Advent Photos - 1: Hope

 

 

 

 

TIKVA - Sermon for My Home Church (I Peter 3:13-22)

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.”

I haven’t even started and I feel like a fraud.  I am NOT always ready to make a defense of my hopeful faith and when I try, I am more often than not timid and awkward, and as a general matter I have been known to forget all about reverence and gentleness.  I do, however, have friends to remind me.

One of those friends is an artist who lives in western Pennsylvania.  Some time after I returned to seminary for the second year, he sent me a small piece of paper upon which he had crafted the word TIKVA.  I groaned when I saw it –my command of Biblical languages is limited at best and all I could see was that he had written something in Hebrew.  Thankfully he had used English letters, and so I was able to google it.  TIKVA means “Hope.”  I shook my head  --  it was not a word I wanted to hear, or see.  Nevertheless, I dutifully pasted his sign to the door to my door in the seminary dorm, so that I would have to see it every several times a day.  But would be a long time before I would be able to understand the word TIKVA as having any relevance to my own life’s journey.

Last week, our PC(USA) moderator Cindy Bolbach reminded us that, in our lives of faith,  we do not get from here to there alone.  We do not find hope or healing on our own.  We carry one another. Let me tell you a little about that experience in my own last couple of years, recognizing that some of you know the story and some not at all.

The last time I had the wonderful opportunity to preach here was just after Easter three years ago.  I was in my first year of seminary and a man in my closest circle friends had just died, very suddenly.  I tried to offer something of consolation to his wife and to our friends who were family to us, most of whom were here.  Little did I know that only five months later, the tables would be turned and the loss would be our own family’s.  In September, as I was preparing to return to Pittsburgh for the second of my three seminary years, our beautiful 24yo son Josh died of suicide.  Many of you were here in the days that followed, and you witnessed the stunned horror and grief in which we in our family found ourselves locked.  You can understand that when I speak about hope, I am talking about a confidence that is the product of along journey across a vast desert.

I did eventually finish seminary, and I am in the process of seeking a call to a church right now.  But the past two and one-half years have not been those of which I had dreamed; the circumstances have not come close to anything I could possibly have imagined or planned. 

Perhaps it’s because I have found hope so difficult to recover that I gravitated toward the reading in I Peter today.  And of course I wondered,: Out of what reality was he speaking?  Who, even, in fact, was speaking?

We all know not to take the authorship of a Biblical text for granted, even when a name is plastered to the front of a book.  We might be tempted to presume that the author of I Peter is, in fact, that fisherman who followed Jesus with an immediacy of commitment that most of the rest of us find difficult to emulate.  But in fact the book was most likely written by one of Peter’s followers in Rome, or by a community of such followers, toward the end of the first century.

The letter is what’s known as a circular letter, a document sent off to be circulated among a number of churches in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire, in today’s Turkey. Those of our members who went to Turkey earlier this year probably visited some of the places in which this letter landed. A circular letter was sort of an ancient version of a chain letter, except that it didn’t end with those ominous predictions about what will happen if you don’t email 16 more copies by midnight.

The writer we call Peter is instructing the young Christian communities in Turkey on how to address the challenges they face in a situation that should be recognizable to us: being church in a world which is somewhat indifferent and even  somewhat hostile to its teachings and practices.  A surrounding community resentful of the church members’ refusal to participate in the civic rituals honoring the Roman gods.  A surrounding community irritated by those insistent upon proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ, and willing to hassle them a bit for their convictions.  

And so, Peter tells them: always be ready to defend the hope that is in you.  Well, we know what that means: make a defense, be ready to assert yourself and your position.  We all do it all the time, over all sorts of issues.   Just a couple of days ago, a man tried to defend to me, with choice words and gestures, his decision to make a U-turn in front of me on Cedar Road.

We defend most of our choices out of hope – out of hope that we are right, out of hope that things will work out, for ourselves and for those who we love.  Hope grounded in the everyday matter of life that we think we control.  What college, what job, what neighborhood? (What U-turn?)  But those decisions are a few steps away from the hope of which the author of I Peter reminds us, the hope in Jesus Christ that grounds all other hopes.

And that hope, as Cindy reminded us last week, we nurture in one another. We account for it by what we do with and for one another.

A couple of months ago, it was my privilege to teach our confirmation class one Sunday. The topic L assigned to me was: What does it mean to be confirmed? What does it mean to affirm, intentionally, that we have been invited into this life in the church by our loving God?  I invited the class to respond to that question – how does confirmation affect you – in three ways:  How does it affect you as an individual?  As a participant in this church congregation?  As a member of this church in the world? 

I might have framed the question differently.  I might have asked them: How do you account for your hope in Jesus Christ– as an individual, as a church member, as a person engaged in the world community?  How does it change you?

After Josh died, I had no idea what to do about my life. I didn’t care, actually, anything at all about my life.  Hope was no longer one of my vocabulary words.  Those of you who have been there will recognize the feeling.  But my daughter, who had returned to college for her senior year, called me up one night and said, “Mom, you have got to get out of bed.”  I thought about that for awhile, and concluded that if she could get on a plane and fly back to Oregon, I guessed that I could get in a car and drive to Pittsburgh. One person’s hope, and it wasn’t mine.  We love each other, and we carry each other.

In these months, and now years, it turns out that the hope of many, many people sustained me.  Hope expressed in gentleness and with reverence, even when I did not respond in kind.  Hope expressed in meals and gifts, and, most especially, in presence. There were a couple of people who wrote to me and read my emails and sat with me and listened to me for hours at a time.  Even when I hurled angry words at them, accusing them of not listening, they kept right on listening.  They listened with the profound patience of people whose hope is in Jesus Christ, as people who as individuals account for the hope that is in them by being present to others.

As a congregation, how do we account, among ourselves, for the hope within us?  Look at how we worship together, how we care for one another, how we laugh and cry together.  Last fall, EP and I co-facilitated a Kerygma group.  One day when we were supposed to be discussing one of the strategies our lesson presented to us on how to interpret the Bible, we all got into a conversation about some of our more difficult experiences.  Out of that conversation the idea for the Blue Christmas service was born.  I guess that we were, in fact, employing a strategy for interpreting Scripture: we were applying it to our lives and, as hopeful friends of Jesus and one another, seeking to spread that hope around in ways new to us.

If you were here last week, you heard K and LS announce the project inviting us all to note on a paper brick the ways in which we have each contributed to the issues of care and justice for the homeless in our community.  The paper bricks are being constructed into a wall on the Justice and Mission Ministry’s kiosk in Fellowship Hall.  The Ministry makes it easy for the rest of us to contribute to solutions for the homeless and to reflect on what we’re doing: to see that we take the steps we do out of hope.  And not just out of hope that we can help others, or hope that we can chip away at a major societal problem.    But hope that the Kingdom of God is among us, hope that we account for by participating in its growth.

All of this – individual, church, world – all of it is grounded in Jesus and the hope that he is.  We don’t do these things just because we are good people.  We do them because we have hope in the one who is hope himself.  

It's still Easter – did you know that?  It’s hard to believe, on Memorial Day week-end, but it’s the sixth Sunday of the Easter season.  The season in which we particularly celebrate that Jesus died and rose in defeat of death. The season in which we particularly celebrate the hope that lies within us. 

In a few weeks, our readings will take us back into the life of Jesus. If we pay attention to what he says, and does, and wants, we learn what it means to defend our hope in the person who defeats death and who invites us into participation in the building of his kingdom.  It means that we listen to despairing people in the hope that they will know God’s love in our listening.  It means that we worship together in the hope that we will affirm God’s love in our celebrations and in our crises.  It means that we try to offer ourselves to others out of the rest of the world in the hope that they will experience God’s love in the rebuilding of their lives.

A couple of weeks ago, one of those people who listens to me said that our vocation is to live the love of Jesus.  No matter what else we do in our lives, our real vocation is to live out the love of Jesus.  

And if that is our vocation, how we could we not be people of hope?  Our vocation, if it is to live the love of Jesus, must be to counter death with life at every turn.  All the deaths, small and large – those of loss, of brokenness, of homelessness, literal and metaphorical – our vocation is to counter them with the love of living hope.

I don’t know for sure about all of you, but I know that for me, death is a personal affront.  Very personal.  My mother, my youngest brother, my son – all died at very young ages.  I don’t have any kind or sentimental words about death.  I suspect that on Memorial Day, a lot of us are particularly aware of death as a horrific gash in our lives, as a breach in relationship that we ourselves cannot overcome. 

But if our vocation is to live the love of the person who DEMOLISHES death, the person who replaces it with the life and light for which we were always intended, how could we do anything other than reach out to each other with hope? share in the hope of our community life? and walk into the world as bearers of the message that love is stronger than death, stronger than what looks to be our end?

It was a long time after Josh’s death before I recognized any signs of renewal.  But I have kept my friend’s little TIKVA card, which I plan to frame and hang on the wall in my someday church study.  Because it’s true: we should account for the life of Jesus Christ that dwells within us, and there is no gentler and more reverent way than by quietly communicating one word: Hope.

Grace

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen.

These words are frequently attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, but when I heard them at the event the other night, another author was named.  Of course, I could not retain the name for longer than a few seconds and it took me awhile to track it down, but the source is clarified here: the prayer was written by Bishop Ken Untener (to whom they were credited by our speaker).

My daughter frequently reminds me that I should not generalize my experience as a universal one, but I think that I might be on safe ground here:  When you suffer the sudden, unexpected, suicidal death of a child, all sense of the future is crushed. Seeds planted and watered, foundations laid, yeast provided ~ it seems that it was all pointless, and that there is no hope for another future.  I haven't heard anything different from any other parent in my circumstances.

For the rest, though, I will stick to my own experience and not seek to impose it on anyone else.  And my experience, slow and halting as it is, has been to recognize that, whatever our own plans and expectations, however much we hope and however hard we work and however deeply we love, God's grace is at work, not merely on an enterprise beyond our small contribution, but on a project that may be extravagantly more dimensional than that in which we imagine ourselves to be engaged.

Body, Breath, Place (Sermon ~ Ezekiel 37: 1-14)

There's a good chance that when  I preach this tomorrow, I will refer to my son's death in only the most general way.  I realized, as I printed the bulletin into 28-point font so that I can read it, that there may be very young children in this congregation, as they do not usually have Sunday School during worship.  Their parents are not bringing them to church so that they can learn the definition of suicide.  (I remember my horror when one of my friends at my own church, whose wife sings in our choir and was there for our son's funeral, talked about explaining what had happened to his own little nine or ten-year old son.  Horror that my family's circumstances mandated such a discussion in his.)  But this is how it emerged earlier in the week, with a little subsequent RG editorial assistance.

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I’ve been here enough times in the past few months that I think we know each other a bit.  Enough for me to preach a bit more personally then usual, at least insofar as sharing some of my experience in encountering today’s texts.  Perhaps that experience will speak to all of us who have found ourselves in deserts filled with dry bones. 

 

As I think most of you know, we in our family lost one of our young adult sons two and one-half years ago.  He died of suicide, just as I was preparing to return to Pittsburgh for my second year of seminary.  I use the term “died of suicide” these days because I have learned a lot in those two-and-one-half years.  One of the things I’ve learned is that very few people “commit” suicide, not any more than they "commit a heart attack" or ""commit a stroke."  Most people who die of suicide suffer from unresolved or – in the case of our son – even unrecognized clinical depression or bipolar disorder.  And that’s a problem we won’t even begin to confront successfully until we get rid of the very language that implies the victim is somehow at fault.  And so – my son Josh died of suicide.  That means that he died suddenly, and unexpectedly, and violently, and alone – and left behind a completely crushed and devastated family.

             

A desert of dry bones, indeed.

             

Josh’s death also means that when I looked at the OT and gospel texts for today – the texts we’ve just heard, Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, my heart stopped for a second.  There are certain texts which preachers steer clear of, for personal reasons, and these are the kind that I avoid.  They’re just too hard – one of my seminary professors refers to the situation as one of “existential dissonance.”  My own life experience and that of the text simply do not match up.  Not yet, anyway.

             

Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have tried.  I would have just gone off lectionary and preached on something else.  But this year – well, Lazarus seems a bit beyond my capacity, but I thought that I might try Ezekiel.  And I tell you all this not to be self-indulgent, but because sometimes, as we contend with our own desert experiences, it helps to have something concrete in someone else’s desert to hang onto. To know that while our experiences are unique to us, the realm of the desert is something that we all experience, one way or another.

             

One of the things I try to do in my preaching is what I call “preaching ahead of myself.”  We are all called, I think, to move beyond ourselves, especially in our suffering – to move beyond our own self-absorption into a space in which we might have something to offer others.  If I were a nurse, for instance, and my son had died, I would try to work ahead of myself by returning to my unit and caring for other people’s sons, helping them to heal and live.  As a preacher, I try to preach ahead of myself by preaching into what I hope, what we all hope, rather than falling backward into the hard specifics of what I merely know.

             

 So once I had decided to give it a try, I started to prepare for this morning by thinking about Ezekiel, imagining him and this bizarre vision of his.  I looked at some paintings online; I even found a wonderful short video, which you can probably find as well if you google-image something like “Ezekiel dry bones.” I looked at all these images of deserts and bones, and I thought about all of the people whose bodies I have cared for and prayed with, in my family and in my chaplaincy training at the Cleveland Clinic, and I wondered what Ezekiel thought and how he felt.  What did he think and how did he feel when God invited him into this vision in which death becomes life?

            

 And so I went back and re-read the text, and I found out.  At least, I think I found out some of what the writer of Ezekiel, perhaps Ezekiel himself, was thinking and feeling as he shaped this vision into words for later generations.

            

I discovered that at both the beginning and ending of this passage, Ezekiel talks about three things.  He talks about bodies, incarnational beings.  He talks about Spirit – about breath enlivening those bodies.  And he talks about places – geographical places.  Body, breath, place – things we all need to live.

             

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that these matters come up on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday.  Lent begins in the same way: with Jesus, the incarnate one, the embodiment of God, being led by the Spirit, into the desert.  Body, spirit, place.  Jesus needs those things in order to live, just as we do, and he needs them in a specific way in order to live into his ministry.  He needs his body as a source of temptation: a body that hungers, that thirsts, that might triumph, that might be imposed upon others.   He needs the Spirit, the Spirit that belongs to and participates in both him and his Father, to lead him.  And he needs the desert, that empty, desolate, vacant place, in which to come to terms with the life to which he is called.  We heard all of this at the beginning of Lent –

             

And now we hear it with Ezekiel.  The same three requirements for life are brought to bear. “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”  Me – Ezekiel is the person, the ordinary, embodied human being.  So ordinary and embodied that he describes his encounter with God as a physical one: The hand of the Lord came down upon me.  As metaphorical as that statement might be, we visualize it, don’t we?  We see God’s hand - the same hand that reaches out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - we see that hand clamping down on Ezekiel’s shoulder.  The hand of the Lord came upon me –

             

And he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord – there’s the first appearance of the Spirit who will be so ey to this passage.  The Spirit leads Ezekiel just as it leads Jesus.  Just as it leads us. 

            

Now we like to think that with the Spirit’s leading, we will be directed to good places.  Joyous places.  Places filled with possibility. 

             

Not desert places. 

             

And yet, the place to which the Spirit leads Jesus is the desert. And the place to which the Spirit leads Ezekiel is the valley of dry bones.

             

Imagine this valley.  You don’t need all those internet images. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine:  the bare ground, sandy here, rocky there, stretching before you for miles.  Perhaps in the distance some mountains, but they are barren, rocky.  The colors?  Greys, browns, deadened colors, colors as devoid of hope as the ground itself.  And the silence.  The oppressive, weighty silence. 

             

And then you realize: the ground before you is littered with bones.  All sizes and shapes of bones, grey and brown and bones bleached to white. 

             

Now me – as you might guess, I see this scene pretty literally.  And perhaps some of you do as well.  It depends, I think, upon what the barren, desert places are in your own life right now.  What bones cover the ground, when you have the courage to look there?  What disappointments?  What frustrated hopes?  What losses?   What lies around, lifeless and hopeless, in your own existence?

             

Oh, this is a hard one, isn’t it?

             

God knows it is hard.  And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, and they begin to get up and be melded together again, muscles and tendons appearing and skeletons being reconstituted.

             

Now how do you think Ezekiel feels? 

            

 I’m guessing that he’s reminded that bodies are not enough.  It sounds as if these bodies are complete – but they do not live.  They do not live until God tells Ezekiel to speak again, so that the winds will come and breathe life into these bodies.  Wind, breath, spirit – all the same word: ruach – in Hebrew.  The cultural memory is triggered: In the very beginning, according to Genesis, “a wind from God swept over the waters.”  Now a wind from God sweeps over the desert valley.  In one of the Genesis stories of creation, God breathes life into God’s first human creation.  Now God’s Spirit breathes life into an entire population.  A population of bones.  Bones in the desert.  Bodies, spirit, place.

           

Where are these places in your life?  Where are the places in which bones lie, in which the wind of God needs to rush in, into which the Spirit of life needs to breathe?

              

This is the why of Lent.  We know that without the cross, there is no resurrection.  We know that unless we look deeply into the desert places in our lives, there can be no wind of life.

           

“O my people,” says God through Ezekiel. ^“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  Bodies, spirit, place. 

             

We can hear this story literally, as the Israelites would have done, as Zionist Jews do today.  Real people, enabled by the Spirit of the Lord, are returned to their land, to Israel. Or we can hear it as God’s engagement with us, regardless of the geography of the matter in question. We can hear that God cares about who we are – embodied people, animated by God’s own Spirit.  We can hear that God cares about where we are, because embodied beings have to be somewhere.  We require place. If we find that we are standing in the middle of a dry valley, we can hear that God is laboring there.  If we stand on the precipice overlooking the valley, afraid to move, we can hear that God is ready to force air into our nostrils.  If we have crashed onto the plain, we can hear God saying, “Oh, my people.”

             

What did Ezekiel think?  What did he feel?  Was he terrified, watching those bones being re-assembled  into bodies, and listening to those bodies being re-animated by the wind?  Was it all that he could do, to stand there and not run away?  Or was he filled with hope, astonished by God’s love and God’s willingness to try again with God’s people?

             

In another two weeks, we will celebrate a similar story – a story in which a body is reconstituted, breath is released – and people do run away. At least, some of them in some versions run away, before they all get it right. And when they do get it right, and are able to grasp the reality – body, spirit, place – then they will recognize, and perhaps we will as well, that God still sighs, "Oh, my people.”  That God still seeks to transform valleys of dry bones into meadows of life. 

             

This is what I mean by preaching ahead of myself.  I mean this: that our God, who sees the starkness, the emptiness, the shattered lives strewn across the deserts of human existence, says to us: This is not the end of the story.  This is the Lenten journey, this is the journey through the wilderness but, Oh, my people, this is not the end.  My hand will roll a stone away from a tomb, and you will know that your God speaks and acts.  You will know that you are beloved and that you live, O my people.

             

Amen.

Image: Barry Donaldson, Ezekiel Speaks to the Dry Bones