied desire for consumer fulfillment points to the need for cosmic hope, for an eschatological future in which hope will be satisfied.

Cosmic hope does not however mean fleeing from the world, giving up on the way things are. Rather, it is our hope for the future that leads to our dissatisfaction with the way things are now. It is only hope for an ultimate future that enables us to carry on from day to day, to try to make things different, if only in small ways. Though our plans and schemes for a better future for ourselves and for those we love are at most provisional, they are symptoms of that ultimate yearning without which we cannot live. Our bottomless wants are signs of a hunger that is not yet satisfied.

While cosmic hope is oriented toward the eschatological future of “someday,” it is still grounded in the concrete reality of that which has happened in the past. Christian hope is grounded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our hope is in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Because God is faithful to Jesus, we can trust him to be faithful to us. So we find that the hope of Advent is linked to the faith of Easter and the charity of Christmas. Without hope, there can be no faith that the God who gave new life to the crucified Jesus will be true to his promises and give life to us. In hope, we trust one day to experience in full the love we glimpse in the manger of Bethlehem. Because we have come to know this love made incarnate among us, we can be certain that this hope will not be merely a pipe dream.

Finally, just as Christian hope is grounded in the concrete events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, so it finds its expression in concrete ways, whenever we wish and dream that things were different, wherever we work at even the smallest day-to-day tasks, and not least in the concrete reality of Christian communities where we worship the God of hope each Sunday morning or in seminary chapels. The gathered church is the community that lives out its life in anticipation of that future that God has planned for all the human race. The church is that distinct community that consciously lives in the tension between unfulfilled hopes and recognition of God’s promises. The danger for the church of course is that we might be tempted to settle for the porridge of immanentist visions of hope – whether these would be nostalgic visions of the past or merely secular visions of progress. The Biblical messages of judgment that we hear in this morning’s readings are warnings to the church as well as to secular culture to place our hopes on solid ground.

The church avoids these temptations insofar as it is a community that lives with practices of hope – that gathers to hear Christ’s promise proclaimed in the preached Word, that shares through bread and wine in Jesus’ risen body and blood, that proclaims again and again the words of eschatological hope: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again! Cosmic hope gives us the courage to trust in the God who meets us in a crucified and yet risen King. Let us live in the promise of St. Paul’s blessing in the epistle to the Romans: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’” (Rom. 15:13). Amen.