8 th December: 2 nd Sunday of Advent

The Advent Dream

I grew up in the north-west of England in St Helens, which was then a town on the Lancashire coalfield. Now the mining has gone, and its contributions to the town are commemorated in a number of public memorials, including the wrought iron gates of Sutton Manor Colliery, which was about four miles from the town centre. The colliery closed in 1991 after 80 years production. Ten years later the Forestry Commission began landscaping the site and planted 50,000 trees. But the local authority wanted a more ambitious memorial than a public park. They developed an imaginative project that Channel 4 Television chose in 2006 as one of seven in its Big Art Project, to create public art across the UK.

A group of 15 former miners and local residents worked with advisers, and they commissioned the Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa to develop their project. His initial suggestion was a 20-metre high monument to represent a miner’s lamp, but the project group rejected it. They wanted something that was more forward-looking. Plensa’s revisions envisaged something quite different, a 20-metre high sculpture of the head and neck of a nine-year-old girl, cast in concrete mixed with white dolomite, to give it a colour that couldn’t have been more different from coal.

Jaume Plensa called his sculpture ‘Dream’. Its figure looks out meditatively from the former mining site, as if she were staring into the future. It has won a number of awards, and was visited by over 60,000 people in its first year. It’s a powerful statement from a town with an illustrious industrial past, that seems to say, ‘we refuse to be defined by what we were’. And it’s an invitation to dream of a new future, however uncertain or tentative it might be. ¹

Dream is a symbol of a community’s hope. I wonder what it suggests about the ingredients of hope that will bring this future into being: partnership; international cooperation; environmental renewal; artistic creativity; and the willingness to see through the eyes of those who are most affected by the changes that sweep the past aside, not least the young.

A symbol of a community’s hope. We’re now a week into Advent, less than a month until 2025. What is our Dream, our symbol of hope? In today’s readings we hear about a messenger, a voice in the wilderness, the day of Jesus Christ. What kind of future might they symbolise, and inspire us to hope for?

In testing times like these, we naturally cast around for hope. A new government, a new peace deal, a new job, a new house, a new relationship, a new baby. Then after a few months we find ourselves wondering if anything has really changed. Jamil Zaki, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Stanford in California, spends his working life researching and writing about hope. What he fears most is that hope might be no more than ‘the sweetener that helps oppression go down easier’. ² In other words, it doesn’t bring about any real change; it just helps us to sleep better at night.

How much is this true of Advent hope, the symbol of our Dream at this time of year? What kind of future might today’s readings help us to hope for?

If we only read the extracts from the Hebrew Bible, we might find ourselves gazing at a hopeful future that re-runs the past. ‘Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look towards the east, and see your children gathered from west to east . . . rejoicing that God has remembered them.’ (Baruch 5.5). ‘See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way for me, and the Lord whom you see will suddenly come to purify his temple.’ (Malachi 3.1, 3). According to these prophets, hope lies in rebuilding Jerusalem’s temple, resettling Jewish ancestral lands. Dreams like these drive some of the most dangerous conflicts in today’s world, sadly with the support of many Christians.

John the baptiser was much more forward-looking. When he called for repentance during the Roman occupation of his people’s ancestral lands, he encouraged his hearers to embrace what comes from God’s future, not the past. When he spoke of forgiveness, he meant putting past failures behind them. John’s Dream looked towards the coming of Jesus, when ‘all flesh shall see the salvation of our God’ (Luke 3.1–6).

Was this ‘a sweetener that helps oppression to go down easier’? John the baptiser wouldn’t have said so. Neither would Paul the apostle. In his letter to the church in Philippi, he dreamed of ‘the day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1. 6,10), the symbol of God’s coming salvation. True, this is one of the sweetest of Paul’s letters, full of warmth and affection and appreciation for the church’s support and kindness. But this was a community that was buffeted by Paul’s critics, who despised his Dream of a world in which Jews and gentiles, insiders and outsiders, have equal value in the eyes of God. Ultra-conservative pressure groups—Paul is hardly complimentary; he calls them ‘dogs . . . evil workers . . . who mutilate the flesh’ (Phil 3.2)—were in danger of splitting this most joyful and generous of churches. So he reminded them that the Lord who came in the human form of God’s servant is the Lord who will come from God’s future, to transform the multi-racial and multi-cultural world on the doorstep of this church in a Roman colony into the glorious body of Christ (Phil 3.20-4.1), whose life together is shaped by ‘the mind that was in Christ Jesus’, the way of other-centred, slave-like service (Phil 2.5–11; 3.20–4.1).

Hope like this is anything but ‘a sweetener that helps oppression go down easier’. Paul’s hope dreams of a world in which everyone feels at home. Christ-centred hope resists the powers that drive people apart, by living out the better way of the Lord, whose coming reveals God’s salvation from beginning to end. Advent hope is shaped by faith shown in working together, generous support, mutual service.

Where do we find hope like this in today’s church? Let’s go back to St Helens. Two of my oldest friends still belong to the church whose youth work introduced us to each other more than 50 years ago. Over the years the church’s fortunes have mirrored those of the town, often in the direction of decline. But the last five years have seen remarkable growth. Not numerically: a parish church that seats hundreds is still only home to about 50 regular worshippers. Not because of mission-shaped strategic planning: no-one expected this to happen. Many of the current congregation are members of minority ethnic groups, who have come to the town as refugees, and some of their stories are harrowing.

In a town and a church that hardly had anyone from minority ethnic groups when I was growing up, something unexpected is happening. The hope of Christ’s coming is being born in a multi-lingual, multi-racial community. Refugees are made welcome. The church has bought Bibles translated into Farsi. Established church members are teaching refugees to speak English, and helping them with the endless form-filling that goes with seeking asylum. Friendships are forming as the newcomers are making increasingly significant contributions to the life of a church that has been struggling for decades. And all this is happening within a few miles of the Dream.

There are many church communities like the one in St Helens where Christ-centred hope refuses to die. What they offer is not action plans or templates, but models of faithful living in the way of the coming Christ. Their hope is not a sweetener but a summons: a call to repent, to embrace a bigger vision of the world, to welcome what is utterly unplanned and unexpected as gifts of God’s eternal grace.

A symbol of a community’s hope. A week into Advent, less than a month until 2025, what are the ingredients of our Dream, as we gaze into God’s future?