Sermon: The Power of Hope -- Easter

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The Power of Hope -- Easter

By Charles Rush

April 15, 2001

commercial airline pilot on one occasion make a particularly bad landing. The wheels of the big jet hit the runway with a jarring thud. Afterward, the airline has a policy, which required that the pilot stand at the door while the passengers exited. He was to give each of them a smile and say, “Thank you for flying with us today.” In light of his bad landing, he was having a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment, but no one seemed annoyed.

Almost everyone had gotten off the plane, except a little old lady, who was slowly walking the aisle with her cane. She approached the pilot and said, ‘Young man, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Why no ma'am, what is it?”

“Did we land,” she asked, “or were we shot down?”

I pass that along for those who might have had days like that recently. Despite everyone around you telling you how fortunate you ought to feel, perhaps you've felt shot down too.

Madeline L'Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time, and many other volumes, has a house in the Catskills that she and her husband used as a refuge retreat from their apartment in Manhattan. Behind the house she had constructed a little garden with a bench near a mountain stream that she used for meditation, some place just to sit and listen to the healing sound of gurgling water and be at peace.

One year her daughter gave her an icon, a simple square painting of Mary holding Jesus on her lap. Madeline took it up to the Catskills, and erected a little alcove on the side of a tree in her meditation garden. It was just what that little retreat needed to give it some prayerful focus.

The next spring she went up to open up the cabin with her husband. As she was walking out to her meditation garden by the stream she noticed that the icon was missing. It was laying on the ground in pieces. She bent over and picked them up, putting them together and she noticed that the icon had been shot with a gun. Someone had taken out a pistol at close range and fired a shot right through the painted portrait of Jesus and left the icon in pieces on the ground.

There are many worse things that vandalism. But Madeline wrote about how hard it was to deal with that event because it was so characteristic of the way evil works. “It just invades our sacred spaces in our lives. It destroys that which is precious to us. Often it is anonymous, silent, and invisible. It just strikes out and makes us feel hopeless and helpless, like there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves, and especially nothing we can do to protect those who are precious to us.”[i]

W. H. Auden, memorable phrase ‘The Age of Anxiety' comes to mind. A colleague of mine got a note from a parishoner that read. “Last night I awoke in the time when the tides run, when old people die with the gravity pull, or some other great power.” An arresting phrase to the things that catches us unaware in the middle of the night after we are of a certain age, caught by a wave of our own mortality.

Edvard Munch's painting The Scream comes to mind. It shows a man on a bridge, screaming with a dark sky all around him. It looks as if the world is going to collapse in on him. Screaming takes so many forms. Jonathan Eldridge had a brother that was senselessly shot to death in a murder that was never solved. For the next couple months after his death, people would see Jonathan jogging around town… and jogging… and jogging. At some point people began to figure out that there was a difference between exercise and the loneliness of a long distance runner. One of his friends stopped him and said, ‘seems like you are jogging quite a bit these days. Are you okay?” Jonathan thought about it for a minute and said, “I'm just numb from the waist up.”

He was living through one of those times, I n the words of William Butler Yeats, “the center will not hold”. The disciples had that kind of moment. The death of Jesus wasn't simply the death of a beloved friend and someone they respected. It was that but it was more. It was also the death of their dreams, the hopes they had for the coming of the Messiah, the hopes they had for the dawning of a new era liberated from the Romans. And it was the death of something in each of them too. They were all deserters. We are told that they gathered in a room, hiding from the authorities after the death of Jesus, twelve isolated individuals in the same place, each lost in their own thoughts, like a bunch of athletes each sure that they are personally the cause for the total team loss. It is no place to be for long.

And then something happens to them. Women come with a report. It is not what it seems. A friend of mine tried out for the Army Rangers when he was in his twenties. Part of the training required small teams to work with a map and radio and find their way through very difficult terrain to different places. It went on for several days, with hardly any sleep, very little food. The object was to get the soldiers disoriented, tired, and angry to see how they would respond under battle type stress. At one point my friend and his partner were so lost that they thought of just quitting. Tired, dying of hunger, with blisters, he didn't care any more about honor or glory, team work or anything else. They just wanted to quit but they couldn't. They were embarrassed, angry at themselves, frustrated and they called in for the next set of coordinates, even though they knew they weren't even close to where they were supposed to be for this set of coordinates. It was raining in the middle of the night and they are looking at the map which they cannot figure out to save their lives. When all of a sudden it dawns on them both at the same time that they have gotten so very, very lost that they are found. They figured out that they weren't all that far from where they were supposed to ultimately end up.

I think the disciples must have felt something like that. When their moment came for spiritual discipline in the Garden of Gethsemane, they all slept, as Jesus prayed. When the Roman authorities came to arrest him, they all fled. When strangers in the crowd identified them, like some woman identifying Peter as one of Jesus' disciples, they lied. Spiritually speaking, they were getting loster and loster. It was kind of pathetic.

But the women speak only a brief line to them, and all is changed, at first incredulous, the way that you respond when someone tells you ‘the tests were negative' or ‘you are free to go' or ‘your daughter is fine'. The worst has not happen, the center holds.

Timothy Lynch was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army for an incident that he would have just soon forgotten forever. He walked away from it deeply hoping that he would never have to run into the men from his platoon for the rest of his life. But there was one soldier he couldn't run away from, his father. His father came from the WWII generation that held military service in the highest of esteem and his father had done well in the service. He was a no nonsense man, strong on discipline, not real communicative with love. The thought of having to tell his father that he had failed in the service filled him with dread.

This was many years ago, so Timothy took the cautionary step of sending a telegram to his father, rather than tell him face to face. He explained his dishonorable discharge. He got back a three line telegram. It said:

I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.

In essence, that was the beginning of the message that those women first delivered to the disciples. Despite their compromise and weakness, God promised that God will be with us no matter what. We can reject God but God won't reject us. Despite the very real tragedy and evil that surround us in the world, God promised that hope will triumph ultimately. We can despair but God won't stop infusing hope in the darkness. Despite the fact that we will all die, life will triumph over death. We can be anxious about the meaninglessness of our brief existence but God's transcendent life will fill the world with purpose despite our anxiety.

It was shortly after this that the most profound miracle of Easter began to happen. A bunch of fearful, anxious men with low self-esteem and no hope, were transformed and made confident, empowered, courageous and daring. God gave them the gift of the Spirit and said to them, you've already got everything you need, here is my blessing, now go and heal other people. [I love the charming scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard addresses the Scarecrow and says to him, ‘Where I come from there are men that haven't any more brains than you have but there is one thing they have that you don't have, a diploma, so I confer upon you E Plurbus Unum, etc., etc.. a degree.] With that blessing, these women and men turned completely around and started other churches to the point that today a quarter of the world is gathering to remember the hope that galvanized their lives.

Blessing has a power like that. Don't you know it? I remember one boy in High School that was just depressed. He was convinced he was nothing but a loser and he dressed in clothes that screamed alienation, shuffled around, and mumbled. One day he was making some self-deprecating, cynical remarks and one of the prettiest girls in the school was standing with us. She reached over to him, twirled his hair a little bit and said, “I don't know, I think you're pretty handsome and if you cut your hair right, you'd be down right good lookin'”. I'm telling you within a week that guy had a whole new look. It was amazing to behold.

And profound spiritual blessing is all the more deeply reorienting. I'm thinking of the story of Sojourner Truth, a black woman born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, around 1797. She was sold and cut off from her family and years later when she had a child of her own, he was sold and she was cut off from him. She was broken from the start, badly damaged goods.

Sojourner was befriended by Quakers, who hid her until the Emancipation Law passed in New York in 1827. The Quakers, of course, told her that she was a child of God and precious in God's sight. They blessed her with God's blessing. We don't know all that happened to her during that period but she says that at some point she had a profound experience of God's love for her through Jesus. And that blessed her and empowered her. She changed her name from the name her slave masters gave her to Sojourner Truth, a name which came to her during a time of prayer.

In addition to working, finding her son and rebuilding a family together, Sojourner traveled across our country preaching for an end to slavery in the South and for Women's Rights in our country. She became an enormous social force. Never mind that she was uneducated, never mind that she was freed slave, never mind that she was a woman. She would not be resigned to the accidents of history because she was filled with a moral and spiritual purpose and a conviction that God was with her.

And she was an outstanding orator. She attracted large crowds, particularly of women. She was so popular, in fact, that men, often Ministers, tried to keep her from speaking on the grounds that women ought to be submissive to men. I remind you that this was 1830. At one rally, she was confronted by a group of men, and this is what she said.

“I could work as much and eat as much as any man and bear the lash as well and aren't I a woman? I have born children and seen them sold into slavery and when I cried with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And aren't I a woman? Some say woman can't have as much rights as a man cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, all women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up and again and now that they are asking to do it, the men better let ‘em.”[1]

Something dramatic filled the life when Sojourner Truth was blessed and she did an amazing amount of good in the midst of profound adversity because the Spirit was with her.

Blessing is like that. And how much need for it there really is. Jorge Martinez had a teenage son that had been difficult. Words were exchanged, threats made, anger took the place of reason, and the kid took off from home. After a while Jorge came to his senses and decided to reach out to the boy. He put up signs all around one of the squares in Mexico City where teenagers who are on the streets hang out. The sign said, “Juan, I want you to come home. All is forgiven. Let's start over. Meet me at a certain fountain on a certain date and we will talk. Your Father, Jorge.”

Jorge went to the fountain early and there were half a dozen boys were there. He stood around waiting for his son before he asked one of them if they knew Juan. Everyone of them said they were Juan and it slowly dawned on him that all of them had answered the sign and were there hoping for reconciliation. There is a lot of need out there. Despite the hurt and the distance, people want to come home. They want to be blessed. And you can keep hope alive by passing the blessing on. May you find one person this Eastertide that you can bless. Pass it on. Keep hope alive.

Amen.

[1] From Bill Leonard, Word of God Across the Ages, 1981, p. 71.

[i] Thanks to Mark Trotter “What's the Use?”, First United Methodist Church in San Diego, CA, April 11, 1999.