Easter’s Hope
Given by James Covington on March 23rd, 2008
Easter! What a fitting time it is for Easter’s arrival this year, practically on the first day Spring. Birds are laying eggs; tulips and daffodils are poking through the soil. While the temperature remains a bit crisp, I think I feel a softness in the air. More light in the day.
Easter is a holiday of resurrection. Life from death. The new isn’t created out of the old, but out of the death of the old. Flowers bloom from the corpse of last year’s growth. The death of the worm feeds the bird in the nest. From death will come life. Can’t you hear the poetry of it? What a hopeful holiday!
Perhaps hope is Easter’s truest meaning. Harvey Cox writes: Hope is what the Easter story hopes to evoke–a hope not based on weighing possibilities but on one’s own experience of what is most real in life.
The story of Jesus is a story about hope. I seriously doubt that Jesus physically rose from the dead. But I don’t have any doubt about his life, teachings and message of hope. He had radical hope even as the world was crashing down around him; even as poverty and corruption crushed his people; even as he was dying on a cross, that there was something worth living for. Jesus’ life and death was a surrender to this greater calling in humanity–to lay down sword and shield, turn the other cheek, love your neighbor as yourself, and in so doing, to give yourself over to hope.
In the midst of the presidential election we hear a great deal about hope these days. That’s because of so much despair both in regard to world affairs and political failures. Indeed, there are days when things in our nation and our world don’t look very hopeful. Strife and worry, war, poverty, economic downturns, global warming; genocide continues in Darfur, oppression in Tibet. And the rich are getting richer. If we want to change things, we need all the hope we can muster. Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote: We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. But hope for what?
Barack Obama has written a book on hope and in his inspiring, masterful speech this past week we heard him mention hope once more. As you know he tried to clarify his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago which of course will remain fodder for political/media debate forever. But more importantly, in my opinion, he also addressed quite eloquently the racial divide and animosities that continue in our nation. He referred to “our common hopes.” “We have different stories,” he said, “but we hold common hopes—that out of many we are truly one.”
My comments about Obama are not intended either as an endorsement of a nonendorsement of Obama. My main emphasis in referring to him is on hope. Interestingly, Martin Marty, one of America’s foremost theologians and who I greatly respect and regularly read, wrote last week, that while he and his wife, both white, frequently attend the Trinity Church of Christ in Chicago, he is always greeted with warmth and hospitality. Marty writes: “The big thing for Wright is Hope. You hear hope, hope, hope. Lots of ordinary people are there; they are there not to blast whites; they are there to get hope.” I like that. I accept that. Reminds me of us. We are here this morning to get hope. Aren’t we?
What kind of hope? What do we mean by hope?
Hope is elusive. She has a cousin called optimism and a sister called faith, but she herself is hard to ferret out. One would think she could be found in mansions, but strangely enough, she is more likely to be found in hovels[1]. One would think that she would be at a holiday party, full of smiles and glitter festivities and wine, but the truth is she is more apt to be found at the bedside of one who is dying.
Hope is the very bottom layer of reality. Hope is not wishing, since wishing has an object of its desire, and wishing takes us into an imagined future, into a place where we might not actually want to be, once we get there. We need to take care in our wishing.
Hope is not optimism–optimism is more a gift of temperament, I think. Hope is not deciding and planning and controlling, for when we live with hope, in hope, all plans are open to revision–every day, every moment. Hope is not self-confidence, but rather confidence in something larger than the self. Hope is not the blissful but totally unfounded belief that everything will turn out all right. Sometimes the diagnosis is bad. Sometimes your spouse does leave. Sometimes the diagnosis is terminal. Hope is what holds you to life when, in fact, nothing is turning out all right. It is the paradoxical, inexplicable connection to–what shall I name it–something Holy, sacred, inexplicable that will not let you go. You can’t think your way to it, or capture it because you desire it. It is a gift freely given. When hope fills your being, you can be sure it has wafted in on the wings of grace. [2]
Emily Dickinson captured it so well. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” she says, “That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all./ . . . . I’ve heard it in the chilliest land/ And on the strangest sea,/ Yet never, in extremity,/ It asked a crumb of me.” [3]
We use the word hope casually, don’t we? And that’s all right. But I’m using the term in a different way from “I hope I can get a reservation,” or “I hope it doesn’t rain today” or “hope all is well.” Hope is something we live by, something we are rooted in that fills our very being.
Let me see if I can bring it down to a story. A minister colleague tells of a hospital visit with a parishioner diagnosed with terminal cancer. On this day, the parishioner, a woman was crying, fearful. An understandable response when a person is about to lose everything she ever loved–and about to cross over to the other side, to the unknown. The minister listened to her fears, encouraged her to cry, and then after a while, asked her, “What is the source of your hope?” thinking to himself, this may be a really stupid question, considering the state she’s in. But in spite of her tears, the minister thought he saw hope in her face. The woman was quiet for a while, thinking, and then she said, with eyes wide open, “Hope is the essence. It’s not about ego. It asks nothing. It just bubbles up within me, from some source other than me.” There it is! [4]
Hope is the energy within that sustains us on a passage that would be too arduous and dispiriting otherwise. Hope is the mysterious sense of something or someone more beyond what we touch and see, that calls us beyond what we touch and see and thereby enables us to engage what we touch and see without being defined or trapped by what we touch and see.[5] Hope is an anticipation of the good. So that’s the first thing I want to say about hope.
Here’s the 2nd thing. Hope is the balm of connection. The connection of each human being to each other is the mother of hope. This is what Jesus was telling us. That is what the Buddha taught. We are all one.
Connectedness. We are brothers and sisters. The health of one is the health of all. Once we can understand that lesson, we can be that connected person. You can be that person who feels, who knows in your bones that your fate is not different than anyone else’s.
That is what this connectedness, the root of hope, is. It is being with each other. Being connected, we have no choice but to feel the pain of others. We have no choice but to truly do unto others as we would have them do unto ourselves. We will know that we are not different, that my well being is utterly linked to your well being regardless of my sexual orientation, my race, my gender, my class. As Obama intoned: We have different stories, but we also have common hopes–that out of many, we are truly one!..
Here’s the third thing: There are places where hope lives. And in finding these places, finding those rare and authentic people who have the faith to live hopefully, we may find inspiration for our own hope.
Wendy Wright, a teacher of theology, says that she was 50 years old before she found hope. She met her on the island of Hispaniola, on the westward side of Haiti. Wright was accompanying students on a semester-abroad program.
Passing through innumerable tiny Dominican villages, their little troop saw concrete block one-room houses painted bright pink, blue, and green. A family goat might be tethered by the roadside, and there was always a rooster strutting as if he owned the place. Outhouses are the norm, but just about every hamlet features at least one colmado, where Coca-Cola can be purchased.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere. Haitians typically earn $200 a year. Seventy-five percent of the people are illiterate. Seventy percent are unemployed or underemployed. The hills, once lush, have been plundered for wood, leaving the landscape barren. For decades the cruel military dictatorship run by the Duvalier family took the wealth of the land.
So what did Wendy Wright find hopeful about this scene? Where could hope possibly lodge? Perhaps in the fledgling democracy. Or in the amazing resiliency of the Haitian people. Or in the color and vitality of the culture. But no, Wright said. She said, “Hope met me in all the places where I least expected her.” She met me in the empty spaces. In absence, abuse, neglect. In the ravaged soil. In the palpable sense of danger left over from the years of vicious repression. Where there was no reason for hope, there she appeared. She was found where everything else was stripped bare. Hope lives at the deepest layer of reality, beyond reason, beyond expectation, beyond what might be dreamed. So this is the third thing: hope is found in the deepest and sometimes starkest realities of life. [6]
In fact this is the very truth the followers of Jesus awakened to on Easter morning. Despite the harrowing experience of Jesus’ death, they found a spirit in their midst that comforted them and gave them hope. They eventually call this inexplicable and ineffable presence the Holy Spirit. It was not divine in the usual way, however, like a cosmic patriarch who controls the universe or a divine savior who dies to save humanity. Rather, it was a spirit that enabled them to see themselves and each other in a different light.
Slowly it dawned on them that the world would be saved not by divine intervention, but by human action. They began to see themselves not as pawns of a capricious god or passive followers of a divine messiah, but rather as agents of transformation in their own right. Jesus had always been clear with them about these matters. You are the light of the world, he insisted; the kingdom of God is among you.
Much of the religious legacy handed down to us suggests that agency lies beyond us; in a supernatural god or in a divinely appointed prophet or messiah. The moment this illusion dies is the moment we can begin anew, as child of a God who stands not above us or in place of us, but within and among us. In my view, God is the idea we use to convey our conviction that we come from the same mysterious source and share the same ultimate destiny. We are all in this together. In this sense, God provides a vital connection for me with life.
And my final word this morning is this: hope is not without lament. Sometimes we hope against hope. Meaning, sometimes, the things we hope for will not come to pass. Sometimes our hope for the end of shedding of innocent blood, the end of wars, the end of hatred and fear by the force of love and openness, will not come to pass. So hope and lament cannot be separated in a fallen world. But we cannot despair.
We cannot change the world. None of us can–no matter how loudly we shout, no matter how hard we work for peace, or end domestic violence or make our towns and children safe from crime and our families safe from racist cross-burnings, or bigotry. By that I mean, we cannot change human nature, or so it seems. There will always be strife.
And yet, we are also not foredoomed to be defeated. Hope affirms that events can be influenced, that change for the good can happen, that wars can end. We may not be able to change the world irrevocably, but we can save the world from ourselves, again and again and again!
Jesus knew his death wouldn’t change the world. The reality and myth of his death and resurrection inspired hope in his followers and it continues today. Hope frees us to make the choice to do what we can. So live my friend and live hopefully: work hard to be that connected person. Live hopefully: do what you can, even though you have considered all the facts. Accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope that you can make a difference for the good. I do not hope my children will avoid all suffering and pain; but I do hope in them–that they too will save the world.
So live hopefully as your authentic self, answering the call of the Holy each and every day that you live, “knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” (Romans 8, New Testament).