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Rev. Tom
Lenhart Here are some headlines from the past few days – “Myanmar Crisis Deepens”; “Report Assails FDA Oversight of Clinical Trials”; “Mold Problem Found at Hendrick Hudson HS”; “Divorce Me, Please”, “Fretting in the Toy Store”, “Suicide Bomb Kills 27 Afghans”. Charles Dickens famously wrote in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” While I suspect we would not share Dickens’ assessment, most of us would agree that there is plenty to worry about in our world. As a friend of mine said recently, “I can’t remember when so many things seemed out of kilter – our deficits are at historic levels. There is seemingly intractable animosity, if not hatred, among the peoples of the world. Violence has emerged as the dominant method of resolving disputes and differences. Global warming is beginning to affect the quality of life of millions. And our precious resources seem ever more scarce and at risk.” And he continued, “Against this background of critical challenges and daunting problems, there is a paucity of leadership that talks directly and honestly or that speaks from principle and seeks truly to make this a better world – not just be reelected. Whether you share that degree of pessimism or not, I think most of us would agree -- these are difficult times and there seems little reason to hope for a better future. But the times have been difficult before and the future has appeared every bit as dark as or darker than it does today. Such were the times of the prophet Jeremiah. Our passage from the book of Jeremiah that you just heard, remarkably allows us to pinpoint the date of the events chronicled there. It is 888 BCE -- probably August or September. The city of Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Judah and the religious center for most Jews, has been under siege by the Babylonians under King Nebuchadrezzer for many months. Jerusalem we know will fall to the Babylonians in 887. Much of the city, including the Temple, will be destroyed. And most of the Jews in Jerusalem will be forcibly exiled -- many hundreds of miles east to Babylon -- for what will be many generations. The prophet Jeremiah has for years been the lone voice predicting the victory of Babylon, the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people. He has said these events will be punishment for the chosen people who have turned from the worship of Yahweh to the worship of the gods of the Canaanites and others. So dark and negative have been Jeremiah’s prophecies that his writings have been called “the book of doom.” Now, as reported in our passage for today, he is not only like the general populace besieged but he is also under general arrest -- not by the Babylonians -- but by his own people. His words and conduct having been viewed as traitorous, undermining the spirit of the people and. And then we have this remarkable sequence of events. God appears to Jeremiah and says, "One of your cousins will approach you seeking to sell you a piece of property." And lo and behold it happens. His cousin Hanamel comes to the prison at the King’s court and offers Jeremiah the opportunity to buy a piece of land. Now, it is clear that the cousin comes to Jeremiah because custom and law gave to family members the right of first refusal to buy land that had been in a family. We can speculate that Hanamel may have needed to sell because of the siege. What does Jeremiah do? He buys the property and asks his scribe Baruch to put the sealed deed in an earthen jar, in order that it may be preserved for a long time. Every time I hear this story I am amazed. Think about what Jeremiah did. Place his actions in a different time and place, for instance Berlin in 1937. The persecution of the Jews is in full swing. The laws in Germany since 1934 have slowly but inextricably deprived the Jews of their rights, including the right to practice medicine and law, to be in business with gentiles, to own certain property and the list goes on and on. And a Jewish relative in Germany comes to Jeremiah and says “please buy the family homestead; I am leaving for Sweden and need money.” And Jeremiah does and sends the deed to a bank in Switzerland for safekeeping. What Jeremiah did reveals a profound hope for a better future. Jeremiah believes that God will not break God’s promises, including those to the Israelites and that some day the land will be restored to the people. What a sense of hope! Where does such hope come from? How do we find our way to such hope? A family friend, the late Bob Luccock, pointed to the placement of the word “hope” in Paul’s familiar statement from 1 Corinthians 13: 13 “and now faith, hope, love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love”, to explain the source and power of hope. Hope, Luccock suggests, is “preceded by faith and nourished by love.”[1] I would amend this slightly to suggest that real hope arises out of faith and is sustained by love. Certainly, hope is supported at times by our experience. When things have turned out well in a similar situation we are hopeful that they will again. Some times hope is supported by the fact that the statistics are on our side. And sometimes hope arises from our faith in human ingenuity and creativity. Yet, there is no certainty to be derived from these sources. Where does hope come from when the odds aren’t good and conventional wisdom predicts a bad outcome? Hope arises out of something that we place our faith in. I submit the kind of hope that holds and shines in dark and desperate times comes not from these human sources but from an acceptance of and faith in something greater than us – our God who cares about us, indeed loves us. That hope is enduring. Why because it is nurtured by love – by the love we observe, the love we receive and the love we give. And of course we have that greatest of all gifts of love, God’s gift of Jesus who in life and death conquered sin and death for us. Each time we confront love we are reminded of its source, its unending steadfastness and its abiding power. Love never disappears. Some 20 years ago I sat in the dining room of Mindy Weisel and her husband, my partner, Shelly. Mindy is a nationally recognized modern artist creating large colorful abstractions many of which hang in galleries and museums, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Mindy was born just after the war in Germany of Holocaust survivors. Her art arises out of and is consciously influenced by the Holocaust. That night her dining room walls were filled with wonderful and powerful pieces that she had painted. But in the corner was this small sketch on old ordinary paper lovingly framed. It was a glorious picture of a sunrise drawn by her father while in a concentration -- just as the war was over. It was breathtakingly hopeful. And so hope exists even in the face of great adversity. Despite all of this we still find holding on to hope difficult. Why? First, God’s timetable is not our timetable. The things we hope for do not always happen when we think they should. How many prophets and reformers, like Moses, never lived to reach the Promised Land? I think of South Africa and all the opponents of apartheid over many years. Some like Helen Suzman, the often lone legislator who spoke out courageously against it, did live to see the apartheid system dismantled while others like Steve Biko did not. What of Gandhi who died before he could see the fruits of his nonviolent campaign come to fruition? Because the things we long and hope for don’t happen when we want them to, we lose faith and hope. But like Jeremiah we should simply place our deeds in earthen jugs not knowing when they will be accepted as valid, but assured that they will be. Why because even if the things hoped for do not happen when we want – the love around us confirms that God has loved us, loves us now and will always love us. A second reason that hope is difficult is that what we hope for may not be what God desires for us. That too can shatter our hopes. It is what lies behind the passage from Timothy that we just heard. There, the author of Timothy wrote
To hope for and to focus on accumulating wealth is simply destructive. Timothy suggests that in furtherance of faith – “Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.” If riches come with such pursuits then the challenge is to use them appropriately in good works. And so it is that those who seek righteousness, love and gentleness find real hope. A final difficulty in maintaining hope is to hope for the things that are possible. Certainly, miracles happen but our longing should be for things that are with in the realm of possibility. Much as I might wish, I cannot throw a baseball 90 miles an hour, I cannot return Roger Federer’s best serve or perform a life saving operation on a friend or loved one. In point of fact those are not hopes but fantasies. But I can hope that my children can be the best they are capable of being and that they will find love and joy in life. I can hope that someday -- perhaps not in my lifetime -- we will have true equality in this country, when children are judged by the quality of their minds and spirits and not by the color of their skin or the nature of their religious beliefs. Does hope matter, yes it does. James Fallows, the writer and former editor of Us News, told a story some years ago. He was researching a piece on immigration. He traveled to Miami to visit a high school there. The school was roughly 50% black and 50% Hispanic. He was walking the hall with the principal observing the kids and the life of the school when they approached the principal’s office. There on the wall was a list of the individuals on the honor roll. Fallows looked at the list and was dumb-founded to see that all of the names where Hispanic. Surprised he asked for the reason. The principal said -- that despite the similarities in economic status -- there was one difference he had observed between the African-American community and the Hispanic one. The Hispanic families, including the kids, had a palpable hope for a better life down the road – the black kids did not. Hope you see matters even if the path ahead is difficult. To this point we have talked about hope principally as a noun – that is the expectation of something desired. But hope is also an active verb. There is a wonderful book entitled, In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle, by Madeleine Blais.[2] This book chronicles the evolution of the women’s high school basketball team in Amherst, Massachusetts from the end of its disappointing 1992 season through its championship game at the end of the 1993 season. It focuses on the development of the team and its individual players motivated by a dream and a hope for a better season. What stands out in the book is that hope is not simply about the future but it is about today. These girls don’t simply sit back and hope for success; they pursue their hopes and dreams with courage and verve and in the process receive much more than they ever hoped for. And the same lesson is true for us. Our faith is not self-executing. We don’t simply become faithful, hoping and praying for good things and expect that they will happen. Sure we hope that homelessness will disappear but we also know that we must help to make that happen. And, of course, we want global warming to be reversed but know it is a false hope without our actions – small though they be in our homes, offices and, yes, in our church. This aspect of present action is critical even if what we hope for does not occur in our time. No amount of hope for a fair and just society is going to help in Myanmar without the brave actions of brave monks and ordinary citizens who will stand up to the generals. And finally as we sit her today I ask you to remember those who have walked before us in faith and active hope -- those who refused to denounce their faith and so kept it alive against the tyrants of the past and those who with an active hope founded this church and then moved it to this location. Their example should serve as a resource of illumination for us to live our lives in active hope. Hope is both a noun and a verb but more importantly it is at times a muscle that we must faithfully exercise. Amen |
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