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Sunday "Becoming Hope" 1 Samuel 1:4-20 Luke 21:25-36 |
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What is hope? Emily Dickinson wrote:
Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul.
And sings the tune
Without the words,
and never stops at all.
Cicero intoned: “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Shakespeare:
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
And Saint Paul: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
But not all wise words about hope are, well, very hopeful.
“He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.” Albert Camus. And…“He that lives upon hope will die fasting.” Benjamin Franklin.
What is hope? Or, on this the first Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Hope, what specifically is Christian hope? To begin with, it is important to be clear about what Christian hope (I would say spiritual hope) is not. Hope is not the same as optimism. While true hope is always positive, it is never blindly optimistic. Hope never ignores reality. It is not the attitude of the man who falls out of the window of a sky-scraper and comments to the person at each window he passes, “Alright, so far!” Christian hope is grounded in the capacity to face facts.
Karen Armstrong, writing in The Great Transformation, identifies the values that emerged in the great world civilizations around the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E. She describes the mission of the prophets of ancient Israel at the time of the Babylonian conquest – with Israel’s leaders and thousands of Hebrews in exile in Babylon, with Jerusalem and the temple destroyed. She writes:Jeremiah presented himself to the people as a man of sorrows, opening his heart to the terror, rage, and misery of his time, and allowing it to invade every recess of his being. Denial was not an option; it could only impede enlightenment.
The prophet Ezekiel demands that the Hebrews face the full weight of their sorrow.
They could not relax or feel at ease anywhere at all. Unless the exiles appreciated this to the full – saw things as they were – they would not be able to heal. It was no good looking on the bright side or telling themselves that they would soon be home, because this was simply not true. They must strip themselves of these delusions.
True spiritual hope does not engage in denial. Delusion and cheery optimism are dangerous because they make true healing impossible. To heal, one must face the reality of the wound.
As events continue to worsen in Iraq, it has become clear that, even how, our government’s policies have largely been founded on illusion. Our leaders seem to be relying on some vague optimism that the Iraq Study Group will come up with something new, the Iraqi leadership will somehow take charge, or maybe Iran and Syria can help. It is hard to face the reality that there are no good options, we may be helpless to do much of anything, and that Iraq is a hope-less mess.At the personal level, it seems that we will go to any length rather than admit how bad we feel about some situation in our lives. When something truly horrible happens, we try to ignore it, minimize its impact (“No big deal, really!”), or divert our attention away from it. (“Other people have worse problems.”) The tragedy in this is that we are prevented from true hope and true healing. So, first of all, spiritual hope, Christian hope, is realistic and insists that we feel how bad we really feel. It means facing loss, grief, humiliation, and sadness.
But, when we do, something can happen. What can happen is that we come to understand that God is there with us, and God has been there with us all the time - even in the blindness of our denial and empty optimism. Hope has been there all along, like Emily Dickinson’s little bird – perching in our souls, singing a never-stopping tune without words.And when hope is activated, hope takes wing. It flies into action. Christian hope is not simply a turning-about in which we now start to feel good where before we felt bad. Hope comes alive with the choice to take action. To act. Depression is usually experienced as the inability to act. As depression lifts, energy comes. And such action doesn’t have to be something huge. Anne Lamott has written:
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up.
There was no more ferocious truth-teller than the prophet Jeremiah. Like every prophet he warned repeatedly about the consequences of injustice and hypocrisy practiced by government and religion. When the leaders of Judah were in blind denial and irrational optimism, Jeremiah spoke the truth with a horrific intensity. But when the worst finally did happen, he grieved and wept along with the people. He did not stand aside. Indeed he, like Ezekiel, showed them how to truly grieve. But then, amazingly, he became a prophet, not of gloom and doom anymore, but a prophet of hope. For when the reality of how bad things were was faced, the people could then begin to discern that God had not abandoned them. These words came into the darkest night of their souls:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it shall be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
Jesus’ words in Luke’s Gospel are about hope. But the coming of hope is, for Jesus, closely connected to being awake, aware, alert. He tells us to play close attention to what is really going on. Superficial optimism is blind – looking through rose-colored glasses that are nearly opaque. And, in the depths of grief, when we are appropriately focused on how bad we feel, that is still not the whole picture. Jesus is saying that if we, having faced the worst in our situation, keep our eyes open, we will begin to discern the presence of God. Ultimately, God’s coming in fullness will be unquestionable - like seeing the Son of Man coming on the clouds with power and glory. But for now, Jesus quickly he moves to another image. Like Jeremiah who describes the coming of God into our consciousness as like the sprouting of a little branch from an old stump, Jesus talks about noticing the buds beginning to appear on the fig tree, as spring nears. Both images are about seeing clearly something so simple, so delicate, that it can, at first be easily missed. Those are the signs of hope that we, as people of faith, are called to discern.
Let me close with two brief examples. Last Friday on World AIDS Day, the Washington Post lead editorial was entitled: “Keep Hope.” It spoke of many signs of hope for health and healing of people in the developing world. For example:The number of people receiving AIDS drugs in sub-Saharan Africa has jumped tenfold in three years, and yesterday the William J. Clinton Foundation announced plans to boost AIDS treatment of children in 62 poor countries.
The editorial goes on to talk about the hope of expanding programs for accelerating the deployment of a variety of affordable new vaccines. It ends saying:
We should still remember that some 800 million people go hungry and that 10 million children die each year before their fifth birthdays. But it’s also important to keep hope: The wagon is advancing.
Second, last September Pope Benedict XVI set off a firestorm of criticism over his references in a lecture to Islam. As the time for his visit to Turkey approached, angry demonstrations took place, and Muslims and others expressed grave reservations about the visit. But it now appears that the Pope was well-prepared and did everything right. He was humble, respectful, and careful to honor the religious as well as secular sensibilities of his hosts. In Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, the Pope knelt in prayer, facing Mecca, beside the chief Muslim Cleric, Mustafa Cagrici. It is reported that the overwhelming impression made on the average Turk by the Pope was extremely positive. I was moved to hear Margaret Warner of PBS report from Istanbul last week, sitting in a store where a shop-keeper, a man very angry at the Pope, watched him on television. The Turk turned to her and said, “He is a good man. I’m glad he came here.” Following his visit to the mosque Benedict said, “This visit will help us find together the way of peace for the good of all humanity.” Mustafa Cagrici replied, “A single swallow can’t bring spring. But many swallows will follow, and we will enjoy a spring in this world.”
That is what hope is like. Like the little bird that has weathered the worst storms imaginable, has kept on singing throughout the wintry blast, and now takes wing. AMEN.