By Rev. Peter S. Sawtell, Executive Director, Eco-Justice Ministries
Texts: Jeremiah 17:12-18 and 1 Peter 1:13-21
INTRODUCTION
If you can, I want you to think back about 20 years. It was the start of the Reagan era, and many changes in policy and politics were taking shape after the Carter years. My wife and I were serving as co-pastors of a small, rural parish in central Iowa. Our neighboring pastor and a good friend lived 20 miles down the road. Jim was deeply involved in peace and justice issues, especially dealing with Central America. We would go to visit Jim, and turn up right after he had watched the evening news. He would open the door, and moan, “I’m so depressed!” In those early Reagan years, he saw few signs of hope for the world.
On many levels, a lot of us can understand Jim’s lament. There are problems that we encounter that just won’t be solved by cheerful words of encouragement.
- a neighbor’s struggle with a drawn-out terminal illness
- a dead-end job, with no realistic options for a change
- the political gridlock in our state and national capitols, and the inability to pass even moderate legislation on many issues that are most important to the voters
- the degradation of our global environment, and the inability of business and governments to come to grips with it.
Positive and inspiring stories of success are hard to find. Without sources of hope, it is easy to join the chorus of “I’m so depressed!”
It is easy to talk about faith and religion when the world is looking good. But what do you do when life isn’t living up to your dreams?
Theologically speaking, there’s more to hope than inspiring stories where things worked out right. There’s a type of hope that goes much deeper, and does far more to sustain us in this troublesome world.
This morning, I want us to explore the nature of hope:
- to see what separates the profound sort of hope that we need from the trivial sort of hope that distracts us
- to see how hope makes a real difference in how we live our lives.
HOPE FOR/HOPE IN
“Hope” has a couple of different meanings. We usually think about hope for something.
- Ask a kid before Christmas or a birthday, and you’re sure to get a list of things that they are hoping for.
- Ask a diplomat, and you’ll hear about hopes for peace.
- Ask an environmentalist, and you might hear heartfelt hopes for clean air and water, or a sustainable society.
- Ask a parent, and they will tell you about hopes for their children’s health and happiness.
And all of those are very good things. But they are all out there, in the future. We hope for things that we want to have or see, things that we don’t have now, or that we’re afraid that we won’t have. Indeed, our hoping often arises out of the anxieties that we feel today. We hope for peace, because we are anxious about war and violence. We hope for a clean and stable environment, because we are anxious about the decay and destruction that we see around us.
Hoping for something does nothing at all to deal with our anxiety. Indeed, the more radical our hope for something, the more visionary our hope for something different, the easier it is to fall into despair of ever seeing the hope fulfilled. Our hopes for something different are important, but they don’t always strengthen us.
The other meaning of hope is the lesser used one, and the one that points us in the right direction. Instead of hoping for something, out there, in the vague and uncertain future, we can hope in something now.
If we are feeling anxious about our threatening and difficult world, then we need to place our hope, our trust, in God.
When we place our hope in God, it means that we align ourselves with God’s purposes, God’s values, God’s ethics. It means that we tie ourselves to God’s community. On the most profound level, it means that we believe that God will solve the problems.
Placing out hope in God is something that happens right now. Our hope is not pointed somewhere out in the future and tied up with some desired result. Rather, our hope has to do with where we find meaning and truth. Hope in God is an expression of deep confidence.
In this morning’s Gospel lesson, I think Jesus was pointing toward that distinction between the two kinds of hope. “Don’t be anxious,” he said, about the things that you hope for – food and clothing. Rather, he said, “seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be yours as well.” Place your hope in God, and the things you hope for will take care of themselves.
Let me give a mundane example. If my neighbor is utterly disreputable — living in a pigpen, having loud parties at all hours of the night, selling drugs — I’m likely to be upset about that.
My hope is for a better neighbor. But how do I get there?
I could place my hope in violence. I could go and confront the neighbor with a threat or a baseball bat or a gun, and demand better behavior.
Or I could place my hope in the legal system and the courts. I could use zoning codes and drug laws to drag the bum into court, and try and win a settlement that would solve my problem.
It makes a huge difference whether I place my trust in violence or in the courts. Now, there is no guarantee that I’ll get what I want in either case. I might be more effective if I go next door with threats — or I might get shot. The outcome is not the critical thing.
What is important is the choice I make about where to place my hope. In this example, some of that decision is practical, and some of it is moral. I might place my hope in the courts, even if I’m likely to lose there, because I believe that’s the right way to go about it.
SCRIPTURE
In today’s other scripture readings, we get glimpses into how different “hope in” is from “hope for.”
Our first scripture reading this morning came from the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is my favorite prophet. In addition to profound words of judgement and forgiveness to the people of Judah and Jerusalem, the book gives us glimpses and insights into the person of Jeremiah. This is a prophet who resisted his call, and complained long and hard to God about being stuck in a really lousy calling. Most of the time, apparently, Jeremiah did not enjoy being a prophet.
There was also a period in Jeremiah’s life when God stopped talking to him. The prophetic inspiration dried up. And, it appears that the passage we heard from this morning comes from that time. Jeremiah quotes the taunts of the people around him: “Where is the word of the Lord? Let it come!” But Jeremiah has no word to speak.
But even as Jeremiah waits in his isolation, he still looks to God:
Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved; for thou art my praise.
O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake thee shall be put to shame … for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.
Jeremiah experiences God as silent, but he still proclaims God as the hope of Israel, not just the source of his own personal hopes and desires. This is a profound sort of hope.
The second reading this morning was from the book of 1 Peter, a letter written to a community facing intense persecution. Scholars suggest that it was written from Rome, during the time that the emperor Nero was feeding Christians to the lions, and written to another community, also facing strong persecution. Both the writer and the recipients had daily experiences of the danger and the stress of being oppressed and intimidated.
Peter’s words are not of pie-in-the-sky good news. He does not tell them that everything is going to be fine, and that the emperor’s policies will soon change. Rather, he tells them to be strong in their convictions, to keep doing exactly what it is that leads to their persecution, to hold strong in their commitments to the Christian faith. For, through Christ, Peter wrote,
you have confidence in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and your hope are in God.
The persecution they faced was likely to continue, and probably get worse. But Peter urged the folk to have “faith and hope” in God. And because of their hope, they are to be transformed. They are to be holy. They are to strive for the right and righteous kind of conduct. Their hope tells them who the real judge of their lives will be — not Nero and the Roman officials, whose values and standards are corrupt, but God.
This sort of hope is powerful stuff! It is a different quality of hope than we hear about in our day-to-day conversations. This biblical sort of hope transforms lives and empowers people to courageous living. This profound hope gives strength to people who would otherwise be crippled by totally justifiable anxieties and fears.
When we place our hope in God, as Jeremiah and Peter remind us we should, we are making a commitment to a source of power and a way of doing things. We are saying that, ultimately, God’s way is the right way. We make that proclamation even in the midst of huge problems and great despair. We say that, knowing that the problems we face may not be tidily, quickly or easily resolved for us.
Hope, hope in God, transforms us when life is difficult. Hope does not make everything happy and pleasant. Hope does give meaning and purpose to lives in the real world.
OTHER HOPES
Now, I want to be honest. There are other places to locate hope beside God. We can, and we must, make choices about where to place our hope. In today’s world, there are many options for our ultimate convictions about the right way of doing things.
- We can place our hope in the economy and business and the free market – to believe that “the invisible hand” of the market knows best and will solve all of our problems. Many people have placed their hope in the free market. Indeed, there’s a recent article titled “The Market as God.”
- We can place our hope in violence, or in self-interest — and many people have.
- Or, we can place our hope in God. And with that come some commitments to biblical and historic notions of justice and peace, of appropriate power and humility, of compassion and community.
And just like my example about the bad neighbor, the choice that we make about where to place our hope makes a profound difference in how we live our lives. Where we place our hope determines what we will do. It does not necessarily determine what will happen. But it does determine how we’ll feel about it, and it does determine how we’ll live and act in the future.
IMPLICATIONS OF HOPE IN GOD
“Hope in God” sounds abstract, though. What does that mean in our daily lives? It means that we align ourselves with specific values that we associate with God. It means that we may come across as rather counter-cultural in today’s world.
- Hope in God means a commitment to relationships. That’s remarkable, when our society surrounds us with the anonymity of mass society and mass marketing. It means that we insist on being touched by the impacts of our lifestyle on people and ecosystems.
- Hope in God means a commitment to community. That’s remarkable in our globalized world that frequently moves jobs and businesses.
- Hope in God means a commitment to simple living and to sustainability. That’s remarkable in our society that calls us to materialism and ever-greater affluence.
Hope “in” changes the way we live. We may not get what we hope for — but in the long run, that will probably happen, too. And, even if we don’t get what we hope for, placing out hope in what is good and right is a moral stance. It is the right thing to do, and that in itself empowers us and strengthens us.
CONCLUSION
A number of years ago, the Roman Catholic bishops in the US wrote a pastoral letter on the theme of “war and peace.” In it, they included this statement:
Hope is the capacity to live with danger without being overwhelmed by it; hope is the will to struggle against obstacles even when they appear insuperable.
(quoted in Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope)
A while back, I heard theologian Tex Sample speak at a local seminary. He put the same message in more ordinary language:
Hope is putting yourself where you would not be if you did not believe in the promises of God.
Hope, deep hope, is a powerful force. It gives strength and conviction for life in the current moment. It does not hide from the difficulties of the moment, but rather helps us to address those difficulties with vision, courage and grace.
I started these comments be referring to my friend Jim, who was “so depressed” in the face of the political news in the early 1980s. Jim could have been overwhelmed and burned out, but instead he has lived in hope. Jim moved from parish ministry, and now does ecumenical mission work on peace and justice issues. His hope in God, his conviction that the principles motivating his life are ultimately true, has sustained him through decades of prophetic ministry.
When we place our hope in God, we are transformed and empowered to live now. And that is good news!