Cantique de Noel

Cynicism is the religion of our day. It provides a worldview, it has priests who propagate it and adherents that wield the message with voracity. Brian Stimpson, John Cleese’s character in the film Clockwise, is a prophet of this religion: he says
I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.
Despair is easy. It takes nothing and it costs nothing. It needs no courage and will never let you down. Hope, on the other hand, can take you places, lead you to believe and leave you stranded. It opens you up to the possibility of failure.
President Obama, who campaigned on the premise of bringing hope, has not been able to deliver the wholesale change he promised. Those who feel most let down were his most fervent disciples who realise he hasn’t bought the change they ached and longed for.
Any follower of the England football team could adhere to Stimpson’s maxim: the despair of second round or quarter finals exits are easier than the hope that the team could actaully do something. You know where you are with despair. Hope can mess with you.
A friend of mine’s Dad just died. Cancer spread from his colon to his liver and he died peacefully in his bed two nights ago. Everyone has stories about how things are not as they should be: we yearn for things to change whether it is cholera in Haiti, the billion people who will go to sleep tonight hungry or the habit/thing in our life that controls us and we cannot shed.
Which raises fundamental questions about how we view the world. Is it wise to continue to believe? Is it better to cut ourselves off and save ourselves from the pain of defeat, of loss, of hopes dashed? Is there any cause to believe or will we always be let down?
Which brings us to the Christmas story. There is a gap, a radio silence of 400 years between the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures and the birth of Jesus. It would have been easy to give up hope. To be cynical. To cease to believe that things would change, that Roman oppression would end. The Jews were waiting for deliverance from the Empire: to be delivered, rescued and to rule themselves.
Zechariah, dad of John the Baptist, says this:
And you, my child, (talking about JtB) will be called a prophet of the Most High;
for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
to give his people the knowledge of salvation
through the forgiveness of their sins,
because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.
What’s going to happen? What reason is there to believe? The God child will be born and bring light into darkness, he will shine a light into the shadows of death and lead people into the paths of peace.
The Christmas story shows that God has not given up on the world and that he is active within it, to bring healing, peace and shalom. To reconcile and restore all things back to himself. Elsewhere, St Paul writes to people in Ephesus saying that for some, they are without God and without hope in the world.
Hope is real because God is active and working in the world. The carol O Holy Night puts it like this:
We face a choice: do we embrace cynicism or hope? Do we continue believing or do we give up? Jon Foreman says that cynicism acts as a temporary insulation against the pain of being alive. Do we choose to reside there or do we open ourselves up to hope, to love but also to their counterweights.
In the Four Loves, C.S Lewis says:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
The birth of Jesus, the presence of God in our time/space existence, demonstrates that God has not abandoned the world, that hope is real and that situations can change. Hope is more real than cynicism and despair. And maybe, just maybe, one day, the England football team will rise above abject failure to at least fail heroically.










