'We Know How the Story Ends'

ON THE DAY Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, I tweeted this: “Today was a day of protest, rage, mourning, lament. Tomorrow we go on by going deeper, and learn that hope is not a feeling, but a decision—based on whatever we call faith. Stay strong and take care of each other.”

The nation is in trauma, with many women and people of color in particular being retraumatized almost every day. But Advent is upon us, and the message of that liturgical season never changes. Advent is a season of waiting for the coming of Christ. Christ will come again, and not just ultimately but time and time again, in all kinds of unexpected ways.

So, in Advent, we wait—expectantly—for Jesus Christ to come again in our personal and our public lives. That is our hope, based not on optimism but on faith.

The situation we face in Donald Trump’s autocratic impulses and actions is indeed a constitutional crisis, the severity of which will depend, in part, on whether our institutions and structures, in the wake of the midterm elections, will hold the executive accountable, or not.

This is also a moral crisis regarding whether our “better angels,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, or our worst demons, as Donald Trump seems to evoke every day, will finally triumph. As they say, the jury is still out on that. Trump has opened a Pandora’s box of white racial and male resentment, fear, and hatred, and those forces are not going back into the box, despite election results. The battle between our better angels and our worst demons will be the spiritual battle of our political life for the unforeseeable future.

But along with this being a political and moral emergency, this is also a faith crisis—the response of faith communities to this crisis will define the meaning of faith for generations to come, including whether future generations will even want to be people of faith.

THE DANGER THAT the president will plunge us into a constitutional crisis to avoid accountability for corrupt and likely criminal acts is very real. Hope—in a secular, political sense—feels awfully hard to muster these days, especially for people the president and his supporters have consistently marginalized and attacked, such as people of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and many others.

Yet, as Christians, our outlook should not be based on the evidence of the world and current events. We shouldn’t look to election results or other political events for our hope. Rather, we should look to a God who became flesh and lived among us, and bestowed upon us justice, mercy, grace, and, yes, hope.

The hope of Jesus coming, again and again, does not, of course, absolve us from our responsibility to act here and now to further God’s vision for justice “on earth as it is in heaven.” Indeed, that is a consequence of waiting for Jesus. The Incarnation and resurrection tell us that our hope is never in vain, even when things seem darkest. I often say, paraphrasing Hebrews 11:1, that “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.”

Faith and hope are vividly depicted in a beautiful metaphor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. When Sam and Frodo are in the depths of the land of Mordor and things seem their most hopeless, Sam is keeping watch in the night and looking at the dark and ominous sky:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

This image has a special resonance as we look forward to Advent and Christmas. Tolkien, himself a devoted Catholic who helped bring C.S. Lewis to Christian faith, is telling us that while each of us must in his or her own time struggle for what is right and confront what is wrong, even in the face of seemingly hopeless odds, we should nevertheless always remember that the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). Or, as my friend Tony Campolo puts it, “We know how the story ends.”