We Have This Hope. . .
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Easter Day, April 12, 1998
I have a great Easter story to tell you. Some of you have heard it before, but you can hear it again. It takes place in Sunday School. It could be ours. In any case, as Lent wound down, the church school teacher began to prepare her class for Easter. "What is Easter?" she asked her eight-year-olds. "What happens on Easter?" One little fellow raised his hand and eagerly answered, "Easter is the day when all the family comes to the house and we eat a big turkey and watch football." The teacher kindly suggested he might be thinking not of Easter, but rather of Thanksgiving.
And then a little girl raises her hand. "I know about Easter," she says. "Easter is the day when we come downstairs early in the morning and we see all the presents under the tree." The teacher's face falls. She suggests the little girl probably has Christmas on her mind. But then, just over there, the teacher sees a little hand raised. Her spirits perk up as she hears a lad begin the story: "Easter is the time when Jesus was crucified and dies." Our teacher smiles and nods her head in encouragement. The little boy continues, "Then Jesus is buried and three days later he comes out of the grave -- and if he sees his shadow we have six more weeks of winter."
That is the kind of occurrence upsetting our author to the Hebrews. He finds himself panicked about his congregation. They are going through the mill. The faith they confess seems in a shambles. Figuratively speaking, they cannot tell Easter from Ground Hog Day. They experience a world riddled with injustice, unfairness, cruelty. Where is the promised goodness? They work at trying to change things, but human inertia, stupidity, powergrabs and greed seem no less the order of the day. Their church proves to be a laughing stock, outsiders mocking what they perceive to be nothing more than a giant religious hoax, others ostracizing them, beating them up. Their mood matches the observation of H.L. Mencken nearly two millennia later: "Hope is a pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible." Time to shut the whole enterprise down; close the church, be done with the whole ludicrous enterprise.
And do you know what they get from our author? He is really a preacher, you know. Can you guess how he approaches this drained and hopeless crowd? He begins by laying on a little sarcasm. "Hey, you clowns," he writes, "I want to tell you something, but I don't think you're smart enough to get it. I've got some great stuff to tell you, but you may be too dumb to take it in." He uses some dinner table imagery. He says, "I've got some roast beef, but you want to nibble pablum. Here's caviar, and you're reaching for pizza." But with these cheap shots our author gets the rise he wants. "Oh yeah?" responds the congregation. "Dumb, are we? Try us! Stupid you say? No way! Give it to us straight." And so our preacher spreads it on thick. He tells that faltering, fatigued, failed church that, by Heaven, theirs is a God whose promises stick; that when everything seems to be going down the drain, a Divine presence hangs in there with them. "Look at Abraham," he says. "God makes promises there;" he promises Abraham the siring of a whole people, beginning with the preposterous pregnancy of his 80 year old spouse Sarah, who responds with hysterical laughter at a prospect so bizarre. But through the toughest of times, the most threatening of circumstances, Abraham endures and God makes good.
And then our preacher advises us to look at Jesus, betrayed by friends, clobbered by hatred, tried by hacks, bloodied up on a Cross, jammed into a tomb -- dead. If you want to talk about hope shot down, love blasted, promises slaughtered: you begin there. That is where love dies, hope evaporates, Divine promises run into a stone wall. Our preacher knows hopelessness when he sees it; and he knows that his readers as well as a lot of us stand in the middle of some crucifixion convinced, with Mencken, "Hope is a pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible."
Is that why we are here today? Is that why we sing these hymns, say these prayers, read these great Biblical testimonies: because we are crazy? Touched by some pathology? No way! Our preacher insists hope holds at the Cross or it holds nowhere. He tells us the promises of God can bear through the worst of circumstances, yea, the terrible things we do to one another, and claim a victory. He reminds us patience is a function of hope, endurance a burden of hope. We find ourselves knotted to hope, he writes, as if to the end of a great cable making its way through the strife and stress, the trouble and crunch of life; the other end secured to the steady, immovable, constant, arm of One who pledges to be with us through all the dangers and threats we encounter in life and who, in death, promises to never let us go.
I
Can you believe that this morning? Is hope, as our preacher writes, a sure and steadfast anchor of your soul? Can it bear you through the worst life dishes out? Let me tell you of one person who lived by hope -- and died with it, too.
I suspect some of you are familiar with John Tully Carmody. He is a devout Catholic, a Philosopher, who, with his spouse Denise Lardner Carmody, for years reflected on the vast range of world spiritualities. On Good Friday and Easter, 1992, he wrote his first letter to friends informing them of his "multiple myeloma," described as "an incurable cancer of the bone marrow -- a mindless cloning of excessive plasma cells that inevitably so destroys one's blood that one succumbs to infection or a cognate occasion. . ." In the course of his three and one half years of battling this illness, Carmody made testimony to a faith and a hope, putting this illness in its transcendent perspective. He assembled a book of poetic Psalms entitled "God is No Illusion" and using Noah as a pledge of God's fidelity, just as our Hebrews preacher uses Abraham, Carmody wrote from his death bed:
O God, increase the time when you show us your plan.
If we can hope that our pain serves a purpose --
even just your inscrutable demand that we suffer --
it is less likely to destroy our spirits.
Such a hope tends to come through endurance
building itself up day by day
as we learn that trouble, frustration and pain
need not be our entire definition.
If often they defeat us,
laying our bodies and minds and spirits low,
sometimes we can resist them,
laugh and celebrate a rainbow.
After the flood Noah enjoyed the rainbow.
It remains a symbol of your pledge
never again to destroy the world by water.
The rainbows in personal experience,
the times of beauty and peace after the deluge,
can be equally symbolic.
So once I watched a woman
come out of her treatment,
then square her shoulders and grin at her daughter:
"Let's get a burger and a beer!"
You had moved in her spirit, stirred up her feistiness,
and given her back her self.
When her pain had gotten in all its licks,
she discovered she was still standing,
and that she was still more than her woe.
How about you? How about me? More than our woe? Hope: the anchor of the soul.
II
But more. Our preacher has a discouraged and defeated congregation on his hands. He wants them, as he writes elsewhere, "to lift their drooping hands and to strengthen their weak knees." Now there is an Easter promise! Hope for churches! Hope for Congregations!
I have to tell you, I love seeing you all here this morning. I suspect many of you may make it to church -- any church -- perhaps at most a couple of times a year. It is OK – it is great having you here today. No doubt, over the course of your lifetime you have run up against any number of reasons to say "thanks, but no thanks" to church. I can sympathize with you. We church folk can be judgmental, moralistic, egregiously exclusive. We have supported crusades against women, gays, Jews, people of color and plastered Christ's name across the banners of war. It is terrible, and a lot of you detect, as one man rightly observes, "The power of hell is strongest where the odor of sanctity fills the air."
And that may be just the worst of it. There are people who may creep in here -- not simply today -- perhaps on other Sundays as well, -- people discouraged by the church's tendency to squabble over paint color, coffee hour venues, flower arrangements, music tastes; nit-picking and badgering one another nearly to death. They may feel the church is something like Noah's Ark. "If it weren't for the storm outside, they couldn't stand the smell inside."
Sad! True! You know Kathleen Norris, she of those two seraphic bestsellers, Dakota and The Cloister Walk. Her new anthology, Amazing Grace, describes her tip-toeing back into church after years of absence. When she told a friend of hers she planned to join a church, her friend asked, "What's the matter? Did you have a lobotomy?" Her father, a stalwart agnostic, feared she might reject him. When she joins a little North Dakota Presbyterian Church, an elder in the church, whom she does not care for at all, an ill-tempered and cruel gossip, the epitome, she writes, of what can make small town life miserable -- this elder, whom she calls "Ed," rises and greets the new members, mumbling, "Welcome to the Body of Christ." Her mouth drops open. The minister's mouth drops open. From Ed's mouth they never expected to hear words "remotely like this." She realizes that while she may not like Ed much, she is now commanded to love him. And then, walking with shaky legs to the front of the church to be welcomed, her eyes lock with a religious and political female antagonist causing her mind to jump to that classic Western movie line: "This town ain't big enough for both of us." She feels like turning around, getting out of there, but she can't -- because she had just been welcomed into the Body of Christ.
Of course! She realizes that churches are not tight little clubs. They are messy, sloppy, open societies. And in them you will find polarities representing the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Hillary Clinton, Mother Theresa and Donald Trump, Jesse Jackson and Jesse Helms.
And friends, if you look around this room this morning, to your left, your right, up, down -- wherever -- you will see, as Kathleen Norris affirms, "a motley crew assembled in Christ's name -- yourself, myself in the great throng -- and how unlikely it all is. The whole lot of us," she writes, "warts and all, just seems so improbable, so absurd, I figure that only Christ would be so foolish -- or so powerful -- as to have brought us together."
Right on, Kathleen Norris! We are black, we are white, we are gay, we are straight, we are rich, we are poor; some of us wandered in here searching for solace, others of us sure of the Easter promise; some of us are wounded, some of us, confident; some of us cannot sing a single hymn, others of us eager to let it go at the top of our lungs.
My soul! What draws us here today? The foolishness? Nay, the power of Christ! And dare I speculate, hope? Hope? God grant this vast, motley crew; be a sign of the world which Hope designs, and that among one another we may discover the presence of the One who truly anchors our souls.
III
And just once more. Hope forged by the likes of Easter makes for new possibilities in our human relationships. We have been battered over these last weeks with the terrible and violent hatred and action surfacing out of the human heart. Those Jonesboro boys still baffle us. The furies let loose in that Holy City surrounding the garden harboring the tomb of the risen Christ continue to haunt us. We watch from a distance as the Balkans seem to go up in flames again. And yes, this morning, with our fingers crossed, and our prayer shawls intact, we witness an almost astounding agreement in Northern Ireland. Assassins, bombers, terrorists hating each other for generations reach skittishly to embrace one another while in another part of town walls dividing Catholic from Protestant continue to rise, and extremists on both sides -- ostensible Christians all -- label all compromise treasonous. Will "Good Friday really be good Friday?" as John Hume of the Northern Catholic Party asserted. Will "hearts finally weep over Belfast as Jesus wept over Jerusalem?" asked the Reverend Jim Campbell as he prayed with Catholics and Protestants in historically bloody Ormeau Park. We can hope.
Last weekend we were reminded again by Martin Luther King, Jr., as we commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of his assassination -- we were reminded by one who anchored his soul in hope, that vengeance and retaliation are nothing more than a recycling of the old order. "We must in strength and humility meet hate with love," he said. "We will be accused of not being practical in a dog-eat-dog world. "But," he insists "we've been practical for too long now and what has practicality gotten us but deeper confusion and chaos. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of humankind we must follow another way. . ." And then, amid those excruciating, and angry times, facing water hoses, electric prods, fierce dogs, police batons and bats, he said,
To our most bitter opponents we say, "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with our soul force. Do to us what you will and we will continue to love you. . . Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom. But not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."
In our suffering and conflicted world, whether Belfast or Jerusalem, Jonesboro or Boston, I pray we claim this profound Divine hope as the anchor of our soul.
We began with a confusion between Easter and Ground Hog Day. Let me tell you of one man who got Easter right. Winston Churchill, they say, planned his own funeral. In it he included a smashing celebration of hope. When the day of his funeral services arrived, in the dome at London's St. Paul's Cathedral, there stood two buglers. As the Archbishop of Canterbury articulated the final Amen of the Benediction, the first bugler began to play "Taps." He finished. The congregation stood hushed for only a moment. Then the second bugle rang out, "Reveille."
Reveille! Isn't that what rings out on Easter morn for you, for me, for this church, for God's world? Of course! It signals forever this Easter hope is ours, "a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul. . ."
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
