Hope
Mar 05, 2009
Rev. Kathleen Russell
Genesis 9: 8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; Mark 2: 9-15
Growing up as I did in what felt like the confined landscape of a city, the genre of the Western has always had a strong appeal for me-the wide open spaces, the romance of the cowboy, the possibility of adventure and heroism. One of my favorite westerns was a big-budget film of the late 1950s. Shot in vivid Technicolor with a wide-screen lens, it opened up images of a place that was very different from my reality. On that screen I saw a landscape that went on forever, no trees, no hills, no human habitation breaking the view, just a stretch of scrub and prairie grass that reached out toward an endless horizon.
In this movie's story, a young woman from a BIG state with a daddy who runs a BIG cattle ranch (I'll leave the state to your guessing) goes east for a visit and falls in love with the handsome heir to a shipping fortune. The movie starts with him arriving out West to be reunited with his love. Over the next few days, he is greeted by a succession of people who are impelled to point out to him what a BIG country they live in. (And not surprising for a movie called The Big Country.)
"Yes," he says, politely, "Big, yes, very big." Yes to the rhetorical-"Isn't this something?" "Yes, yes, very impressive." And yes to the comments of "Gotta be careful, it's dangerous out there, ya'll might get lost." "Yes, yes.
Dangerous, need to be careful, easy to get lost" it goes on, until finally at a party when someone says "Have you ever see anything this BIG?" his politeness quotient is reached and he responds "Well, yes, actually I have." For he isn't just a privileged eastern dude; he's a veteran captain of sailing ships, having crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific-so he has seen big-he knows about vastness, and horizons that stretch for ever, and what it's like to be a tiny little speck of humanity in the middle of a great big, unpredictable and dangerous world.
Today's readings-the story of God placing the rainbow in the skies as a sign of God's covenant with human beings and with creation for all time and the story of Jesus being baptized in the Jordan, like any other human being, yet as the fulfillment of that very covenant, are tucked in between two stories of wilderness-one of the flood with its images of water overwhelming almost all of humanity and one of earth-bound wilderness-the uninhabited and lonely places of the desert into which Jesus is driven, driven by the Spirit.
Now whether some lectionary guru was thinking about this or not, I don't know. But I do know that it's an interesting setup, having these two readings together. They form an intriguing pattern: (a, b, b, a)--wilderness, God's love, God's love, wilderness-what are we to make of that? Does it suggest that God's covenant-the promise given and the promise fulfilled-is always going to be bracketed between times of difficulty and struggle; that it is always hedged in by reminders of danger and vulnerability?
The voice of realism says, yes, it certainly seems to be that way. But could it be that Lent-this Lent in particular--calls us not to focus on the wilderness, and putting ourselves into it, casting about as saints looking for holiness, but to cast our glance on what's in the center...-the promise given and the promise fulfilled. And to take seriously what this means for our life of faith as we live out the vocation God has given us?
Which way do we turn our face, upon what does our gaze fall? I am not rejecting the search for holiness, for discipline and sacrifice, for contrition, (God knows I need it more than most) but what I am suggesting is that repentance-true repentance in the sense of metanoia-means turning not just our gaze but our very being towards God and towards God's grace.
Perhaps the challenge of Lent is to remember and to turn our face to the rainbow and Jesus the Christ-who is the source and symbol of our hope. Yes this sermon is about hope.
It seems counter-intuitive to talk about hope in Lent. Why not save hope for the Easter season when its connection to the Resurrection is so clear and our joy overflows and we have that sense that the future is opening up in new and wonderful ways or even Holy Week when hope and despair are nicely explored as polarities; hope being the promise of God's love that sees us through the pain and darkness of Good Friday.
But any way I went around these readings, hope kept waving its flag. Hey, pay attention to me!
First the rainbow, a sign of God's steadfast love, "God's signature" as one Jewish source puts it-always and forever a sign of hope. And what's amazing is that God tells Noah it's not there so we humans can have a sign. No-- God puts it there so GOD is reminded; God promises not to forget and that is where its power comes from.
And then we see Jesus in the river. I've always wondered why Jesus gets in that line of unwashed humanity heading for that river, wading into that water, giving himself over to a ritual of cleansing for sin. Yet he did and that gesture, that event, begins the unfolding of a story that has at its heart the question of hope.Now hope is a BIG topic; it seems dangerous to go exploring there. Because what is hope? What is Christian hope really?
Of Paul's list of faith, hope and charity, it's always been easier for me to fill in the faith and charity parts. Faith whether we think of it as belief, or discipleship or relationship with God, that's tangible. And charity-acts of love, the embodiment of our faith in relationships or even the internal world of devotion or reconciliation-those things are easy to see and easy to share.
But what exactly is hope-- if it is to be more than a surplus of joy or an antidote to despair, or even worse, just another word for optimism, mistaking the buoyancy of our own possibilities for hope. Hopefully, we say, next year will be better; hopefully, this project will turn out well; hopefully the Dow will rise again; hopefully, and yet..and yet...we know that things might not get better, that our particular hopes can be realized or they can be dashed by things outside our control, that we are subject to powers and principalities. We think we can control our destiny but the more we chase that, the more it can elude us...and yet we are called to hope... Paul says hope is faith in things unseen, the future, the not yet, the eschaton.
But I would argue that he is also talking about the intangibles of the here and now. Hope is not a commodity, not a means to an end. We don't just have hope, or need hope. As children of God, our identity and our vocation is to live in hope, not in the abstract or disconnected from life, but in the incarnate lives that we live.
For years my ministry was at a Children's Hospital. Now hope is the stock in trade for children's hospitals-the joint fundraising effort is called the children's miracle network. But where I learned about hope was from the families and the staff. They taught me a lot about hope and this is what I learned:
First, Hope is born in relationship-yes, hope is born in the deep connection of God's abiding love and deep attachment to us; we matter to God and so we matter to each other.
Second, Hope is yearning for the good, the good of the people we love, the communities we belong to and the future in which we participate and -we hope-for the people and communities and futures that exist farther away from us, closer to the horizon.
And finally hope is about fidelity. Hope calls us to fidelity, to acts of faithfulness, generosity, selflessness, sacrifice, and humility, fidelity embodied in our choices, our commitments and our relationships.
The hero in that movie discovers an interesting thing. It's not the wilderness itself that is dangerous, not the rattlesnakes or wild beasts of a high prairie or the sudden squalls or lurking shoals of life at sea, but the challenge and the danger that come from the culture he finds himself in, contesting with others over integrity, power and vulnerability (and water rights). He has to make choices, serious choices that affect the lives of others. This isn't just the stuff of action movies; it's the stuff of our lives. So yes, after all, hope is about living between flood and desert; they don't go away.
As we keep our gaze on Jesus Christ we will indeed go into the wilderness. At some point and in some ways, it will mean walking toward Golgotha and the cross-could there be any lonelier or more dangerous place? Jurgen Moltmann warns that where hope abandons the cross, it becomes inflated and then collapses in helplessness. Christian hope has an abiding realism and honesty, yet Moltmann also says that "The spirit of hope and the present power of the resurrection have an explosive effect-the practice of hope in obedience, love and suffering opens up the future..."
And I would add--not just for me and my spiritual development, my vocation and mission, but God's mission and the vocation of the church. Surely living out this vocation given to us means that we cannot sit within the safety of a Jesus zone, basking in the beauty of rainbows and feeling the flutter of doves. Jesus is driven out into the wilderness--he can't stay where he is-
he has to be on the move-as the one sent as gift to reconcile all creation to God's intentions-to bring the horizon of God's love closer to us and us closer to God's love. And so in hope we live into our vocation as followers of Christ and children of God, living a life of faithfulness predicated on the faithfulness of God, on that rainbow in the cloud, that man wading into a river, and that savior being driven into the wilderness.
