Sermon: Hope is Where You Find It

[ previous | index | next ]

Hope is Where You Find It

By Charles Rush

January 8, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 2.0Mb) ]

is day we celebrate the coming of the One who is the Hope of the World, one whom even Wise Men traveling far and from the East came to bow down and laden with gifts.

Hope is not just optimism, although optimism is not all that bad to hang around with. I read a story about two brothers, one an optimist and the other a pessimist. The optimist, it turns out, is kind of an inveterate optimist. He turned out to be an adult that really did my heart warm. When the boys were young, their birthdays were 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 to see how they would react before they told them that they had other presents.

They went into the 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. His parents come up to him and say, "son, what are you smiling about?" He says, "all this manure, there's got to be a pony nearby".

I got to thinking about that listening to the comedian George Carlin, the other day being interviewed by Don Imus. From my generation, everyone I know love Carlin's humor. In the 60's he came on "I'm the hippie dippie weather man bringing you your hippie dippie weather…. Man."

Yet as a Minister and a person of faith, over the years, I have a respectful wariness about George Carlin. He has a deep seated cynicism about the world that is as committed as any religious fervor.

He was talking about his birth. It was a revealing narrative because he was recounting a story that his mother had told him as a child.

His father was a successful businessman and his mother was the secretary to the publisher of one of New York's top fashion magazines. They were married and divorced after three years. They each went their separate ways, when one day, a couple years later, they run into one another on the streets of Manhattan, a completely chance encounter.

Carlin's father was quite a schmoozer and he asks his ex-wife to get together for the weekend at the beach at Far Rockaway in Queens. She had nothing going on, and, for whatever reason, she agreed. They met that weekend, way led to way, next thing you know, Carlin is conceived. It wasn't supposed to happen, it only happened because of a chance encounter.

She calls her ex-husband, tells him she is pregnant, and that she intends to have an abortion. She contacts a physician in Brooklyn, a Dr. Sunshine. Back in the 30's abortion was illegal in our country. They make an appointment. She is waiting in the waiting room with her ex-husband, he is reading the sports pages, when she looks up at a painting. I think it was an abstract painting or an impressionist painting. And in that painting, she sees the face of her mother. She studies it for a moment, leans over to her ex-husband, and says, "I can't do this now. Let's go." And that was it.

Now, I could just as easily hear a religious person telling that story and seeing God's hand of mercy at work in this incredible subtle, unpredictable way. That out of rather sorry, banal circumstances, comes the good fortune of birth and a productive life. But that is not the way George Carlin sees it. He sees it as a random meeting that was not meant to be, which led to an improbable rekindled brief spat of passion, that led to a confused woman reading portents into an inscrutable rorshach on the wall of a waiting room that led to a rash and unconsidered impulse not to abort that led to… his life.

He says, at the wizened age of 68, that life is all just arbitrary happenstance. "People ask me what I've showed up for… I tell them, Man I'm just here for the show. I'm just here for the show."

I've heard this speech for 3 decades now. Spiritually speaking, in my mind, it went from sad, to lame, to pathetic with each passing decade. "That's it? The category is "Meaning and Purpose" and that is all you came up with? The sub-categories are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness- and that is all you could color in? Truth of the matter… I don't want to end up like you… And I'm old enough to know how it happens…

I wish he had a better birth narrative to work with. It is pretty banal, lacking in chivalry and romance, daring, adventure or promise. [It is like a bad episode of 'Sex and the City' from the audio years].

I was standing at a family gathering once, exchanging pleasantries with an elderly couple. I had nothing much to say and plenty of time, so I asked them, 'If you don't mind, how did you two meet?' They were kindly, in their late 70's.

"The first time or the second time?" He says. I said, "I want to hear about the first time you laid eyes on her."

It was at a dance… given by the RAF in England. The Americans were shipping out to Europe the next day. He was there by himself, she came to see her brother, who is a pilot for the British Air Force. They danced, they talked, time came to go. He offered to walk her home. She said it was six miles. Thank you anyway, I have a bike.

He asks if he can run along next to her. She says yes. 6 miles he runs, all the way thinking that he is heading out to battle, maybe to die, and he's only kissed one girl in his life.

They get to her farm in the beautiful English countryside. They are talking about this and that. He decides he has nothing to lose and he tells her that he is leaving the next morning for the front in France and that he can't believe his fortune that as soon as he saw her, she took his breath away, and now this. He's in the middle of his speech and suddenly he just kisses her.

Way led to way and they move this session to the hayloft in the barn and kiss some more until they are literally out of time and he runs the 6 miles back to base and gets there just in time for formation before they shipped out at 6 in the morning.

Now that is romance, adventure, daring, passion.

He mails her letters from everywhere he goes but… she never gets them. He didn't have them posted correctly. She thinks about him all the time but she starts to think that maybe he died or maybe it just wasn't to be…

Many, many months later, she is in London visiting relatives. She is standing in one of the train stations, Charing Cross, and out of this sea of uniformed young people, she sees a young soldier drop his back pack, part a crowd of people, and lay a great hug and kiss on her.

She starts to cry, just not believing that he is alive and that she could ever run into him again. Way led to way, they stayed up all night, walking the streets of London, and he told her about all the letters he wrote and all the battles and how when he was tired and afraid, he kept going, because in all the world, the one thing he wanted more than anything was to find her again… Oh, man…

It would be hard to grow up hearing that story and conclude 'It's all just arbitrary happenstance, random, shouldn't have happened but did… and I'm just here to see the show.'

Great passion like that is infectious isn't it?

But, you know, real lived life is never an either/or is it? It is never just a choice between epic, romantic adventure or staid banality. Great romances eventually have to argue over which bills to pay and where to put the furniture and even boring, safe households have a dimension of adventure and prospect, if for no other reason than you and the potential future that you might actually realize yourself.

Our biblical story starts off on a great adventure. Three wise men study the stars and see a new star come into being. They study the stars every night and they know that this means something important because this is the way that the gods communicate with humans inscrutably but for real. They are not sure what it means but they intend to follow it where it leads and they pack gifts of precious value because whatever they find will be very important. They travel by night to follow the star.

Who knows how much time goes by. And one night, they finally sense that they are in the right place all along. And what do they find? An ordinary child, with peasant parents, in the most modest of dwellings, barely out of the elements. The great new star leads them across the deserts to new lands where they find… the hope of the world as a baby wrapped in a burlap grain sack.

It is ordinary, banal to some, certainly looks slap-dash and random, probably shouldn't have actually happened, but there it is… A mystery, a wonder enough to the Wise men that they bowed down and paid homage- leaving Gold for a king, frankincense and myrrh.

It was a mystery, rich with the smells of royalty. But, if you were there, that fragrant incense was also mixed with all the ordinary stench from the barn. They are both there… which one will you use to interpret the other?

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.

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 interpreted their lives through the lens of hope despite the set backs or banal social circumstances they have transcended. In most of their cases if you ask them to describe their lives, with no cameras around, I imagine that they would sound quite a lot like the story that was told about Arthur Rubinstein. Reportedly, a young inquirer came to Rubinstein and asked him how often he played the piano and Rubinstein 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?" Rubinstein said "I'm good and I wish to become superb."

Hope sees the present, with all its imperfections, going somewhere.

Hope has an inchoate sense of blessing that is working itself out, slowly and with set backs, but it is defining itself with purpose. Hope creates meaning as it goes and holds on to it even when there is not much evidence to support it's effort at the moment. Where the future brings us something not anticipated and not entirely understandable, hope sees mystery. And when the present sees things coming to fruition and fullness, sometimes with remarkable improbability, hope generates gratitude and grace. Hope is the light of the world that beckons us from the East to come and follow it where it will. And hope gives us eyes to see the blessing in the midst of the ordinary and the banal. It is the interpretive lens that grants us determination in the midst of despair, courage in the midst of crisis, power in the midst of peril.
It is my hope for you that you will be able this season to lift your eyes from the immediate surroundings that define you day in and day out, up to the great canopy of heaven that stretches over our head. It is my hope that you will be able to survey that great universe and reflect on your place in it. It is my hope that you will find the star that can guide you towards a vista of discovery and will set you on a journey to find something worthy of worship and adoration. It is my hope that you will find the mystery in the midst of the ordinariness of your life and the spiritual adventure that our world has to offer. It is my hope that you will see yourself blessed; that you can drive out cynicism and disappointment and that you will find yourself about to find out. God has something great for you to do yet. What that is exactly is taking shape even now. Pray, study, reflect, and step out. It's time. Amen.