Basic Hope
By Charles Rush
March 25, 2001
I Corinthians 15: 51-58
ve been meditating on the words contained in Bach's Easter Cantata: “Our grievous guilt He hath removed… He hangs upon the cruel tree… For Death was swallowed up by life… Let us with grateful hearts, eat the bread of gladness… He alone can feed us.” A colleague wrote me this week, seeing that we were doing the Easter Cantata actually during Lent, even before Good Friday- he said, “so Summit to celebrate the victory before engaging in battle”. Unquestionably, it is a temptation for Christians -- we know the end of the story.
We are not too different from an incident
that happened to Congressman Dan Kuykendal of Tennessee. Congressman Kuykendal
had been through a tough fought campaign for election to the U.S. Congress and
barely won. He was back in his home state one day when he was introduced to a
man who was from his district. This fellow grabbed the Congressman's hand,
pumped vigorously, slapped the Congressman on the shoulder and said, “If
I'd known you were going to win, I'd have voted for you.”
We are kind of like that. We are ready to
show up and eat the sponge cake and celebrate the victory but we are not too
big on walking to Jerusalem with Jesus. Part of that is because we live in a
culture that is not too hip on suffering or setback of any kind. I was reminded
of that lately by George Will in a speech he gave at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Will says that our country has recently developed an “astonishingly low pain
threshold.” I quote at length because it is worth hearing.
“We just went through a Christmas retailing season, and
all the papers said we had a bad, disappointing, sad, terrible Christmas
retailing season. The Christmas retailing season this year was slightly better
than last year, and last year's Christmas season was the best in ten years.
“You heard NASDAQ had the worst year in its twenty-nine
year history. After that worst year in its twenty-nine history, the NASDQ is
sixteen percent higher than it was two years ago.
“It is said that one day last fall, October 12th, the
stock market lost three hundred and seventy-nine points--3.6 percent of its of
value gone in one day! The sell off
started minutes after Home Depot, great retailing chain, announced that its
growth would be four percent instead of seven percent. Now, I don't know when four percent growth
became a national calamity. Well, the
trouble is expectations were for seven percent!
Well, who sets
expectations? Stock analysts. What do stock analysts sell? Stocks! They sell expectations. The
country is becoming slightly neurotic.
“Last summer, you may recall, we had a slight up tick
in a gallon of gasoline's price. Why,
at one point, the price of a gallon of gasoline in America soared to about
forty percent of what it is in Europe. <laughter> So, the government of the United States,
that exists to "feel our pain," tapped the strategic petroleum
reserve, which exists to protect this country against a major interruption of
supplies, but was used instead to knock a nickel off a price of a gallon
gasoline. Think of this country,
Americans driving around in their Lincoln Navigators, lurching, barely making
it from one gas station to another <laughter>, sipping designer water
that costs a lot more than gasoline <laughter> and talking on their
cellphones to one another about how they are suffering.
“This is a country, ladies and gentlemen, in which the
number of households with a net worth of a million dollars has doubled in the
last five years. One in fourteen
American households now has a net worth of a million dollars! Think of the changes this country has gone
through.
“ In 1939, '40 and '41, when the clouds of war began
lowering over Europe, Congress passed conscription and had to stipulate the
physical requirements for a young man to be eligible to be taken in to the
armed services. Three of them
were: a young man had to be a minimum
of five feet tall, had to weigh a minimum of one hundred and five pounds and
had to have twelve of his original complement of thirty-two teeth. A commentary, let me tell you, on nutrition
and dentistry during the depression.
As recently as 1951, and
'53, Americans lived in homes with outdoor plumbing. As recently as 1975, eighty percent of the American people had
never, not once, traveled by air. In 1975, an IBM mainframe computer cost 3.4
million dollars. Your
fifteen-hundred-dollar laptop is about a thousand times more powerful.
“If
there had been a comparable improvement in the price and performance of an
automobile, an automobile today would cost two dollars and would go six hundred
miles on a thimble full of gasoline. <laughter> And we would all be on our cellphones complaining about the
thimble full price. <laughter> This is a country that is spoiled... badly
spoiled.
“I mean, think of the changes in health care in our
lifetime, in our last century. It has
been commonly said, and not untruly, that it was not until about 1910 that the
average visit to a doctor did more good than harm. At about that time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great supreme
court justice, said, "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica
could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind
and all the worse for the fishes."
“At the turn of the last
century, one in four American children died before age fourteen. And if your child got diabetes, you watched
the child go blind and die. We live in
a wonderful, wonderful time to be alive. And we use our leisure time to complain. You would think we would have learned from the terrors of the
last century: not to complain, and, on the other hand, not to be complacent
about the world in which we live, which holds a good many terrors and furies worse
than the high price for a gallon of gasoline” (A speech given in the Forrestal
Lecture series, on January 24, 2001)
It is truly unbecoming. And
for Christians, unwarranted and immature. I remember hearing Desmond Tutu about
fifteen years ago. The struggle to bring apartheid to an end had been going on
for such a long time and at the moment he was speaking, there was no end in
sight. At that time, it was not at all clear that sanctions had any effect on
the government or that any reform would take place at all. Someone asked Tutu
if he ever lost hope. The Archbishop said, “I am always hopeful. A Christian is
a prisoner of hope. What could have looked more hopeless than Good Friday? But
then, at Easter God says, ‘From this moment on, no situation is untransfigurable.'
There is no situation from which God cannot extract some good.”
It would seem to me that of
all people, we ought to be people of unbounded hope. More than anyone else, we
ought to return to our regular disposition, that of joy and gratitude. More
than anyone else, we ought to be filled with a faith that is daring and not
afraid of big challenges, a confidence to walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, surrounded by enemies and danger. We ought to be able to let go of
worry, especially about things we cannot control. We, of all people, ought to
be filled with an outgoing love towards others. In the words of the Cantata,
“Christ Himself the feast hath spread, By Him the hungry soul is fed, and He
alone can feed us.
Irving Berlin died at the
age of 101. The next day the Today show invited the world-class musician
Isaac Stern to say a few words about Berlin. That was pretty stunning because
Irving Berlin was a hack musician. He could only play in the key of C and to
modulate to other keys he had to build a piano that transposed by pulling
levers. Yet he wrote over one hundred hit songs many of which we are still
singing today. They asked Isaac Stern to account for Irving Berlin's success.
His answer was breathtaking.
He said that Berlin “saw life
as composed of a few basic elements: life and death, loneliness and love, hope
and defeat- not many more. In making our way through these givens, affirmation
is better than complaint, hope more viable than despair, kindness more noble
than indifference.” With just those few themes, Berlin was able to cut through
the ambiguities and angst that surrounded him in the last century.
I mention his example because, perhaps you too feel
like just a one key musician, surrounded by a sea of whining weenies. But you
too have an the capacity to be of enormous influence if you allow yourselves to
be infected with the contagion of God's hope through Christ, if you allow
yourself to become an embodiment of living praise. Think about it and enjoy. Wayne…
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