Spirit of Hope
By Charles Rush
November 29, 1998
Isaiah 2: 1-5
is week we read the first five verses of second chapter of Isaiah,
one of the truly beautiful passages of scripture, what a hopeful image
it really is. This is what Isaiah writes: It shall come to pass in
the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be
established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above
the hills and all the nations of the world shall flow unto it and many
people will come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of God, to
the house of the God of Jacob, that that God might teach us God's ways
and that we might walk in God's paths, for out of Zion shall go forth
the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem and God will judge
between the nations and shall decide for many people and they will beat
their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation and neither shall they
learn war anymore.
Hope is not just optimism, although optimism is not all that bad to
hang around with. I read a story this week about two brothers, one an
optimist and the other a pessimist and the optimist, it turns out, is
kind of an inveterate optimist, he really kind of did my heart warm.
Their birthdays are very close to one another and so their parents used
to celebrate them together. One year, the parents decided just to test
their dispositions and they gave them different presents just to see
what their reaction would be. They gave the pessimistic brother these
truly amazing gifts and the optimistic brother they gave him just a
large box, it was lined with aluminum foil and filled with horse
manure. The parents let them open the presents and waited for about
fifteen minutes so that they could kind of settle in before they told
them that they had other presents in the room and they just wanted to
see. They went into this optimistic brother and he is sitting in the
room all by himself holding that box and just throwing it up in the
air, shaking that manure up in the air and he's got this big grin on
his face, parents come up to him and say, man, son, what are you
smiling about and he goes, all this manure, there's got to be a pony
nearby.
Some kids just seem to be born with that kind of passionate,
incredible optimism. It's an optimism that just seems to be in them,
and yet the other kind of optimism that we know more about is a little
bit closer to the biblical understanding of hope. We tend to hear
about famous people after they've become famous and we don't really
think about the way that they might have worked things through their
entire life in order to develop the successes that they have actually
accomplished. They view their lives on the other hand, as a struggle,
as discipline, something that had to have focus and required quite a
lot of sacrifice. Just a couple of examples that will give you an
idea: Scotty Pipin, the great basketball guard for the Chicago Bulls;
he's won four NBA championship rings, two Olympic gold metals and the
guy's just like glass, isn't he when he flies into the basket. You
know, it hasn't always been this easy for Scotty Pipin. He got exactly
zero college scholarships to play basketball. In fact, his freshman
year, he joined the team; it wasn't as a player but as the team
equipment manager. And Gregor Mendel, the Austrian botanist whose
experiments on peas really opened up the modern science of genetics
he never succeeded in passing the examinations so that he could become
a high school science teacher. He failed biology
struggled with it all of his life and did some pretty good work, we
might say later on. James Earl Jones the great actor, arguably the
most influential and attention-getting voice in the world at the
moment, did you know that he has stuttered his whole life and he
struggles with it all of the time? From the time he was nine years old
until his mid teenage years, he had to communicate with all of his
teachers and his classmates with hand-written notes. A high school
teacher gave him some of the help that he needed, but he still
struggles with that problem even to this day and yet, recently he was
listed as one of the ten actors in the world with the most beautiful
speaking voice. This list is innumerable, I could go on with different
people who have achieved success and developed a certain hopeful
outlook on life because they have confidence and optimism because of
personal things that they have overcome in their lives or social
circumstances that they have transcended. In most of their cases if you
ask them to describe their lives, with no cameras around, they sound
quite a lot like the story that was told about Arthur Rubenstein.
Reportedly, a young inquirer came to Rubenstein and asked him how often
he played the piano and Rubenstein said, well, I play about eight hours
a day and I have pretty much done that all of my life. The young man
said back to him, gees, you're so good, why do you keep practicing all
of the time? Rubenstein said "I'm good and I wish to become superb."
Now really, hope is more than optimism. Part of it is the fact
that genuine biblical hope kind of comes to us from the outside in a
way that we couldn't have expected. Pete Moran tells a story
it's a wonderful story. He was standing outside of Harrod's department
store last summer in London and his wife was inside shopping. Shopping
is not Pete's cup of tea so he was making pleasant conversation with
anyone walking down the street. He was wearing a blue blazer and it
had an insignia on it. It said he was from the 8
th
Air Force. Pete was in the 458
th
bombardier group.
He was over in England actually for a reunion. He wanted to take
his wife back to the airstrip that flew him back to the United States
50 years ago when the war ended. He's standing out there and a nice
look gentleman comes over to him on the street and says "I see you're
with the 8
th
army, lad." I love someone referring to Pete Moran as 'lad.' He said,
"Lad, you'll never know what you did for us. In the fall of 44 we were
in a German POW camp. A group of us had been captured during the
evacuation of Dunkirk and we were left behind and as it turned out, we
got captured by the Germans. They were pretty dispirited. They'd been
in a German POW camp for several months and the Germans, of course,
were telling them everyday that the Germans were winning the war and it
would all be over soon. One morning he said, we came out. We heard a
tremendous roar outside. All of the men woke up, ran out of the
barracks and overhead, we saw 100 B-24 bombers from the 8
th
Air Force. A cheer went throughout the whole camp that the Americans
had joined the war effort." The German guards soon dashed their hopes.
They told the men about the incredible anti-aircraft guns and they
assured the men that not one of the planes would return from their
bombing mission. All day the men waited but the bombers never
returned. They went to bed that night so dispirited, just all of the
hope taken out of them and they felt like just kind of dying and
letting go.
But the next morning, the next morning, a 150 more B-24's flew
overhead. A huge roar and the guy turned to Pete and said "From that
day on, we were filled with a boundless hope and we never let the
German guards live it down." It's amazing what you can endure with just
a little flame from the candle of hope.
And what hope we have been privileged to witness at the close of
this century? I was thinking about this the other day. In our
lifetime, there have been several significant, hope-filled moments. I
just want to list one or two of them. Who can forget the cameras in
Berlin in 1989? All night long, CNN had the broadcast of a continuous
shot of people standing up on top of the Berlin Wall. They were all
out there having a few celebratory champagnes, taking turns with a
sledge hammer, chipping away at the great concrete curtain, the
concrete gate that made up the iron curtain that separated our world
and that wall was damn big too, wasn't it? And it was thick, that was
one of the most mesmerizing nights of my life and probably yours too.
I felt like Hegel, when he saw Napoleon riding through the middle of
Berlin. He wrote to a friend and said, "I just saw the zeitgeist
riding through Berlin on a horse." The spirit of our times, I just saw
the spirit of the times riding through Berlin on a horse. I drank my
coffee that day in front of the TV, I went to lunch and watched the
same thing on TV, went to the gym and saw it on TV, and sat there in
the middle of the night just watching it just kind of mesmerized. I
felt like Mary that day, the mother of Jesus, when we are told in
scripture, 'she pondered all of these things in her heart, and wondered
what they meant.'
And how about this week, a real small but very significant
hope-filled moment with Pinochet being detained in England and in the
House of Lords, the men getting up and giving their different
adudications on whether Pinochet should be tried for crimes against
humanity or whether he should be let go and given immunity because he
was the head of state, and finally, the fifth and deciding vote that
was cast and the guy that stood up and gave that deciding vote saying,
"If we cannot hold men accountable for their actions when they're in
governmental office, why should we ever go to war against Hitler?" And
the people across the street waiting, the Chileans, who never in a
million years imagined that they would have actually won the vote that
day, stunned and overwhelmed that justice had finally been done and I
got to thinking, oh my god, in our lifetime, maybe human rights will be
established in every country and these petty tyrants and dictators will
not only be disempowered, they'll have no safe place to run but their
own mountain homes.
Neil Armstrong, remember him, on the moon, another form of
incredible hope with a particularly American twist to it. When we were
kids, we just stayed up, glued to the TV set watching that long buildup
with Walter Cronkite describing every detail and then all of a sudden
there was Neil Armstrong walking down the ladder, 'one small step for
man, one giant leap for mankind.' And all of a sudden we were just
filled with the possibilities and the hope that might come through
technological advance and for a moment, it seemed like an incredible
array of intractable problems could be solved if we just put the right
kind of coordinated effort into it and got our resources together and
then in that wonderful American touch he dropped a golf ball, pulled
out a club that he'd stashed, stroked a shot across the moon. The
impossible was not only possible, it doesn't even look all that hard.
Something particularly American about that brand of humor that just
kind of winks a little bit at you, the accomplishment of the incredible
that just happens, but the biblical notion of hope is imaginative in
these ways, but it is imaginative in a way that overcomes a seemingly
intractable human situation. It looks forward to a day when all of the
nations will flow up and not only be together but worship together, to
a day when spears shall be beaten into plowshares and enemies shall lie
down with one another, where every woman and every man shall be at
ease.
What a wonderful metaphor in the bible that each shall lie under their
fig tree and enjoy the fruit of their tree in this life and not in just
the future one. The biblical understanding of hope recognizes that we
continue to create enemies, we continue to create injustice in our
world and political oppression because there is a division in the
middle of our hearts and that is sin. It's a spiritual condition that
has to be overcome. The bible recognizes a great difference between
armistice and detante, which are human and real peace with justice
which is divine. It recognizes that only God can really come and heal
this division which is in our hearts because it runs right through the
middle of each one of us and recognizes that truth, justice and true
peace will only come as the result of a profound spiritual renewal of
our world. In this regard, the bible is much more profound and
realistic than we Americans are. We're too young as a nation to really
appreciate that depth of hatred and the depth of prejudice that
exists. It spans centuries. There are so many situations in the world
were it appears that the only change that will ever happen will have to
come as a result of divine initiative. That is what biblical hope is
all about.
When I was in college I got a little taste of this. I took a train
one-day from Istanbul to Athens. You know, I read of course about the
way the Greeks and the Turks had been fighting with each other ever
since the seventh century when the Turks arrived in Anatolia and I knew
that the Crusades were fought largely as a result to keep the Turks at
bay, but I never would have imagined the depth to which these historic
battles were lived out daily in a little friction that goes on between
these two people. The Turkish train, when it leaves Istanbul to go to
Athens, goes about 25 miles an hour maximum. I know it's really slow
because at one point I got so bored I hopped off the train and ran next
to it for about half a mile and then jump back on. It could be just
part of Turkish inefficiency but it's probably a slap at the Greeks
because when you get to the border of Turkey and Greece, they make all
the passengers get off, it's a tiny station in the middle of nowhere,
goats literally running around the station house, peasant farmers, and
you ask the conductor, 'how long before the next trains through to pick
us up' and you get 'um, I don't know, don't care either' and turns
around and leaves. They cannot even coordinate a piece of railroad
track with one another.
Robert Kaplan, in his book "Balkan Ghosts"
he fairly well describes this intractable situation that exists in the
Balkans. He followed Slovadan Milosovich when he was running for
president of Serbia. Kaplan followed him out on the campaign trail and
Slovadan Milosovich made his acceptance speech on a plain in Serbia.
Seven hundred years earlier, there had been a famous battle on that
plain where the Turks had defeated the Serbs and had forced themselves
on the Serbs in an oppressive manner and you know Milosovich is a rabid
nationalist and he has that brand of nationalism that feeds on
resentment from the past and past grievances and he believes that
Serbian ethnic identity has never really been established and
continually paints the Serbs as victims that deserve their time, their
national right and their political unity even if it comes at the
expense of Muslim neighbors. Kaplan as an American, was pretty well
stunned by the breadth and depth of sentiment that he was able to stir
up in the ordinary Serb. He followed Milosovich out to this plain and
there, in front of thousands of supporters, he gives this speech in
which he describes the battle that took place seven hundred years ago.
The people erupt at the telling of it, they know every detail, they
know the whole cast of characters, it's a story of defeat and they have
learned it since they were little children and as the story goes on
they whipped up and madder and madder and Milosovich, the demigod, has
the crowd in such a state that they would go out and incite pogrom
against the Muslims if they were asked to do so at that moment. And he
concludes his speech by shouting defiantly, 'Never again, never again.'
Kaplan said it was venomous, it was pous-filled, hate-ridden, it was
vindictive, it drew people into mob rule and the thing that was the
most hopeless about the entire story was that it was drawing on twelve
hundred years of resentment and grudges, loss is like that.
If you grew up in the south in this country, you are likely to have
been told stories about the Civil War like I was as though the battle
had just ended yesterday. Loss is filled with sadness and bitterness
and its memory is long and the amazing thing about the Hebrews is that
they were not overcome by their bitterness for they too had been
victims of slavery, they too had been victims of political oppression
for most of their thirty five hundred years. They too had been run out
of every county and victims of pogrom, but their prophets like the
Prophet Isaiah came to realize that the only antidote to bitterness and
defeat is the hope that God will transform all peoples spiritually and
open up a new way of relating to one another and that's not only true
on a national basis, it's true on a personal basis as well. When we
were starting out as chaplains in the hospital, I was still in seminary
at the time, our director George Bennett sat us down in a circle on the
very first day we were there and he told us that whatever else
happened, he didn't want us going up onto the floor and saying anything
stupid because ministers have said a lot of stupid things over the
years. George said it a little more colorfully than that, but this
will do for this morning. After a long silence, one of the guys that
was with me finally had the guts to say, 'um, question, what are we
supposed to do?' George looked back at him angry and annoyed and he
said, 'I want you to listen.' Another long silence and the guy said
'um, question, um, what are we supposed to be listening for?' George
scratched his head like he was advising absolute boneheads and he was
and he said 'I want you to listen for hope because these people are ill
and if they have no hope and you have no hope, then we have a real
situation on our hands.' And my friend Michael Usey who was there that
day with me says that every once in a while, even today, twenty years
later when he heads over to the hospital he says to himself, 'I'm here
to listen to hope.'
I commission you this week, as you go out in the name of Christ, to
be disciples, listening for hope. Your neighbor who will share with
you a long and complicated tale of a work situation where she is no
longer fulfilled and for a variety of reasons things are not likely to
change in the immediate future and in the midst of the whole telling of
it, do you hear any hope and the next week as you start to talk to your
friends about you kooky family gatherings and in the middle of it
somebody is unpacking a long relationship with another family member
that has a long-term grievance, compounded by a lot of recent wounds,
as you listen to them tell that, are you hearing any hope? As you are
around those who are overwhelmed with stress, they have too many kids,
too little income, next to no freedom on their job and they are barely
hanging on and you hold a hand during this holiday season when things
seem to get a little more anxious and more stress-filled, do you hear
any hope? And for the few of us this season who will have to sit with
a friend or a relative who has a terminal illness situation that's not
going to bring any recovery, as we walk through that incredibly sacred
time, do you hear any hope? Pray, pray gracious Jesus I have done what
I could, I need your hope. Give them that hope that empowers scared men
to stand brave in the face of death, give them that hope that enables
mothers to endure through the whole night and many nights to take care
of children who are sick, gracious God, give them that hope that
creates a new way beyond the impasse for a solutionless people a fresh
vision of a way that this monotony can be broken.
Fill us with your hope, O God.
Amen
