Hope for the Long Haul
Isaiah 2:1-5 Romans 13:11-14
December 1, 2019
Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley
The architects of Advent and Christmas lived in the northern hemisphere. They did not choose to celebrate Jesus’ birthday in the midst of winter because of any evidence that Jesus was born in December. They chose to celebrate it then because other people in northern latitudes had already figured out that long dark winters needed an infusion of light and cheer if they were to be endured. Those ancient peoples knew that hope was essential to the survival of the human spirit.
Most of our hymns are written by people who live in the northern hemisphere and so they reflect the same worldview. I appreciate the lyrics that we sang in our second hymn “In deepest night, Christ’s coming shall be, when all the world is despairing.” “When all the world is despairing” . . . many of us have deep concerns about the all the world right now. We could easily name places and people and animals and ecosystems in every part of the planet that are in danger from violence and greed and cruelty and indifference. We are aware of the potential for despair. But if the ancient people could hope for the return of the sun, with no understanding of the solar system, then we, who have the gift of the gospel, have so much more reason for hope, and for joy which is strong and loving and fearless.
Isaiah wrote in the midst of war. The people who heard his message had no good reason to hope for peace, no expectation to believe that the weapons of war would ever be transformed into tools for the community. Yet, they yearned for the promised transformation when God’s reign will be established for all to see. It is a deep hope which persists despite all evidence to the contrary. Someone must have believed Isaiah, because they preserved his message.
The Christians in Rome had expected Jesus’ imminent return, but as the years passed and the older generations began to die, they might have thought their hope was misplaced. Paul himself believed that Christ would return in his lifetime. That did not happen, but theologically Paul was not wrong. “He was right to believe that every moment in time is rich with divine possibility. He was right to urge his readers to “wake up from sleep” – to pay attention and be alert to the imminent inbreaking of eternity.”[1]
We, who live on this side of resurrection, live in the anticipation of the next thing God will do. Confident that history’s final outcome is safely in God’s hands, we have hope for the long haul. Despite what is happening at the moment, a day of justice and kindness and mercy is coming.
Hope is perhaps better caught than taught. When we are tempted to despair, we may lean on the hopeful strength of others. So, today, let me simply offer three images of hope.
Most of us are angry and heartbroken over the situation at our southern border. The militarization of that border, the systematic separation of asylum-seeking families, the detention of children for profit occurring simultaneously with the deportation of some parents, and now the remain in Mexico protocols – these all seem to be actions of a government impervious to its own citizens’ demands for compassion and justice. It would be easy to lose hope, but we cannot, especially because those right in the thick of it have not.
There are many volunteers on both sides of the border. They work to relieve the suffering of those stuck in refuge camps waiting to cross and of those who make it through the detention process and are released with little information and very few resources. The fact that individuals are banding together and stepping up to attempt to meet needs that governments are choosing to ignore – that right there is evidence of persistent hope.
But here’s the image from the border that I’m loving right now. It is people playing on see-saws that transect the border. It finally happened in July, but the two artists who put it in place had been working on it for a decade. They designed the pink steel beams which were installed through a part of the border fence that separates Juárez, Mexico, and a desolate area of Sunland Park, New Mexico. They asked for permission, but never received an answer. Finally, they decided that it was not illegal and they just did it. It was only in place for about 45 minutes, but both US Border Patrol and Mexican soldiers came by to observe.
Teeter-totters can symbolize issues of inequality, of balances, of separation. Using one can also speak to sharing, community, and collaboration. There is give and take. The actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other. The pink color was chosen because in Juárez, it is used to remember women who have died from violence since the early 1990’s.[2]
The children and adults bobbing up and down on them probably didn’t think about all that stuff though. For them, it was a rare moment of shared play with people from the other side. And for those looking on at the time, or in video, it is a moment of resistance, a point that celebrates the humanity of people of all nationalities, an image of childlike joy infused with hope.
The second image of hope comes from our sister E. E is dying. She is quite upfront about that. E lived almost all of her 88 years on the same street. She grew up in the house her parents built and then, when she married, they built their own house two doors down. But she is dying in a nursing home an hour from her lifelong home and most of her friends. That distresses me, but if she is distressed, she doesn’t show it. That is just part of the courage with which she faces this final chapter in her life.
Every evening, when the nursing home staff put her to bed, they slide a foam wedge under her. It’s a way of treating her bedsores. The wedge keeps her facing in one direction. She asks them to place it so that she faces the interior of the room. Then, after shift change, sometime in the middle of the night, the new staff will come to check on her. They will help her to turn over and replace the wedge so that she is facing the window. She has told me several times that she asked for this. She says that she often cannot sleep in the wee hours. She asks to be facing the window because, if she cannot sleep, she wants to watch the sky as it gradually, imperceptibly gets lighter and lighter, until the full dawn comes with the sunrise. E knows that she is dying. She is weak and doesn’t feel well most days. And yet, she positions herself to see the sunrise. She inspires me and makes me hope that when my time comes, I will meet it with courage like hers.
Hope in the image of a see-saw and a sunrise, and one more image of hope for today.
In the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, there was a bakery owned by a man named Yankel. Yankel survived the Holocaust. He once said, “You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz. Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar.
The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm,” he said. “Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew - from my hometown I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe, and looked terrible. So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on. All night long; I kept the man warm this way. I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the others in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence.
Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night – they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me… The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…”[3]
Three images from different times, different places. One thing they have in common is that they involve action. Each situation has its own swirl of ideas and feelings, but the hope comes through most strongly because it is enacted.
To live in hope is to act on it, to throw ourselves relentlessly into the struggle for the realization of that hope. The more we trust the God of the future, the more we will be awake to the present. German theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote, “faith, when it develops into hope, causes not rest, but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart but is itself the unquiet heart in us. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.” [4]
John Lewis often says, “Make good trouble.” Hopeful people are troublemakers in the world, the hope that is within us is our source of joy, energy, courage and life itself. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] Joanna Adams, in Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 15.
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/pink-seesaws-at-the-border-wall-showed-that-play-is-a-form-of-protest?fbclid=IwAR1svrxf2x-OTDWb-zFH0c9lS5zVkYeoIysuUg8L_cJi51pURZl2Q4Vf01M
[3] http://kippahdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/yankel.pdf
[4] Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 21