It doesn’t require a lot of courage to get through the season of Advent in anticipation of the birth of baby Jesus. Sure, it’s still Good News, but let’s face it, it’s also old news. In my early years as a minister I always felt guilty for not actually feeling any excitement about re-telling the legend of Jesus’ birth. I heard and preached endless sermons about the theology of “waiting”, of “expectation”, and “staying awake” for the coming of the Son of Man. But for the life of me the old story of Jesus’ birth was more likely to put me to sleep—having heard it every year of my life.

Then I found out that Advent is more about the second coming of Christ than it is about Jesus’ birth. I must have missed that eschatology class in seminary. This was a little more interesting, although no rational person whom I know actually believes that we’re waiting for the flesh and blood Jesus to return. So what exactly are we waiting for? What is it that can evoke in us this state of alert expectation?

For me, it is hope. It is staking my life on the promise of a new order of consciousness, interpersonal connection, and a social system that reflects the heart and mind of the Christ, or Holy Wisdom. Jews and Christians are a people who stand on this promise. In a cynical and pessimistic world, this does take courage. Try being optimistic and hopeful in a culture of postmodern, academic pessimism, and you’ll get hammered. You’ll be called a flake. Your progressive Christian colleagues will write you off as a lightweight. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that the world is getting worse? Anybody who says otherwise is clearly into denial. I speak from personal experience here.

The authors of three of the most important books that I’ve read in the past year are not theologians. They are not even religious types. The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin tracks the evolution of the empathic line of intelligence from the dawn of civilization to present day. By the end of the book, the facts stack up in favour of a more empathic world today than ever before. I got hammered for giving a thumbs up for Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. He makes the empirical case for a world that is getting better. Finally, Steve Pinker’s, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, convinced me that humanity has evolved into a more peace-loving species. We have some catching up to do in the liberal church with our secular friends when it comes to hope—which is more than a little ironic.

By largely ignoring an empirically based, evolutionary worldview, progressive Christianity has adopted by default a cynical view of history and the human condition. A few of my colleagues are convinced that the planet would be better off without the scourge of human beings. The “myth of human progress” became the ideological bedrock of Western intelligentsia post-WW2. Pessimism has become fashionable. The carnage of two world wars in the last century is undeniable. But until one places these wars within the context of Big History, (as Pinker does) it’s impossible to see that the historical trend is toward less violence—despite the violence of the first half of the 20th century.  Our fundamentalist Christian friends are heavily invested in our depravity for a different reason: if we’re becoming more humane through evolutionary means, there is no need for a God to intervene and save us from ourselves.

Adopting an evolutionary worldview and theology has reawakened hope in me. This is not the kind of hope we cling to heroically despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Rather it is an evidence-based hope that is embedded in our Common Story of Creation, or Big History—also known as the Epic of Evolution or the Great Story. I know that some do not see or need any directionality or purpose in the universe to live a meaningful life, but I seem to be built differently. One’s perspective on this seems to have less to do with evidence than it does with one’s worldview.  When I observe the story of the universe, I see life in a continuous process of transcending itself, and moving in a biased trajectory toward an increase in beauty, truth, and goodness. I notice that the cosmos, including our beloved Earth, has been through a great many cataclysmic events, and has managed to come through each one with even more resilience and intelligence.

To realize that I am the very presence of cosmic intelligence in human form, a universe in the process of transcending itself, in me, through me, and as me, fills me with hope. I am/we are, the presence of that hope, consciously yearning for and enacting the future that needs me/us in order to emerge. We’re not isolated individuals trying heroically to create a better future, against all the odds. We are concentrated amalgams of the entire evolutionary process—a living, learning system—in the process of adapting new intelligences to meet the various crises that face us today. Cultivating a felt sense of this evolutionary impulse should be a mandatory spiritual practice for Christians in the 21st century. It is how we may directly experience the power and purpose of Spirit.

This hope is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has always imagined and experienced “God” (the personalized form of Reality) as leading from an indeterminate, yet better future. Sarah and Abraham, Moses and Miriam, the patriarchs and matriarchs, and the prophets of justice were animated by a divine promise. At Christmas, Christians gather round a mythic stable to celebrate that Jesus, as Paul writes, is a down payment on the promise’s realization. From an evolutionary theology, the baby Jesus is an intimate expression of the point and purpose of the cosmos, a hint of where this evolutionary trajectory is headed.  Paul was transformed by an intuition and direct experience that a new creation—the equivalent realization at an interior, spiritual level of the Big Bang—had been ushered in by the life, death, and resurrection of the one we call the Christ.

But the beauty of an evolutionary perspective is that this emergence of a new humanity, (our friend Barbara Marx Hubbard calls us homo universalis), is just getting underway. Far from ending with the baby Jesus, the promise is always in the process of being realized in, through, and as us. To take a fearless adventory is to ask ourselves if we are willing, with Mary, to step up and consciously utter the words that still today have the power to bring about a new order of love and compassion:  “Let it be to me according to your word”—according to the promise of a better future that cannot be born without our willing and joyful consent.

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Bruce Sanguin is the author of four books, the latest of which is If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics, a collection of evolutionary prayers.

His newest book, The Advance of Love: Reading Scripture with An Evolutionary Heart, will be released in the spring of 2012.

For more information, to read Bruce’s weekly blog, and to order his books, go to www.ifdarwinprayed.com

* Thanks to Gabrielle Chung for the word “adventory”.