Nov. 15 sermon from Garrett
Our passage this morning is one about hope.
And I am glad it is, as God only knows that our world could use the confidence that hope brings at this hour, especially our sisters and brothers in Paris.
Hope has never been as popular as its other siblings, Faith, Grace and Love. Catholics talk about love and mercy, and Protestants grace and faith; fine and good, but where does that leave hope?
It's not just in theological matter either.
To confirm my hunch that Hope suffers unpopularity, you'll be eager to know that Hope is number #231 of most popular baby names of 2015 – at least according to nameberry.com. But, the website agrees, that although Hope is "an optimistic Puritan favorite" it never has been as popular as Grace and Faith.
I only knew one person named Hope growing up. Hope was in a family of 3. The three children’s names were Faith, Hope, and Billy. I’m dead serious. Poor Billy.
Google has this new function that if you type in a word you can see the frequency that it shows up in books; and its archives go back to the year 1800. Hope has been in a steady decline since then; it hasn’t totally plummeted, but its future still doesn’t look promising. (There's a pun in there somewhere.)
Despite the portents and forebodings in this mornings gospel, I submit that it is really about Christian hope.
The disciples are skipping away from the temple full of glee. “Jesus, Jesus, that temple is the finest thing we’ve seen.”
Pause here and note the irony: Jesus has just a few chapters earlier cleansed the temple of its defilements, and just last week he was calling down judgement on its curate’s who had maintained it by gouging widow’s of their money.
“The temple is going to be destroyed,” Jesus tells them with an executive matter of factness.
And then we move to the next scene where Jesus and a handful of his disciples are sitting on Mount Olive, just across the way from the Temple.
And Jesus, probably with a note of dread in his voice, begins to speak of what is about to go down. In so many words he tells them that things are going to get really really dark. “But you must keep awake. You are going to be really tempted to close your eyes and look away.”
What do his disciples need to be on the lookout for? Well, for the deceivers, those who come promising something that only the Messiah, Jesus, can give.
In other words, “Don’t give in, stay awake. Don’t lose hope.”
Imagine you are one of the disciples, how unsatisfying this word would be: “Jesus, give us something to do? We’ll do anything; we’ll love anybody you ask us to.”
Wait, he says.
“Jesus, don’t you want us to fix this madness? Well if you don't want that, at least give us some sound advice.”
Wait, hope, he says.
We don’t like to be told to have hope. We want to do something. Hope feels so passive. It feels like wishful thinking. “I really hope it doesn’t rain later.” “I really hope Big Ben isn’t out for much longer.” Not much we can do about either, but we sure hope...
We are doers, hope is uncomfortable.
I remember the first time I was stunned at my own lack of hope. My cousin Jared, whom I admire greatly, asked me one of those questions that is so simple and yet so probing: Garrett, what are you waiting for? “Uhh…"
So what is hope anyways? The dictionary says that it’s a feeling of expectation. Not bad, I just think it’s more than a feeling. Traditionally, the Church has thought of Hope as a virtue. It’s something we can cultivate; we can get better at it.
For the more theological among you, here is one person’s systematic way of putting it: “Hope is one of the very simple, primordial dispositions of the living person. In hope, women and men reach with confidence and patient expectation towards the arduous “not yet” of fulfillment.”
A patient expectation.
But the best definition of Hope I know is a story I heard an old black preacher tell one time. It must have been 10 years ago when Dr. Robert Smith preached at my church and told us about losing his first wife. She got really sick all of a sudden, and began to deteriorate very rapidly. Dr. Smith told us about sitting by her bedside on the 4th floor of the hospital holding her hand during her final weeks. Dr. Smith’s life was unravelling.
He shared much of his grief with us. But then the story changed key, and he told us about getting remarried. But what shocked us all was that his now wife was a nurse at the hospital where his 1st wife passed. Dr. Smith told us that she worked on the 5th floor. And what he said next, I’ll never forget:
While my life was falling apart on the 4th floor, God was rebuilding things on the 5th.
Hope.
I don’t know about you, but I get the sense that there is a lot of pessimism out there. A lot of doom and gloom. I don’t know what news syndicate you tune in to, but from where I'm sitting it seems like every one of them is convinced that the end of the world is as immanent as the opposing party’s involvement in our future.
Our pessimistic world cries out for hope.
I’ll just add parenthetically that I don’t think hope has very much to do with optimism either. Can you imagine sitting on the hillside with the disciples as Jesus portends what is about to unfold, and telling everyone that they just need to see the glass half-full?
Take a look at the last sentence in our reading and you’ll see that our translation says “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” But, actually this isn’t quite right. Most scholars agree that there isn’t a “but” there. It should read instead: “This is the beginning of birth pangs.” Big deal, you may think. But it is.
The first reading emphasizes the pain which reaches into the future indefinitely; but the second reading, the one which is more faithful to the Greek, gives attention to the birth. This is the beginning of birth.
In other words, Hope is confident of new life. New life which God is bringing about. Neither optimism nor pessimism, which as I understand them see things in terms of better and worse, hope is a different species altogether: it's the confidence of new life that promises to burst forth from death. The former are human, the latter is from God.
There is nothing fluffy or wishful about hope.
Fighting, fractiousness, strife. It's about as grim as it gets. Nothing makes much sense. A destroyed temple. A preacher at his wife’s bedside. Life as we know it coming unglued.
Perhaps we don’t have to think long to see our own place in all of this. Everything was going so well; and then it (fill in the blank) happened.
There’s nothing this text lets us paper over.
But remember Dr. Smith’s line: When my life was coming undone on the 4th floor, God was at work on the 5th.
Friends, our world knows quite a bit about the 4th floor. But let us as Christians be a people who bear witness to the 5th floor. Let’s be a people confident in God and confident that he is stitching together a future that is far more glorious than we could ever imagine.
We, along with the disciples, are asked this morning to hope; to keep awake.
And here’s the promise: new life is coming, Advent is just around the corner; a baby is being born. Emmanuel, which is really just another name for Hope.
Tags: Clergy Voices