Narrative Lectionary Reflection
December 16, 2018
Reflection
Advent gives us hope. Hope is a hard thing to concentrate on when the wider culture forces cheerfulness and sentimentality. There is a lot out there that wants us to forget the world we live in that is filled with sin and injustice. Isaiah 42 tells us that the world has problems, big problems. Problems that might seem hopeless. But God speaks into that dark time to remind the people of Israel that whatever they are experiencing is not the last word. God has not forgotten them.
Advent is a corrective to the culture that wants to rush headlong into Christmas. Advent not only tells us what their world is like, but what it can be. Even when we face the bad times, Advent reminds us that something good will happen, maybe not right away, but soon. Evil will not have the last word.
The late R&B singer Sam Cooke once sang a song called “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It was an important song of the civil rights movement. To a younger generation, it has a prominent part towards the end of the 1992 movie Malcolm X, the biopic on the life and death of the civil rights leader.
Part of the inspiration of the song came from Cooke trying to register at a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had called ahead to make a reservation, but when he, his wife and his entourage arrived all African Americans, the hotel said it had no vacancies. Cooke, of course, was furious and demanded to see the manager. After a while, they left the hotel to go to another hotel in town. As they arrived, the police were there ready to arrest him for disturbing the peace.
Cooke wrote this song about racism and the hope that things would change. The song became a staple in the civil rights movement because of the lyrics. I want to close with some of the lyrics:
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die
‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
I go to the movie and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me, “Don’t hang around”
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
For Cooke and countless African Americans who were alive in the early 60s, it might have been hard to have hope when things seemed like nothing would change. But Cooke believed that things would change for the better, even if he couldn’t see it clearly at that time. He had hope that the evil of racism would not stand forever.
That is Advent hope. It is the hope that Christ will return to establish justice forever. It is that hope that informs the church in mission in the here and now as we long for the not yet.
1. Sam Cooke. A Change is Gonna Come. (1964), RCA Records.
Dennis Sanders is the Pastor at First Christian Church of St. Paul in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. He’s written for various outlets including Christian Century.
Come Sunday 