Sermon: Accounting for Hope
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Sermon: Accounting for Hope Texts: 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21 Date: May 29, 2011 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” That’s an interesting bit of instruction for the Christian community, isn’t it? How often do people collar you and demand an accounting for the hope that is in you? Are any of you so unfailingly hopeful that your friends and neighbors demand to know why? Do you embody the spirit of South Pacific’s Nellie, who warbled blondly and publicly about being a cock-eyed optimist? She sang, “I have heard people rant and rave and bellow I don’t really get the Jello metaphor in spite of the quantities of Jello I have eaten in a lifetime of church potlucks. But I get what she is saying about how being a person of hope doesn’t make you look intelligent and smart in this world. Hopelessness is the quality that makes you look smart nowadays—lots of reasons to feel hopeless, with the facts and figures, charts and graphs to back up the thesis that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. See handbasket figure 1A: The global warming that has already occurred has caused a measurable increase in thunderheads, torrents of rain and hail, and increasingly violent storms and tornados. Every temperature increase of one degree Celsius, scientists say, brings 6% more lightning; on just one day in June 2008 lightning sparked 1,700 different fires in California, burning a million acres and setting a new state record. There’s a hopelessness statistic for you. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? Percents, numbers, evidence, scary facts. It is remarkably easy to be hopeless and to account for it. But accounting for hope—not so simple. I realize that the situation that the early Christians were in at the time the first epistle of Peter was written and my time are quite different. They were apparently at the front edge of a period of persecution. One of my commentaries says that there was a movement of patriotic Jewish zealots afoot in the aught-sixties that was probably causing trouble for the minority Christian community. A group of revolutionaries endeavored to defend the sovereignty of the Jewish people and their law against Greek and Roman presumption. The used terroristic methods to try to undermine and ultimately overthrow the Roman governors in their homeland. Because Judaism and Christianity were just beginning to be differentiated and were certainly not fully separated, the government reacted defensively against both groups. Not too surprising; even now people outside a faith group seldom bother to understand the different subsets of people of faith. The leaders of our Iraq invasion, for example, demonstrated little comprehension of the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims even though the division would have a huge impact on how conflict in that country unfolded (and is unfolding still). At any rate, at the time our epistle was written, Christians were being painted with the broad brush of suspicion because of this zelotic Jewish movement, and there may have been some of their Christian colleagues who were joining in the revolutionary spirit. So they really did need to be prepared with a defense, and they really were subject to intimidation by their neighbors. Our situation is not like theirs, really, except insofar as unsophisticated outsiders paint all Christians with the broad brush of fundamentalist zealotry and reject us as a group. Most of our neighbors, though, are more likely than not to react to rumors of our faith with a kind of “Meh,” a shrug of indifference. Does the general lack of opposition or suspicion mean that we do not need to be ready to account for the hope that in us as our Christian forbears did? Is this a directive we may feel free to ignore? Of course we may feel free to ignore this (we routinely ignore all kinds of useful Christian instruction). But it seems to me that it is a great challenge to which we might rise. I got to asking myself whether I was ready to give an accounting of the hope that is in me at a moment’s notice, and concluded that maybe I was not. So I’m going to give it a whirl. Perhaps my doing so will inspire you to meditate on your own hope and think about how you might explain it to someone who wants you to defend it or describe it. You probably know Emily Dickinson’s poem about hope: Hope is the thing with feathers This charming verse points to one thing that makes it difficult to account for hope. “Hope..sings the tune—without the words.” Hope lodged in the heart is more of a wordless birdsong than it is a treatise. It is hard to wrap words around hope; considerably more difficult, in my opinion, than trying to articulate its sisters, faith and love. Hope is probably better sung than pontificated. “My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation; I hear the real, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation…” That may well be the kernel of hope for me, either sung or spoken. I believe in the new creation. I believe God is present, interested, and active in this world. Borrowing concepts from Process Theology, I believe God is an infinite pool of possibility. Classical Process theologians speak of God’s Primordial Nature in terms of eternal possibilities. Every possibility for the evolution of creation is held in the depths of God’s nature. Out of this infinite pool of possibility God calls to creation, bringing novelty into the universe, allowing us to transcend the limitations of the past and rise into a new future. In process thought, this unfolds millisecond by millisecond as the experience of the worlds develops. Every pulse of time is freighted with possibility for a new creation. I’ll quote one of my Process theology books. “Creativity is the defining feature of life and the basic force in the world. Freedom and power are the means through which all beings participate in the creative process. God is…the supreme, all-inclusive embodiment of creative power and all other beings are …embodiments of creativity…All living beings are involved in the creative process, making decisions about how they will respond to the past and what they will contribute to the future. Rather than Lawgiver or Sovereign or Judge, God’s foremost role in the world is Creator-Sustainer and Creator-Redeemer. As Creator-Sustainer, God ‘implants’ possibility into the world and works to sustain life-affirming, creative response to those possibilities. As Creator-Redeemer, God transforms the creative efforts of all beings and recasts them in relation to new possibilities.” I hope that doesn’t sound like too much theological mumbo-jumbo. One of Isaiah’s expression’s of God’s message is simpler: God says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing!” I don’t think that process has ever stopped, nor will it ever stop. A couple of hundred years ago a Hassidic rabbi described his sense of the universe like this when commenting on the creation story: “The Lord created the world in a state of beginning. The universe is always in an uncompleted state, in the form of its beginning. It is not like a vessel at which the master works to finish it; it requires constant labor and renewal by creative forces. Should these cease for only a second, the universe would return to primeval chaos.” We often feel chaos lapping around our ankles in this life. There’s no doubt that chaos is still a formidable force in this universe. Let this week’s news story of the 16-month old boy who was ripped out of his mother’s arms during the tornado in Joplin, a baby killed while his horrified parents survived, be the current focal point for undeniable chaos in this world. Perhaps even more than such chaos the elements of seemingly intractable violence and assorted other sins among humans may tempt us to hopelessness. Yet in the midst of the mess God is active in creative transformation. God walks through the shadow of the valley of death and lesser losses with us, upholding us and bringing us to new life on the other side. I don’t know what shape creative transformation will take in these freshest, rawest places of tragedy and loss, but I trust that God will be there inspiring the healing and rebuilding. And we are not merely on the sidelines. In the gospel lesson Jesus assures the disciples that God abides not only above us or alongside us but in us. We know the Spirit not only as a concept, not only as a force outside us, but as an indwelling companion. It’s all quite mystical, Jesus’ talk of being in Spirit and Spirit being in us. It seems we have the privilege of joining God’s creative transformation, powered by the same Spirit that powered Jesus. Last week’s gospel lesson made the outrageous promise that the believer would do the works Jesus did, and in fact, would do even greater works. This says to me that Jesus’ work during his lifetime was also a beginning, not an end in itself. It was a fresh horizon dropped into the lap of humanity, and it’s still opening up before us. When we enter joyfully as partners in the world of open-ended possibilities, we become agents of hope. Since we’ve recently heard so much about an anticipated (now re-calculated, re-scheduled) apocalypse, you may appreciate as I do Catherine Keller’s depiction of hope as a counter-apocalypse. There’s a satirical image going around on Facebook this week of a mock-up of a billboard in the same design as those that were warning of the May 21 rapture and subsequent apocalypse. Its headline is “That was awkward.” It then quotes Matthew, “of the day and the hour no one knows, only the Father.” It actually should be awkward for Christians to accept any prophecies of The End regardless of whether they are seen as coming from God or human destructiveness. God is not about the end but about the eternal beginning, the fresh start, the resurrection, the branch growing out of the stump, etc. etc. And it’s our joy to enter as partners into the process of creative transformation, putting a wedge in the door of the apocalypse so that we never allow the future to slam shut in our imaginations and actions. Jim Perkinson has written a poem celebrating Pentecost that expresses this sense of the radical open-endedness of creation: this is surgeon-general’s warning of “no-way-to-anticipate-it” effect a break-out of jubilation on the tongue of a mute child the logic of laughter-belly the jump of frozen-limb the shout of deaf-mouth the vision-explosion of blind eye the collapse of consternation the crash of shame the size of flesh-on-the-rise against every bullet of can’t the final demise of helpless!... this is Pentecost in your head like becoming what you never dared for the first time and forever. George Eliot once quipped, “It is never too late to become who you might have been.” God’s creative transformation in the world extends even to me. I have hope about the global situation and about the intensely personal situation of being me. I really warm to poet Perkinson’s declaration of God’s Spirit work measured by “the size of flesh-on-the-rise / against every bullet of can’t / the final demise of helpless!” Oh, how I would like to see the demise of helpless in my life and in everyone’s life. I have hope that with God’s work in the world, this is happening, right now, even in my very own soul. So that’s pretty much it, my accounting for the lively hope that is within me. It feels good to get it out there. Talking about hope serves to beef it up somehow. William Sloane Coffin has written, “If faith puts us on the road, hope keeps us there.” Hope is the lure of the open future. Connecting with the idea or the feeling of hope calls one forward as insistently as the Reveille calls the soldiers out of their bunks to show up for duty. You’ve got to sing hope (2x) You’ve got to sing hope this morning. There is no dead end (2x); there is no dead end today. In death there’s resurrection In sin, a course correction A constant new direction Despair must not hold sway! God gives us new hope (2x) God gives us new hope this morning. Live into the hope, grow into the hope, become the world’s hope today. McKibben, Bill eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010, p. 3 Lubarsky, Sandra B. “Covenant and Responsible Creativity: Toward a Jewish Process Theology” Handbook of Process Theology Jay McDaniel and Donna Bowman, ed. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2006, p. 280
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