Hope and Boxes
A reading for this week :Romans 15:12-13 (the ‘root of Jesse’ that is talked about here was the apostle Paul referring to Jesus).
We’ll light the first candle of Advent on December 1 this year. It’s often called the candle of Hope. But today, I’d like to start with boxes, if we could. They might be a little more of a familiar object around this time of year.
We talk a lot about boxes—physical and metaphorical. Is a box big enough for what we want it to hold? Is it made of the right material? What will we do with it after we’re finished? Can we collapse it down and break it down, or should we use it again?
We see the boxes all over the place. Stacked in recycling bins, labels betraying what was once inside. And then a small child will ask for the box and turn it into a car, spaceship, time machine, bed for a doll. An unhoused person will use the cardboard to make a flat surface to sleep on. Grocery stores have piles of empty boxes to substitute for bags for larger items. Sometimes we have so many boxes we don’t even know what’s in them anymore.
On the other extreme, there are things we keep in boxes as collector’s items because if the box isn’t broken, the item is more valuable. Or so we are told.
There’s an old myth about Pandora letting loose all kinds of evil things because she opened a box. The only thing left in the box, before she shut the lid, was hope. That was the only thing she (and humanity, we’re told in the myth) got to keep.
As we get closer and closer to Christmas, we see more and more boxes. And perhaps less and less hope. So we try to grab on and guard each things that gives us hope, and safeguard it.
But that’s not the way God works. Hope we have in God is not a thing to be trapped, packaged, held. It always leads somewhere and its value is seen best when it gets let loose. It’s not the container that holds hope that is important, but it might help hope get from one place to another. However, that box that hope comes in is always meant to be opened. Here’s some examples:
- Hope comes in a box of food—and when that box is opened, having a full stomach, and what one could do with that energy.
- Hope comes in a closed medicine vial –and when that vial is opened, it allows a person to be protected against disease.
- Hope comes in a bag of gently used clothes and blankets—and when that bag is opened, there’s enough to stay warm for a night and look differently at the world the next day.
- Hope comes in a box of wood holding hay –and when that manger is empty, there is a place for the Son of God.
- Hope comes in a box of human skin and bones – and when we hear words and stories and grace coming from God who is our hope, we can move forward, out of our own boxes, into the real life God gives us.
Hope was never meant to be safeguarded. It’s meant to be out of the box.
God never tried to safeguard Godself.
God was meant to be out of the box.
That’s why Jesus came—because it’s what no one expected God would do, coming to where no one expected God to be.
So here are the questions for this week: Where can we embrace the unexpected nature of God, break down the boxes we so carefully build, and see hope? Where can we let hope loose on the world in the name of Christ? What will that look like for you, and for me?
May you experience the gift of a rush of joyful hope and ‘open boxes’ as you journey this week.
Peace in Christ,
Susan
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