"Real Hope" - Luke 1:39-45 - December 7, 2003

One of my all time favorite Christmas hymns is "O Little Town of Bethlehem." It has been around since 1868 although it wasn’t formally used in churches until 1892. It is a hymn which is packed with emotion, a song about the Christ Child, born to Mary, a song filled with the creative power of God intervening in history with the gift of a savior.

For me "O Little Town of Bethlehem," depicts the Christmas story as a story of hope, a story where the divine and the human come together in an amazing but humble way. It is also an invitation for both the non-believer and the believer. For the non-believer it is an announcement of what God has done and for the believer it is a challenge to increase one’s faith.

What might surprise you is how this great hymn came to be. It was written by Phillips Brooks, Episcopal priest. Brooks was serving the Holy Trinity Church in the City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia, PA). He had just returned from a trip to The Holy Land which inspired him to write the words. "When he returned to America he still had Palestine singing in his soul." (from Stories of Christmas Carols by Ernest K. Emurian, Baker Book House Co., page 97)

Brooks was a bachelor. His church organist and Sunday School superintendent, Lewis Redner was also a bachelor and Brooks gave the words to him and asked him to create a tune for the upcoming Christmas celebration. Redner procrastinated and struggled with the creation of a tune to go with the 5 stanzas that Brooks had written. It wasn’t until the night before the celebration that Redner got inspired in the middle of the night and created the song as we know it. The following day a group of 36 children and 6 Sunday school teachers introduced the song created by the 2 bachelors. That was on December 27th, 1968. It wasn’t published as an official hymn of the Episcopal Church until 1892. The following January, Phillips Brooks died, never knowing the magnitude of the hymn that he created.

For some reason the 4th stanza has been dropped from the original score. "Where children pure and happy Pray to the blessed Child, Where misery cries out to thee, Son of the mother mild; Where charity stands watching And faith holds wide the door, The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, And Christmas comes once more." The stanza includes the line, "And faith holds wide the door."

This hymn, like the story of the annunciation of Mary in the gospel of Luke, is a story about faith. It is not a story about how Mary God pregnant. It is not a story explaining the virgin birth. It is a story about the faith God calls us to have in lieu of what God has done for us. God wants us to believe in God’s abiding presence, in God’s prevailing forgiveness, in God’s intervention into the world through ordinary people. It is a story solely for the purpose of giving us hope to a world where desperation, loneliness, and hopelessness overwhelm us.

Recently it was reported that on the day after Thanksgiving a woman was almost trampled to death at a Walmart store. They had just opened the doors for the greatest shopping day of the year and a stampede of people rushed through the doors. A woman fell but few stopped to help her. She finally was attended too by a store employee who called the emergency squad. The woman laid unconscious grasping a DVD player that had was one of the key sales items that day.

For me, that scene illustrates the desperate attitude of our society. We rush to buy stuff that we believe will make us happy. In the process we ignore those around us who have need. Its a sad commentary on the values of our society and when you add the war in Iraq, the campaign against terrorism and the violence in our cities (Columbus, Cincinnati, notwithstanding), its no wonder people are losing hope.

Where is God today? Is God no longer creating hope in our midst? Or, are we blind and deaf to God’s continuing ways of giving us hope in the midst of our despair?

Just as God used two bachelors to give birth to one of our great Christmas hymns, God used two women to inject love into a world which has lost all joy and hope. First, there was Mary, an unlikely teenage girl who would soon give birth to Jesus. In a culture where women had virtually no rights, a young woman became God’s agent of love and grace. Rarely do we look to the powerless people in society to be bearers of hope. We generally assign that responsibility to the rich and famous. But God works through ordinary people.

I believe that God continues to impregnate us with love and hope just as God did with the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately we fail to see that God works through ordinary people. We also fail to understand that God wants us to live in faith, not fear.

Jane Adams was only seven years old when she visited a shabby street in a nearby town, and seeing ragged children there, announced that she wanted to build a big house so poor children would have a place to play. As a young adult, Jane and a friend visited Toynbee Hall in London, where they saw educated people helping the poor by living among them. She and her friend returned to Chicago, restored an old mansion, and moved in. There they cared for children of working mothers and held sewing and cooking classes. Older boys and girls had clubs at the mansion. An art gallery and public music, reading, and craft rooms were created in the mansion.

Jane didn’t stop there. She spoke up for people who couldn’t speak for themselves. She was eventually awarded an honorary degree from Yale. President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed her "American’s most useful citizen," and she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. No matter how famous she became, Jane Adams remained a resident of Hull House, where she eventually died. (from God’s Lessons of Life for Mom, Honor Books)

As long as there are ordinary people, like Jane Adams, who are willing to give love to the ills of society there will always be hope. Jane Adams said "Yes" to faith and trusted in God to be with her. Phillip Brooks and Lewis Redner said "Yes" to faith and created one of our greatest Christmas carols. Mary and Elizabeth said "Yes" to faith and brought forth a savior. My we all say "Yes" to faith and allow God to make us instruments of hope and love.

Dr. Keith Wagner, St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, Sidney, Ohio