Texts: I Peter 3: 8-16a
Accounting for the Hope that I Feel (Even in Foreboding Times)
“Always be ready to give an account for the hope that lives inside of you…” -I Peter 3
I had intended to offer something upon the theme of Thanksgiving this morning. I recently finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s book Mayflower, an account of the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Native American tribes in New England during the 17th century. There are lessons to be learned from that mostly forgotten story, and I had hoped to share them with you today as we all prepare for the holiday later this week.
In the lead up toward writing that sermon, our staff met for our weekly staff meeting, and we began as we usually do, by sharing whatever is going on in each of our lives. There are ways in which our meetings can be terribly inefficient, because we tend to spend a lot of time just talking. And that accomplishes something that is, for me, far more important than efficiency. We have a staff that knows one another. And we actually enjoy one another’s company. Having been in churches my whole life, it’s worth flagging how unusual that is. It might not seem it, but by investing in that kind of relational time, we’re grounding all of the work that goes on in this place. As a leader, if I were asked to choose between efficiency and relationship, I’d choose the latter every time, even if it means that things take a little longer.
This past week we took more time than usual in that sharing phase of our meeting. Around the table many of us gave voice to a sense of dark foreboding. Culturally speaking, it seems as though we’re passing through a very bleak moment of our history, and that it’s hard to imagine how we’ll emerge from it. You know what I’m talking about. It’s what everyone is talking about. Testimony after testimony has emerged in the impeachment hearings from people who have built careers quietly and competently doing their work. Those testimonies have implicated our national leaders in a sleazy campaign of deceit, bribery, and corruption. Meanwhile, those testimonies were met with sneers, sarcasm, insults, threats, prevarications and outright denials. Some of the foreboding around the table had to do with comparisons with the past: whereas in the Watergate era, something called truth seemed to matter, in our era, for many, it’s worthy of little more than a shrug. But far more of the foreboding had to do with the tone of the rebuttals, and the spirit from which those rebuttals emerged. It seemed, to those of us sitting around the table, to emerge from a spirit of crass cynicism. But more than that, it seems to indicate something closer to nihilism, both in our leadership and in much of the public. It’s hard to know how this story will end, where it will lead, or how we’ll ever put all the pieces back together that seem to be falling apart around us.
I mostly listened throughout the conversation. I agreed with everything being said around the table. But as the conversation unfolded on Wednesday, I was noticing my own feelings were a little different. It wasn’t quite gloom that I felt. It wasn’t even foreboding, although I recognize there are powerful reasons to feel that way. Maybe it was because Thanksgiving is almost here, and there will soon be pies. Maybe it was because I was going to see Bob Dylan with my friend David Good later that night. Maybe it was because I love this time of year, with Advent approaching. Those are all humanizing moments, and humanizing moments do count when it comes to combating despair.
But in truth, I don’t think it was any of those things. What I felt was deeper somehow. It was a reassurance and calm that I’ve been trying to unpack ever since. “Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is inside of you,” the author of I Peter says to his readers. It’s a useful instruction for all of us. It reminds us that in faith, we have grounds for hope. And it reminds us that it’s often necessary to share that hope with one another, because we often need it. And so what I want to do this morning is to tell you, and myself, just why I feel as I do. I do so simply because I want you to sense something of that same reassurance that the author of I Peter describes.
The content of the hope described in that letter has nothing to do with a country, or with political solutions to particular problems. The hope of that letter isn’t located in a leader, or the absence of a leader. It isn’t located in a form of government, and it’s certainly not found in vague assurances that “things will someday get better.” To think biblically is to grasp that often, the external circumstances around us don’t get better. The record of the Hebrew people, to say nothing of the earliest Christians, suggests the opposite – they move from upheaval to disaster to catastrophe and back. And yet despite all of that, those ancient forbears of our faith were tenacious in their hope, in their assurance that there is something deeper and better than all other spurious grounds for hope. That deeper assurance has to do with God, with that little light that each of us possesses, a little light that somehow also possesses us.
Over the past several years, my task as a minister has been to remind you of that, and to suggest just how pervasive and powerful that light actually is – even within the darkness. Do you remember The Lifters, Dave Eggers’ story about tunneling underground to find the places in our lives, and in the world, that most need our support if the ground beneath our feet is to be stabilized? Lifters are out there everywhere. For every sinkhole that seems to open, there are people working to stabilize the ground, even as the ground shakes and trembles. There are a lot of lifters right here in this place. This whole community has done the work of lifting, propping the world up and giving it support. You did it with Malik and Zahida. You’re doing it with Miguel Torres and his family. You’re doing it with Jose. You’ve done it for many refugee families who have resettled here. And you do it for one another. Have you ever visited the Ladies Who Stitch when they’re at work? They all know something about lifting. All of you do. I know it because I’ve seen it.
But what about that word, God? What shall we say about that, and how shall it not sound like a false or empty promise? God, for me, has never been a deus ex machina, swooping in to save us like a superman or a savior from afar. Such a God, such a being, no longer holds or persuades me. Still, I do believe that God insists, and persists, in each of our lives.
A few months ago I listened to an extraordinary interview with a medical doctor who also does research into ecology and spirituality.[1] His name is Zach Bush, and he runs a clinic and an institute down in Charlottesville. During the interview, Bush spent the better part of an hour diagnosing the looming ecological catastrophe bearing down upon us, from soil health to food consumption, and from chemical pollutants to weather catastrophes. The assessment was apocalyptic. But in the final twenty minutes of the interview, he made a stunning pivot.
He described an evening during his medical residency when he had been awake for 36 hours straight. And on this one particular night, three different people went into cardiac arrest. Strangely, he and his team were able to resuscitate all of them. Not only that, Bush reported that, to a person, they had each experienced something that felt expansive, warm, and absolutely loving. One person suggested that for the first time in his life, he felt fully accepted in that moment of transition beyond the veil.
What if that’s the deepest and truest thing about the world? What if there’s something out there that wants us here, that loves us, and that accepts us all the way down, even if we’ve brought the world to the brink of disaster? What if despite all our striving and all of our failures, there’s something or someone out there who is infusing life with a kind of beneficent grace, and what if we were just mostly too dense and too preoccupied and too alienated to know it?
But what if it was an encounter with death that brought all of that about? Neither Bush nor I am suggesting that it’s better to be dead than alive. What if, in encountering our mortality, we realized that death wasn’t to be feared, but was actually a moment of profound expansion, and of grace? And what if that freed us to treat other, smaller moments of death as invitations to live into that grace? That would imply that even as we hurtle toward catastrophe, ushered toward the brink by our own worst impulses, there may yet come a moment, or a series of moments, in which our souls are enlarged, in which we’re afforded the courage to change, in which we manage to live into the grace and acceptance that already do infuse our lives. What if we could live that way throughout the entirety of our lives?
What Dr. Bush described is a dynamic that theologians have known about for a long time. It’s called the theology of the cross, coupled with a theology of resurrection. From the very space of death, from the wreckage of a disaster, the most profound affirmation of life, and of the goodness infusing all things, emerges. The Apostle Paul puts it this way: nothing in heaven or on earth, not even death, nothing, can separate us from the love of God expressed in the life of Jesus.
There are reasons to be gloomy, and maybe downright despondent just now. God knows the wreckage just keeps piling up. But almost despite myself, I find that I actually do believe in that beneficent goodness underneath it all. I find, almost to my own amazement, that I really do trust that there is such a thing as grace, and that there is an absolutely loving and accepting Presence holding it all together. That Presence gives us the capacity to change and to grow. It helps to keep us vital, and creative. It gives us the courage to reach out, and to trust one another. I can’t say how, or why. But I really do trust that Presence, and I really do believe it has the power to sustain us.
I’ll conclude with a story I read just yesterday, about Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers is having a little moment right now, and I, for one, can’t wait to see the movie about him that just came out. The story is this: Rogers was a Presbyterian minister and a lifelong Republican. For any Republicans in the room, please take heart – you have no less than Fred Rogers as an exemplar of what that party might still be. That affiliation led President George H.W. Bush to invite Rogers to a fundraiser during height of the first Iraq war, even though Rogers was a lifelong pacifist. Despite some misgivings, Rogers accepted the invitation. At the lectern, flanked by President Bush and Arlen Spector, Rogers seemed tiny. He told the story of a little girl who was drawing with crayons in school. The teachers asked her about the drawing, and the little girl said, “I am making a picture of God.” The teachers pointed out that no one knows what God looks like, Rogers said. The girl just smiled and answered, “They will now.”
With that, he asked everyone in the room to bow their heads, and he began to pray. And he prayed about listening to the cries of despair in America, and about turning those cries into rays of hope. When he was done, he simply left the room. He was no longer tiny. He had become a giant.[2]
There’s something inside all of us, but outside of us too. That something, that Someone, loves us. That something, that Someone, accepts us. It helps us to listen, and to turn despair into rays of hope. I trust in that Someone more than anything. I hope you can too.
[1] As heard on the Rich Roll Podcast: https://www.richroll.com/podcast/zach-bush-414/
[2] “The Mister Rogers No One Saw,” published in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/magazine/mr-rogers.html
