‘Great Expectations’ has to be one of the best book titles ever created. The phrase awakens the imagination. It conjures up images and descriptions of what might be possible and conceivable. It speaks to anticipation, wonder and hope. Great Expectations is the title of Charles Dicken’s famous 1861 novel, set in mid-19th century Kent and London, England. I have to admit up front, that I have never read ‘Great Expectations,’ even as it has swirled around within cultural understandings. Sorry Retired English teacher Chuck Kruger! Maybe it will get on my reading list one day – some unread expectations for the future. But I could of course research the book – its characters, plot and themes are readily available. I hope this doesn’t feel like cheating! The main character in the book is Philip Pirrip or Pip, a seven-year-old orphan with dreams for the future and a better life. Through his life he encounters everyone from the blacksmith Joe Gargary to an escaped convict, to the wealthy and reclusive benefactor Miss Havisham, to her adopted daughter Estella, some unrequited love, to a series of intriguing characters and social outcasts in London. There is mystery and mis-understanding, deaths, misfortune, tragedy, trickery and intrigue, with some unexpected blessings and personal growth and maturing thrown in. The book is a commentary by Dickens on the post-Industrial Victorian England and its destructive social stratification. The great expectation for Pip is that he can attain and win wealth, prestige and status, presumably through any means possible. And for a while he does. But he ultimately learns the hard way that these great expectations are a flawed pursuit, and that his true identity and real worth is shaped by relationships, loyalty, and good moral choices, not his wealth and social advancement. He has to pause in the end, and ask questions about what he wants his real character and identity to be – what are the real and enduring great expectations of his life, purpose and meaning.
When Mathieu Cain and I met to plan for the whole Advent worship series, we got excited about this overall theme and title of ‘Great Expectations.’ We began with the Advent Candles, and their themes for each Sunday of Hope, Peace, Joy, Love, and the Christ Candle. Each is embodied by the character for that Sunday – Joseph, Mary, Shepherds and Magi, with this morning’s character on Hope being the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Each character in the Christmas story comes with their own perspective about what they are expecting, their own Great Expectation, and through the story often find those expectations turned on their heads. What great expectations do we have this Advent season?
Our Scripture reading this morning was taken from the opening verses of Isaiah, chapter 40. We often turn to Isaiah in Advent, with the many poetic passages that resonate with the birth of Christ. The book of Isaiah has ‘fed, nurtured, and evoked Christian imagination with reference to Jesus,’ but it is important to also place and understand its meaning in its original historical context. (Walter Bruggemann, Isaiah 40-66, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998, p.6). We have been studying that context all Fall – the Exile, when Kingdoms Fail, and in many ways this Sunday connects us from that Fall series to the Advent series and the birth of Christ.
I found Walter Bruggemann’s Commentary on Isaiah very helpful to understanding this Isaiah 40 passage. He calls Isaiah the ‘mighty Oratorio whereby Israel sings its story of faith.’ (Ibid, p.1) He places it in the midst of the international geopolitical horizon of the time, with its imperial powers, and asks how faithfulness to Yahweh, to God, can emerge and be sustained in such a difficult and challenging setting – when faith itself needs to be re-imagined. Most scholars divide Isaiah into 3 parts or sections, potentially written years apart – First, Second and Third Isaiah. First Isaiah ends with the last verse of chapter 39, with the ominous note that Jerusalem will be carried to Babylon in exile. In stark contrast, Second Isaiah begins at Isaiah 40 on such a hopeful note – ‘Comfort, Comfort, O my people.’ Brueggemann writes that between these two single verses, these two different chapters, 39 and 40, there is a ‘Long Pause,’ that chronologically might be up to 160 years, between the years 700 BCE and 540 BCE. In that long pause, is the collapse of the Assyrian empire that overthrew the northern kingdom of Israel, the rise of Babylon as the new superpower, the massive destruction of the entire Jerusalem establishment – the city, dynasty and temple, and with it really the whole theology, the brutal exile of Judah to Babylon, and the emerging rise now of the Persian kingdom, first led by Cyrus, who will once again permit Judah to return home and begin again. All this happening in that Long Pause, between these two verses – no wonder they sound so different. This Long Pause has created Great Expectations! There is the expectation that now, finally Yahweh, God, will move in new ways and bring new and hopeful life back to the people of God. And so we hear these powerful words, hopeful words of Isaiah 40. Comfort, Comfort O my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill made low, the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Get you to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news, good tidings. He will feed his flock like a shepherd and gather the lambs in his arms, and gently lead the mother sheep. Are you singing another Oratorio, Handel’s Messiah in your head right now? Two Sundays ago, I was at the Menno Singers Messiah Sing-along. The tenor sings those words of justice and making things right in the world, of our world becoming even again, fair, balanced, made straight – words that John the Baptist picks up to announce the coming of Jesus – and I found myself suddenly filled with hope, with expectations. We need music and poetry. I need to hear the Messiah each Christmas to remind myself of God’s hope in our world, to again give me the imagination of a better world, of a world shaped by the values and vision of God. It is like Pip in Great Expectations realizing that the ultimate goal is not more and more wealth and prestige, but rather growth in character and purpose and meaning, rooted in relationships.
In Isaiah, hope, the great expectation, comes out of this long pause, and it comes by facing up to Babylon and diffusing its power over the people. I like what Walter Brueeggeman does here. He writes that ‘the term Babylon has become a code word for any rapacious (or greedy) social system.’ (Ibid, p.14) that demands its own emperor worship. He states that for the West, today ‘I would suggest a powerful – though not precise – equivalence of Babylon in the ideology of free-market consumerism and its required ally, unbridled militarism… the unexamined, dominant ideology that encompasses everyone, liberal or conservative, and that sets the limits of what is possible and what is good, what is to be feared and what is to be trusted. There is no doubt that this powerful ideology is such that it robs the human community of its humanness and reduces all of life to commodity.’ (Ibid, p.14) (End of Quote) That sounds pretty right on a few days after Black Friday, and with an ever-increasing militarization of our society. When Ryan and I met, we wanted to add a few more recent expressions, not yet so prevalent when Brueggeman wrote his commentary – additional Babylons of our day. We named both the recent and pervasive dominance of on-line sports gambling integrated into every game and sportscast, and the all-encompassing worlds we live in every day of social media and its influence – all of this existing within such a polarized and politicized society. It is so easy to be sucked in, to get caught up in it all. It is so easy to lose hope. Are these not some of our Babylons? As Ryan said in our conversation, ‘I want to be aware of what’s all going on, but not let it take over your life.’
We are aware of the radical shifts happening in society and politics, maybe especially South of the border. Both Ryan and I have family ties in the United States and we chatted about recent trips we had each made this fall of crossing the border to see family, to be at a wedding, to go into some farm implement places, and how good it was to simply have normal, everyday, family and community interactions, with decent, solid people, Americans very similar to us – to know that goodness exists, that there are shared values and ways of being in the world, that everything is not all defined by the top – to feel a sense of hope.
Hope is this strange and elusive thing. It can be hard to define or put your finger on it, and even harder to hold on to and live into. It calls for imagination and creativity. It calls for a different vision and perspective than might be most obvious around you. It calls for a long pause, for deeper reflection. But it is good news, glad tidings. As Hebrews says, ‘Now faith is the assuranceof things hoped for, the convictionof things not seen.’ (Hebrews 11:1) Hope maybe is best expressed through Scripture, through poetry and song, through image and metaphor, through those things that remind us that the world is not simply defined by the powerful, or by materialistic forces that reduce life to a commodity. There is more than Babylon. There is a greater purpose and meaning.
Speaking of music, one of my more hopeful recent experiences came last week. Two years ago, this whole community, and especially music lovers, were stunned by the sudden collapse of the K-W Symphony and the threat of total bankruptcy. It is a long complicated story that I won’t repeat here, but represented such a loss in this community. It felt pretty bleak. It felt like a long pause. But the symphony did not go away. There were great expectations. There were fundraisers and Go Fund Me appeals and pop-up concerts, including one in our sanctuary, and restructuring and a whole new model of operation. Last Thursday, after finally deciding to buy a ticket at midnight the night before, I attended the opening K-W Symphony concert, in a packed-out Centre in the Square, the first official concert since 2023 back in the venue originally built for the Symphony. The piece they chose to perform was Gustov Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, the Resurrection Symphony. It is a massive work with a huge oversized orchestra, 2 soloists and the whole Grand Philharmonic Choir. They had to extend the stage out. There were 24 violins, 8 cellos and 6 double basses, 2 harps, 8 horns, 6 percussion players, and so on. Some players would even pop behind the stage and play from there for awhile. It was Grand! Before the concert, we heard the voice of Raffi Armenian, conductor emeritus of the K-W Symphony, who told the story of the building of Centre in the Square, and tracking down the best technician to create the best hall for acoustics in Canada, and how for its opening concert in September of 1980, he choose to program this very Mahler Symphony, rather than the Beethoven’s 9th that is typically used, because this work shows off even more the absolute extremes and ranges and nuances of orchestral and solo and choral sounds – from pianissimo and ethereal shimmering, to double forte and terrifying. It culminates with the soloists and choir singing of death, transfiguration and rebirth – of resurrection. Mahler is not my preferred or natural musical vocabulary, but I was overwhelmed by its majesty and wonder, and its pure hope. As the program notes end, ‘We offer you our profound thanks for joining us in bringing this masterpiece back to life, and for being a part of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s own Resurrection!’ Again, music and poetry, imagination and vision – the things that make for hope, for the promise of a renewed future, for resurrection again and again in our lives.
This morning, we have entered into the Great Expectations of Advent, of preparing for the birth of the Christ Child again into our world. Our Advent candle, and our Isaiah 40 passage remind us that the place to start this preparation is with Hope, no matter what the Babylons may be in our lives. This is a time of waiting, and it behooves us to make space in our lives for this waiting. This is the long pause, filled with Great Expectations. This is the good news, the glad tidings. Comfort, Comfort my People. Speak tenderly. Prepare the Way. Make straight a highway for our God. Lift up your voice with strength, herald of good news. And be gathered in God’s arms as you are gently led home. May it be so. Amen.