I am Hope

       Preachers love to moan about Trinity Sunday, lamenting the inherent danger in trying to explain the mystery of God with human language and images that can’t help but fall short. Insider jokes about heresy run rampant among clergy at this time of year, as we remember forebears burned at the stake for an unhappy analogy or exiled for an expression that strayed too far from the Creeds. This year, however, we preachers have before us a subject more daunting and dangerous than describing the ineffable mystery of the divine essence. This year, eyes that would normally be trained heavenward are downcast, fixed upon yet another tragedy: the death and devastation following those terrible tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma. As suffering piles upon suffering this spring, it is hard not to let the news of it beat us down into hopelessness. One friend gave expression to these feelings of despair when she wrote, wondering how to preach today about yet another tragedy: “It seems that we used to have a disaster every few years that demanded our attention, but now there is at least one a month. Sometimes I just want to crawl into a little (comfy) hole and ignore the world for a while.” Perhaps the really dangerous subject for a sermon this week is not Trinity, but how to hold on in the face of suffering. Perhaps the really dangerous subject for a sermon this week is Hope.

          I read years ago about an interesting scientific study concerning hope and our responses to suffering. Scientists put four monkeys in a cage with a pole in the middle. At the top of the pole, they put a bunch of bananas. All of the monkeys learned how to get up that pole and grab a treat. Then the scientists added a pail of water above the pole. When a monkey started to climb the pole, the researcher would douse him with a big bucketful of cold water before he could get to the bananas. Eventually, all four of the monkeys stopped trying to climb the pole, even after the scientists removed the pail of water. At this point, the scientists added a new monkey to the cage. This monkey, of course, went straight for those bananas. But do you know what happened? One of the other monkeys would yank him down, every time, trying to save him from suffering from the cold water, even though there was no pail! As the scientists gradually replaced all of the monkeys with new ones, through several generations, even the new monkeys stopped trying to get the bananas. Those monkeys lost hope in reaching what they desired, and that lack of hope was passed down from generation to generation. Kevin Ford, who wrote about this story, drew a conclusion for us Christians in the church: “We preach and teach about bananas [that is, about hope, about God’s love for us, about Good News.] We cast a vision for eating bananas. We develop pole-climbing training programs … We read lots of books about bananas… We argue over which side of the pole the bananas should be on…But no matter what we do, nobody ever seems to get around to eating the bananas.”[1]

          Have the suffering and tragedy that surround us, the pain that pierces our own lives, taken away our desire to climb the pole? Has it robbed us of the hope that once led us to God? Are we feasting on air, longing for Love that we have forgotten how to find? How do we get our Hope back?

          St. Paul makes it sound deceptively simple in his letter to the Christians in Rome. He advises us to “boast” or to “rejoice” in our suffering: “We … boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Hmmmm. Really, Paul? Would I write a letter to Episcopalians in Moore and tell them to be happy that their homes are destroyed and their family members are dead or hurt? Would I tell the runners in Boston who lost a leg that their suffering is the real test of endurance that will give them character, just like running built up their muscles? And the parishioner who, after many years of tragedy, wrote in her questions to God, “Are the struggles in my life a test of my faith or a testament to the strength of my faith?” …. Would I tell her, “Of course! Your suffering is proof of endurance and is building up your character!”

          No, St. Paul, I would not say any of these things. But neither does Paul, really. Paul is not expressing some simple formula for mixing hope out of the ingredients of suffering. He is not offering us a mathematical equation. Paul, like the theologians who try to describe God as Trinity, is trying to express the inexpressible. He is trying to show that, when the inevitable suffering comes into our lives, God is somehow mysteriously with us in the enduring of it. Luke Timothy Johnson points out that hope, for Paul, is a way of perceiving the present based on a faith in God’s hidden presence and power among us. Hope is not wishful thinking. It is what allows us to move into the future because of the reality of God’s presence right now.[2]  If we know and accept that God’s love for us is constantly being poured out upon us through the Holy Spirit, then that love is more real than any of the sufferings that cut through our lives. Hope looks out with open eyes into a darkness where God seems absent or silent at best and demands that God speak again. God gave us all a gift in Jesus Christ—a gift of life, love and forgiveness—and nothing can take that gift away, no matter what. As Paul writes later in his letter, using another image: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38) We are in a relationship with God that can withstand anything, including our own disbelief and despair. We are not monkeys, doomed to unthinking conditioning from our environment. Paul is reminding us that we have a choice, a choice to look beyond suffering, a choice to endure, with God’s help, a choice to cultivate a relationship with God that will train us once again to climb that pole for the bananas. Will that endurance take the form of crying out to God in anger, resentment, or pain? Probably. Will that character include practices of prayer and gratitude and all of the spiritual discipline that they demand? Surely. Will that persistence look like foolishness in the eyes of the world, like gullibility in the eyes of the unbeliever? Undoubtedly. But what will we not give for Hope? God gave His very life for it.

          Hope stands beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out, “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. I am the wisp of light that shines into the dark room and turns the darkness of night into the joy of morning. I am the space in between the cry ‘Dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations’ and the whispered ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’ When Jesus hung upon the Cross, I was there. When the disciples huddled in the Upper Room, I unlocked the door for the living Christ to enter in. I turned cowardly Peter into the Rock upon whom the Church was built. I held the hands of martyrs and slaves and pushed the shy and fearful out into the public square. When the emergency workers’ stomachs turned and their hearts sank in the face of the grisly scene before them, I clothed them with the armor of God’s strength. When the mother stood outside the locked doors of the school that held her handicapped child, frozen as the tornado approached, and unable to decide whether to stay or to go find her other two children, I led her to safety. When the little dog appeared from under the planks and bricks, I opened the hearts of a jaded nation. When the town looked out at rubble and brokenness, I showed them new buildings, buildings with a tornado shelter at every school. I am an iron pot fashioned from character and endurance, a pot that boils and bubbles through all of the pain that we feel and see, scouring away all the dross that covers the hidden love of God. I am Hope. I dance together with Love and Faith, twisting and turning on the breath of God, leaping through time, filling empty hearts, following the steps of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whose joyful dance is my pattern, in whose communion I have my being. Join me, join God, climb the pole, dance, and feast.”

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[1] Quoted in L. Gregory Jones, “Monkey Business,” in The Christian Century, September 9, 2008, 39.

[2] Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2001), 85.