T. Denise Anderson

WE ARE APPROACHING the end of the liturgical year, and the texts have a thread of anticipation running through them. We are deep into the promises conveyed by the prophets and the eschatological vision cast by Jesus. The texts are inviting us to prepare ourselves for something — but what, exactly?

The last Sunday in November, in many traditions, is the Advent Sunday of hope. In biblical Greek, the verb is elpizō (“hope”), which means to wait for salvation with both joy and full confidence. When we hope, we wait not out of boredom or a lack of options but in full confidence that what we are waiting for will arrive. This is the same word used in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The word “assurance” here can also be translated as “foundation,” as in that of a house. Faith is what anchors our hope into the ground and allows it to stand upright. Faith also often requires that we act before we see. Our hope is first materialized in our faith before it is ever materialized in our reality. Hope pushes us to walk, move, and live as if what we’ve hoped for has already arrived.

Perhaps this moment calls to us to build foundations for the futures we need in defiance of our present realities. Our texts dare us to live into new possibilities, even as our current condition offers far fewer promises.

IN HER BOOK The Great Emergence, the late Phyllis Tickle pointed out that the church undergoes a “rummage sale” about every 500 years in which dominant forms of its spirituality are displaced from prominence by newer forms of spirituality. It’s much like a purge one would have when decluttering a home or preparing for a move. Older forms of spirituality aren’t done away with; they simply are no longer dominant. New things come to the forefront.

By the fourth century, the locus of Christianity had shifted from ancient Israel and Syria to a Christendom based in European and Western civilization (though a thriving Eastern church remained and does so today). About 40 years ago, another shift occurred. Now there are more Christians in the Global South than in Europe and North America. And Christianity continues to wane in the West. To the extent Christianity has accompanied colonial expansion, I believe this too is a kind of purging. Many of us wrestle with church doctrines and practices that have been in service to domination power for a long time but are untenable in a just world. Who God needs us to be today is markedly different from whom we’ve been in the past.

This month’s texts call to mind the words of the liberation song: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle. Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long, we must be free, we must be free.” Freedom is not a static destination. Freedom must be maintained, much like the state of a house. Whatever God is calling us toward today, it won’t be necessarily familiar or even pleasant, but it will make us free.

MY PARENTS WERE raised watching Westerns in which the tropes were all the same: There were “good guys” and “bad guys.” I was raised on Disney movies with similar tropes. There was little moral complexity in these stories, which I suspect reflects our tendency to look at the world in terms of a good/bad dichotomy. Reality is much more nuanced. I appreciate the way that popular 21st-century movies have embraced some of that nuance. One example is the Oscar-winning film Crash, a complex racial narrative released in 2004. An antagonist police officer in the movie’s opening becomes a hero by the end, while his idealistic partner takes the inverse path. It’s never totally apparent who the “villains” and “heroes” are. While I think our investment in the good/bad dichotomy is still substantial, it seems popular culture might agree with the psalmist who says, “there is none who does good” (Psalm 14:3).

Our willingness to accept human complexity is key to our ability to reshape ourselves into more just communities. Today, we see state legislatures seeking to prohibit educators from teaching uncomfortable truths about our country’s past because of the dominant culture’s inability to confront that truth. I remember the words of James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The scriptures for this month help us change what needs to be changed by facing it and trusting in God’s ability to move us forward.

TO WHOM DO our lives belong? The Barmen Declaration, written in 1934, was a theological statement by a small group of German Protestants in response to the growing pro-Nazi movement within German Christianity. It stated, “We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords—areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.” The signers of the Barmen statement said this because the confederation of German Protestant churches (which would eventually become the state church under the Nazi Third Reich) was demanding allegiance to the state in all areas of life and faith. The close of Eastertide gives us an opportunity to consider, in our own time and place, to whom we belong and what that means for how we live now amid echoes of authoritarianism.

In this season, we read of Jesus’ growing influence and what it meant for his disciples to reckon with a world in which resurrection is possible. If the threat of death is muted, if not even prison can contain the good news, then how emboldened will a small-but-mighty movement become in the face of a powerful empire and its proxies? Can this good news still reach us—we who are worn from the immense grief of the last two years? Can we find our second wind to share this good news and build God’s reign? I believe Eastertide has a particular resonance for these times.

A CURIOUS THING happened among many congregations in my very white denomination after George Floyd was killed: Churches that had been at best timid to enter the work of racial justice dove into it headfirst. Colleagues dusted off their blogs to share their thoughts. Church leaders laced up their sneakers to participate in marches. It appeared that a reckoning had occurred for countless people in the faith. They finally got it and could no longer stay silent, not while a global pandemic amplified the existing inequities in our society. It was time to act.

This would seem like good and right action, except many began this work having previously wounded leaders of color who’d tried for years to call them into it. Worse yet, there was little to no attempt to remedy their errors or circle back with the people they’d hurt. They were eager to move toward action but had to be reminded that the past still needed to be addressed before the future could be entered with justice.

If there is a “right” way to approach Lent, it involves holding our past and future in tension. The Greek words for repentance and reconciliation both connote a reciprocal change. The person on a wayward path makes a U-turn. The transgressor trades places with the transgressed. Our texts challenge us to examine who we have been, are, and are willing to become, because all of it matters to the future we will build.