Advent Hope? Where has Hope Gone.

Over the last few weeks I have seen the polarized nature of humanity.  I have watched white men in a board room salute our future President as if he was their Fuhrer, and I have watched as the people of Standing Rock have stood up to power and have consequently been sprayed with water cannons and shot with rubber bullets. On Sunday, in my own neighborhood in St. Louis, a young man allegedly ambushed a police officer shooting him in the face, and within hours he lost his life. I have listened to the right and the left, the victors and the defeated, and in all of it there is a need. A need for action.  Now more than ever people need to know that we are Christians.  Not by our politics and not by our theology, but by our love. That we as the people of God, need to embody that love.  Rather than counting our blessing this Holiday Season, why don’t we become the force for Good? Why don't be become a blessing for someone else?  

This week Cornel West put it quite well in his article in the Guardian, “For us in these times, to even have hope is too abstract, too detached, too spectatorial. Instead we must be a hope, a participant and a force for good …” If you rather Mahatma Gandhi said it as “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Paul tells us that together we are the body of Christ.  We are the Hands and feet of Christ.  We as Christian have heard this saying so often, that we do not grasp the full meaning of this text.  Think about the full ramifications of I Corinthians 12.  If together we are the Body of Christ, then together we have the power of salvation and redemption. We have the ability and means by which we can change this world, that we can renew this global community.  Why can’t we be strong and kind? Why can’t we stand against injustice and still care for the oppressors? How do we stand for the weak and beat back the mighty, all while making sure we have a roof over our heads and our kids get to school?

We have world size problems in the midst of our small daily lives. No one person is going to fix these problems, not even the President, for our issues are greater than the lack of economic opportunity or the racial divide.  We have greater problems than legalizing Cannabis or signing the TPP. At the base of it all we have a deficit in America, the lack Faith. We as Christians have relinquished our station as moral and ethical standard bearers.  We have vacated our position as Spiritual Entrepreneurs.  When our country was young and settlers trekked out into the wilderness to form new communities, these immigrants had needs.  They needed Schools and Hospitals.  Those trailblazers turned to people of faith. In St. Louis alone, we have three hospital systems whose roots are Baptist, Catholic and Jewish. Before there was Social Security or Medicare there was the church, and yet the people of faith (for the most part) have turned these endeavors over to public or private entities (for lots of good reasons). My question is, what are we working towards now?

We used to have such a strong a relationship with our community that when it was in trouble they would come to us, but this is not the case anymore. Or rather the community did not have to come to us because we were so involved with helping our neighbor that we knew what they needed before they asked. This relational bond no longer exists because we have shown our communities that we are no longer a place to pursue the divine, but rather an entity concerned with its own survival. We are afraid of the people we are called to help, and the help we offer is temporary.  We are more concerned with budgets and membership rolls than our community at large. We look at numbers and not people.  We believe that we can help the church survive if we modernize it or make it more relevant in some way, but this is false.  We cannot use the tools of the secularism to invigorate our churches.  We are to be in this world, but not of this world.  Using this thinking we become another company, another non-profit. We think that we need to have numbers, money or status in order to effect change, yet that is not the model that Christ gave us.  Christ did not gain followers until he started being the change he wanted to see in the world, until he started teaching, challenging the status quo and healing the crowds didn’t appear. It is time for a grand new design a bold experiment.

When we take the 1st century and the 21st century church, we must form a new way for the people of faith, not a right or left way, and not a middle way where we take a little from both sides, but the Highway.  What would it look like if instead of closing our churches, which are no longer viable, we converted them into a small business incubator or efficiency apartments for the homeless, housing for wounded veterans housing, or transitional housing for refugees? What would it look like if we allowed grassroots organizations to use our unused facility space to tackle issues like voter suppression,campaign finance reform, or price caps for prescription drugs?  There are issues that we as people of faith can agree on, and if we could unite under one cause, we could effect true change.  There use to be three sectors that made up the fabric of America: the Public Sector, the Private Sector, and the Religious sector.  If the private sector won’t take on these issues and the Public sector is gridlocked, why can’t the religious sector tackle these type of issues? Now more than ever, people need faith and they need their faith leaders to stand for something.