I look forward to seeing You

manuscript of a sermon given Sunday, December 1, 2024 at University Baptist & Brethren Church in State College, PA

Maximillian Kolbe, whom I learned about via Richard Beck. Source: Word on Fire.

“Faithfulness is the true substance of hope, a revealing of unseen realities.”
— Hebrews 11:1, personal translation

I have a habit of preaching—mostly to myself, mind you—from definitions. I love words. In particular, I find I get a lot of moral mileage out of distilling the meanings of virtue words, like love or goodness. So today, I’d like to start by putting out there a brief working definition of the virtue whose candle we lit today: Hope, in the Bible at least, is desire and expectation mixed. You both want something and you actually expect it to happen.

In a second move of a word nerd, I did some concordance work preparing for the sermon. That is, I tried to survey every instance in the Bible when a word translated into some form of our English word “hope” appears. Of all those—and there are a lot—the first thing that jumped out to me—charmed me, really—was that twice in John’s letters to his churches and six times in Paul’s letters to his, the gist of the hope is simple: “I look forward to seeing you.”

That reminds me of something else I heard John and Paul write. A little more recently, though. Sometime in 1963, they were away from their Liverpool homes, and they wrote:

It won’t be long, yeah, yeah, yeah
It won’t be long, yeah, yeah, yeah
It won’t be long yeah till I belong to you
Since you left me, I’m so alone

Now you’re coming, you’re coming on home
I’ll be good like I know I should
You’re coming home, you’re coming home!

And later on that same album:

And then while I'm away,
I'll write home everyday,
And I'll send all my loving to you.

All my loving,
I will send to you,
All my loving,
Darling, I’ll be true.

OK, so I mixed up my apostles and my Beatles. But if you’ll pardon me that, notice how in both lyrics, the hope of seeing someone you love who is currently absent to you motivates good, faithful behavior.

Some of you may remember this past summer my wife Carla went away for almost a week to join her dad in Bermuda to help deliver a sailboat across the open ocean up to Connecticut. She was actually gone for, like, eleven days because she’d just chaperoned the FaithX trip to Palmyra.

Needless to say, I missed her a lot. But I not only wanted her back; I had good reason to expect her back and looked forward to it. That made what I was feeling, alongside some loneliness, a form of hope. As the day of her return approached, I found myself sending more messages her way via the onboard GPS. And after I received confirmation that she made land on day seven of her trip, the realization of my hope now had a date, and I bounded into action. I don’t normally drink tea or coffee because I’m very sensitive to caffeine. But that day I did not care and drank three cups of black tea because I wanted to throw myself into maximizing her happiness upon our reuniting. I quickly splurged on a business class train ticket to get her from New Haven to Lewistown where I could pick her up, and then I spent six hours cleaning and tidying the house furiously. Not that the house was that bad. 😬

But anyway, looking forward to seeing her, I wanted to please her, to communicate to her that I loved her and that I had been faithful while she was gone.

My hope to see Carla has a theological equivalent: The single most frequently specified hope in the New Testament is the hope for resurrection—and by extension, a hope to literally see God.

So, here I am, kicking off Advent—with an Easter sermon. I hope that’s OK. Tom did tell me to preach from my heart. And if I’m preaching on hope, this is what’s in my heart. And the ideas I’m submitting to you here aren’t that distant from Advent anyway: In the gospel narratives leading up to the birth of Jesus, Mary’s hope to see her baby, not to mention her hope to see her relative Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s baby-on-the way John the Baptist, leads her to action: She tells the angel Gabriel, “OK, that’s crazy news. But if you say so, I believe it” and then travels—a good distance away—to stay with Elizabeth for the final three months of that pregnancy, presumably to help out, and certainly to commune in the joy and wonder of their shared baby news. Think of all the energy we put in when we expect babies: We build nurseries, we throw showers, we take birthing classes, we buy lots of diapers.

So as with Mary and the baby Jesus, so with us and the risen and ascended Jesus: The great Christian hope of life after death is not, or should not be, some escapist daydream. Believing in the resurrection, hoping to someday see the Creator and to see the Christ, both of whom love us, should, like the expectation of meeting your baby or reuniting with a cherished lover, move us to moral action now, while we wait.

You can hear that connection explicitly in the letter to the Colossians:

We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you. We’ve done this since we heard of your faithfulness to Christ Jesus and your love for all God’s people. You have this faithfulness and love because of the hope reserved for you in heaven (Colossians 1:3-6).

You also can hear it in the letter to Titus:

[W]hen the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us…so that we would be made heirs of the hope of eternal life. This statement is trustworthy; and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God will be careful to engage in good deeds (Titus 3:5-8).

And you can hear it in Jesus’ words:

When the Son of Man comes, will He find faithfulness on earth? (Luke 18:8).

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Now there’s a second piece of theology that strengthens this tie between our hope to see God in the resurrection and our doing good. It’s something we don’t talk about very often. But it’s a key part of the New Testament vision for what happens after we die—so key that the writer of Hebrews calls it “an elementary teaching about the Christ” and part of a “foundation,” alongside faithfulness toward God and the resurrection of the dead. That piece—is God’s judgment of each of us.

Maybe that word raises some hackles. It feels like I’m going out on a limb just to mention it. But when I say “judgment,” I don’t mean “condemnation.” Paul writes in Romans, “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Jesus does claim to have been given authority by God to judge, and did promise to “repay everyone according to his or her deeds.” But He is the same Jesus who says to the woman caught in the middle of adultery, “I do not condemn you.” The same Jesus who tells—at some length—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father greets his estranged and very wayward son with an embrace, and a kiss, and a fresh outfit, and a feast! The same Jesus who requests—in the middle of His being executed—that God pardon His executioners.

So if we were to go with a courtroom analogy for the promised judgment, this judge of ours, as Dale Allison puts it, “is wildly biased in favor of all the defendants.”

But even there, that’s if we assume the Bible speaks of a purely juridical judgment, whose only goal is to determine guilt and mete out punishment. Yet the scriptures talk a lot about us running races, and earning rewards, and receiving wreaths of victory. Maybe Judgment Day is a little more like—a medals ceremony, only with everybody on the same team and the number of medals not limited to three.

Now, of course, I’d be cherrypicking if I didn’t admit that the scriptures also speak of fire and loss and weeping at the judgment. But if you’ll let me return to my comparing the prospect of seeing God someday to the story of Carla’s and my reuniting after her trip, maybe the justice of that biblical language will be easier to digest: Imagine that while Carla was gone, I totally ignored the house, neglected the kids, and did nothing but watch YouTube. Or take it even further and suppose that while she was gone I started a feud with the neighbors over property lines, broke all the dishes in a fit of rage against the kids, and left the cat outside overnight only for her to freeze to death. If I had lived that way while she was gone, I’d have every reason to feel hope’s opposite in anticipation of her return. Fire, loss, and weeping indeed. And justly so. It is right that my actions when I’m apart from Carla matter to her and be up for review when we’re together again.

It’s no different with God. If you spend this life ignoring the spirit of God, hating your enemies, disregarding the poor, destroying the earth, then joining God in the next life will probably have unpleasant parts to it.

If I’m honest, the life I’ve lived so far is a mix: Partly stuff God will express delight with and partly stuff God will express a dim view of. But on the whole, like you I think, I love truth, and I love justice, so even if there are unpleasant parts to God’s review, I look forward to it, because that’s the way truth will be told and justice done.

And besides, here’s the thing: My twenty-four years of knowing Carla have taught me that she is magnanimous, and that sooner or later, probably later if I killed the cat, she would forgive me. Even if I’d been nothing but selfish and stupid while we were apart. Eventually, she’d forgive me. How much more magnanimous is our God, whose “anger,” writes King David, “is but for a moment,” but whose “favor is for a lifetime.” Our God—from whose love, writes Paul, “nothing,” not even our own unfaithfulness, “will be able to separate us.”

So yes, according to the scriptures, with resurrection and seeing God there will be judgment—but also according to the scriptures, there will be judgment’s afterparty. Everyone, sooner or later upon reuniting with the Lord, will enjoy a divine embrace, and a kiss, and a fresh outfit, and a feast. Everyone, having then seen the Creator face to face, basking in the One who is Love, shall be full of joy.

So let’s have this hope. Let us hope for resurrection. Let us hope to see the Creator and see Jesus. Let us even hope for The Judgement. Let us say to God—or sing to God, even—“I look forward to seeing You.” And let us mean it by making it our ambition to be pleasing to God here and now, faithful to Christ this side of eternity by loving abundantly and well.