Sermon: Revival of Hope
Texts: Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-27
Date: May 31, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
One cigarette butt. One liter of water. A handful of minnows. Put them all together and do you know what you get? One soggy cigarette butt and dead minnows--half the minnows in the liter of water will be dead by the end of the week. Now consider how many cigarette butts get dropped on beaches around the world--about a third of the litter worldwide consists of cigarette butts. Mull over how many defenseless little critters are being poisoned by these millions of tiny toxic waste dumps. Isn’t it just enough to make you want to AAAARRRGGHHH!
And that’s just one little problem in our beleaguered planet, one that probably wasn’t even on your radar before. I’m bringing it up as a ploy for instant empathy with a certain father who went on a mountain hiking trip with his teenage son, hoping to find some time away from their constant bickering at home. But instead they found themselves knocking heads at high elevations. After one argument over an insignificant decision, the father, Scott, decided to try to get to the bottom of the conflict with his son Jesse. He demanded to know how he “ruined everything.” At first Jesse dodged answering, but after a little bit he said, “You’re just so out of touch.”
“With what?”
“With my whole world. You hate everything that’s fun. You hate television and movies and video games. You hate my music.”
Scott defended himself. “I like some of your music. I just don’t like it loud.”
“You hate advertising,” Jesse said quickly, on a roll now. “You hate billboards, lotteries, developers, logging companies, and big corporations. You hate snowmobiles and jet-skis. You hate malls and fashions and cars.”
“You’re still on my case because I won’t buy a Jeep?” Scott said, harkening back to another old argument.
“Forget Jeeps. You look at any car, and all you think is pollution, traffic, roadside crap. You say fast food’s poisoning our bodies and TV’s poisoning our minds. You think the Internet is just another scam for selling stuff. You think business is a conspiracy to rape the Earth.”
Scott stares at Jesse. “None of that bothers you?”
“Of course it does,” Jesse answers. “But that’s the world. That’s where we’ve got to live. It’s not going to go away just because you don’t approve. What’s the good of spitting on it?”
“I don’t spit on it. I grieve over it.”
Jesse was still for a moment, then resumed quietly. “What’s the good of grieving if you can’t change anything?”
“Who says you can’t change anything?”
“You do. Maybe not with your mouth, but with your eyes.” Jesse rubbed his own eyes, and the words came out muffled through his cupped palms. “Your view of things is totally dark. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet’s dying, and people are to blame, and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get along without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way out of this mess. Otherwise, what’s the point? Why study, why work, why do anything if it’s all going to hell?”
Scott was stunned. It sounded unfair to him, like a caricature of his views, and he considered many sharp replies, but there was too much truth and too much hurt there. He asked himself, had he really deprived his son of hope? Was this the deeper grievance, the source of their strife—that he had passed on to him, so young, his anguish about the world? Was the demon called despair lurking between them, driving them apart? Finally he answered, “You’re right. Life’s meaningless without hope. But I think you’re wrong to say I’ve given up.”
“It seems that way to me. As if you think we’re doomed.”
“No, buddy, I don’t think we’re doomed. It’s just that nearly everything I care about is under assault.”
“See, that’s what I mean. You’re so worried over the fate of the Earth, you can’t enjoy anything. We come to these mountains, and you bring the shadows with you. You’ve got me seeing nothing but darkness.” [1]
I find this true account of an agonizing conversation between father and son gripping. Convincing, and convicting. It made me ask myself: Have we, who are tuned into what Paul calls the groaning of the whole creation, inadvertently robbed our children of hope by the urgencies of our concern for the Earth and its people? Have we, in our earnest attempts to protest the degradation of our environment and our human community, left our children a legacy of despair?
If there is any shred of possibility that this is so, we stand in desperate need of revival. A revival of hope. “For in hope we were saved,” Paul says. Or, in an alternative translation, “by hope.” By hope we are saved. Hope alone won’t save us; but it’s for dang sure that we won’t be saved without hope.
One of the commentaries I read on the Acts passage pointed out something I had never quite noticed even after more than 20 years of revisiting the story of Pentecost annually. He suggests there was something very meaningful about Peter quoting as much of the prophet Joel’s words as he did in his sermon after the giddy outpouring of the Spirit. I’ve always thought of the last few verses of that quotation as the “appendix” of the sermon—a useless and potentially painful appendage with no apparent purpose. But this scholar says that we should pay attention to what’s happening, cosmically speaking, in these verses: There is blood, and fire, and smoky mist; the sun is turned to darkness and the moon to a shade of dark red. It’s dark. It’s terrifying. And then, in the midst of all this darkness, comes the Lord’s “great and glorious day”, when “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” [Acts 2:21] You see, the Spirit comes when the light is almost gone. There is fire in the dark. Peter’s speech (of which we hear just the first few verses today) is a discourse not about the death and resurrection of Jesus alone, but the death and resurrection of hope itself, for which Jesus is the banner, the icon. [2]
Yes! The death and resurrection of hope itself. Every time hope seems to have died, it is resurrected somewhere. This is a movement of the Holy Spirit. This is one form the Holy Spirit takes: the revival of hope when things seem hopeless. Hope appears out of nowhere, out of nothing, like tongues of fire, resting on the individual’s head and setting hearts ablaze, and blessing whole communities.
Hope leaves its mark on people, and hopeful people leave their mark on the world. In the Orkney Islands off the cold shores of northeast Scotland there is one island more bare than all the others. It is called Lamb Holm. It was there that Italian prisoners World War II were kept. They left something behind: a tiny chapel. They built it with their own hands out of anything they could find—scraps of wood, tin cans from the bully beef they got in their rations. They built a church—Why? Who knows if these men were churchgoers back in their hometowns? But this tiny church was a sign for them. A sign of the presence of God on a barren island of prisoners. A sign of the power above and within us that is greater than all troubles. A sign of hope.
That little chapel is the husk of the hope that the prisoners felt, a building abandoned now but standing in silent witness to the visitation of the Holy Spirit. Ideally, every church, every chapel, would be a house of hope. Every sanctuary built would be a wooden witness to the hope the people of God experienced in that place, and under its roof, hope would be revived. And then from it, hope would be carried out. Hope would be received and reflected—as in the picture of the lighthouse being hit by lightning and light being reflected out into the darkness from within the human-built tower.
Hope is eyes to see and ears to hear what God is doing in the world, right under our noses, both with and without our cooperation. It’s becoming aware of the lightning strikes of hope crackling through the atmosphere. Theologian Paul Tillich wrote a beautiful reflection on whether we have a right to genuine hope which I find very inspiring. He writes, “There are many things and events in which we can see a reason for genuine hope, namely, the seed-like presence of that which is hoped for. In the seed of a tree, stem and leaves are already present, and this gives us the right to sow the seed in hope for the fruit. We have no assurance that it will develop. But our hope is genuine. There is a presence, a beginning of what is hoped for. And so it is with the child and our hope for his maturing; we hope, because maturing has already begun, but we don't know how far it will go. We hope for the fulfillment of our work, often against hope, because it is already in us as vision and driving force. We hope for a lasting love, because we feel the power of this love present. But it is hope, not certainty.” [3]
What I understand from this is that we don’t have to see what we hope for in its complete form in order to have genuine hope. We may have genuine hope that one day peace will prevail, because we see the seed-like presence of peace in places like schools where Palestinian and Jewish youth come together to live, learn, and befriend each other in the Middle East. We may have genuine hope that a lack of clean drinking water will one day be a thing of the past because we see the seed-like presence of good folk who are engaged with bringing wells to desert villages. We may have genuine hope that we will one day live sustainably on the earth because we see the seed-like presence of communities bent on lowering their carbon footprint. We hope for what we do not see, as Paul says, and we wait and work for it with patience. In hope and by hope we are saved.
Hope is contagious. Hope is infectious. We’ve been compelled to contemplate contagion and infection a good deal these last couple of months while Swine Flu rolls around the world. The most practical advice for avoiding viral infections is repeated over and over again: wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Suppose, metaphorically speaking, we don’t wish to avoid the contagion of hope? It occurs to me that one thing those who might want to be heralds of hope cannot do is wash their hands, metaphorically speaking, of course. That is, we cannot give into the temptation to “wash our hands” of the world and all its problems in a gesture of disgust and despair. We cannot retreat behind sterile doctrines or beliefs we wish would save us without any engagement with the world. We are called instead to hang in there, get our hands dirty working for the fulfillment of God’s kin-dom, and let the contagion of hope overwhelm cynicism in our hearts and communities. Let infectious hope have its way with us, and boldly try to transmit it to our neighbors.
Speaking of the transmission of hope, I was privileged the other day to hear again the story of Carol Estes’ friend Vance Bartley. They met and became friends when Vance was serving a life sentence for crimes he had committed under Washington’s Three Strikes law. You’re familiar with that law? If you have three felony convictions you are given a life sentence regardless of whether they are violent crimes. So Vance was in prison for life, I believe for drug-related robberies. He was about 30 when he was starting his life sentence. While he was telling his story, he said clearly about the time he entered prison: “I had no hope.” He could have joined the violent culture there and simply aimed for survival. But he decided instead to participate in any positive programs offered at the prisons in which he served his time. When he was transferred to Monroe, he met Carol, who was there (along with others) teaching in the University Behind Bars program. This is what Vance says about Carol, and about Grant, the volunteer who came in to lead Narcotics Anonymous meetings each week: “They brought me hope.” The hope of freedom from addiction, and the hope of a better life through education, eventually motivated Vance to spend all his spare time studying in the prison’s law library. He ultimately found a technicality in his case that allowed for his release, and he is working as a paralegal in a law firm in Seattle now, while he finishes his paralegal degree. He is focused on helping other non-violent offenders seek their freedom. You see the progression? Hopeless; touched by the Holy Spirit in combination with a Spirit-led human carrier of hope; now a herald of hope himself. In hope we were saved. By hope we are saved.
I’ll give Irish poet Seamus Heaney the last word—an excerpt from “The Cure at Troy”:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky.
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term…
[1] Sanders, Scott Russell “Mountain Music” The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear Paul Rogat Loeb, ed. New York: Basic Books, 2004, p. 102-104
[2] Harris, Mark www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3243
[3] Tillich, Paul “The Right to Hope” http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=62
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