Dare to hope
“The beautiful and the terrible live side by side,” writes Kate Bowler in her Advent devotional, Bless the Advent We Actually Have. How true this is during the twelve days of Christmas. On the one hand, our worship is beautiful and inspiring. On the other hand, on December 28 we commemorate the Holy Innocents, the children two years of age and younger slaughtered in Bethlehem by King Herod as he attempted to kill the Christ child (see Matthew 2:13-18).
Can we remember the Holy Innocents of the past without lamenting the slaughter of innocents in Gaza today? According to Human Rights Watch, 85% of the population of Gaza — almost 1.9 million people — are displaced, most crammed together near the southern border. Innocent people, including too many children, have been forced from their homes and slaughtered by indiscriminate bombing. Those not killed barely survive due to a lack sufficient water, food and healthcare.
And Gaza is not the only place where innocent people suffer. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 5.8 million people have been displaced. In an act of ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the Rapid Security Forces killed hundreds of Massalit civilians in November. In Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones have destroyed about 3,800 educational facilities, interrupting access to education for millions of children.
In the United States, hate crimes against Jews have quintupled since October 7, an escalation of a long brewing antisemitism. As Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times this week, “Well before Oct. 7, Jews were tucking their Stars of David under their collars or hiding their kipas under baseball caps to avoid being shunned or harassed. Synagogues and Jewish community centers were under constant armed guard. The ultra-Orthodox — who, courageously, do not hide their identity from anyone — were routinely assaulted in their communities by bullies who think it’s fun to sucker-punch a Jew.”
We’re in the Christmas season, and you likely don’t want to think about this any more than I do. But Christmas does not shield us from human tragedy and suffering. Instead, the birth of Jesus reminds us that God is with us in the midst of the suffering. And by “us” I mean all of us, all of humanity. God is with the innocents, suffering with them and weeping for them.
In the midst of so much evil, God’s abiding presence can be a source of hope for us. It is the hope that strengthened Archbishop Desmond Tutu during decades of apartheid in South Africa; that sustained countless Black Americans during the civil rights movement; that upheld the women — known as the Philadelphia Eleven — who sought ordination in the male dominated Episcopal Church of the 1970s.
Hope, Kate Bowler writes, “is the function of struggle. It is the realization of our limitations or of our lack of agency or of the inability for us to save ourselves and the ones we love. This kind of hope is not a wishlist sent to Santa Claus. Advent hope is gritty. It shirks all false optimism. It is hope as protest. Hope in the face of impossibilities. As writer Barbara Brown Taylor said, ‘whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.’”
This Christmas, dare to hope. It is one way we can shine the light of Christ in a dark world.
