Sermon: Irrepressible Hope

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Irrepressible Hope

By Charles Rush

April 12, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 5.0Mb) ]

ster is one of those days that veers between the sublime and the mundane. I was in touch with the mundane trials of young Mother's after last weeks service. I got a call from my sister-in-law on speaker phone with my nephews Henry and Charlie that are in kindergarten. “Uncle Chuck, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, did the boys try to hit his donkey with their palm branches?”

“Uh… No Ma'am I don't believe so…

“Did they try to whack their brother when he wasn't looking?”

“No Ma'am, verse 28 here says they were on their best behavior, especially the boys at the Episcopal church”

“Uncle Chuck, I know your making that up”… You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to slide one past my nephew Henry. But he is a Devil in a bow tie.

For all of you who have scored a small victory just getting here this morning, and you know who you are, my congratulations.

On the sublime note, we lift up epic narratives this week because they teach us fundamental lessons about human nature and God. When our Jewish brothers and sisters read the story of the Exodus at the Passover Seder, they say, "Tell your son on that day saying, ‘Because of this God acted for me when I came out of Egypt'" (Shemot 13:8). This isn't just a story about something that happened way back when. In some sense, it is also happening ‘to me'. We humans keep others in bondage and sometimes we even keep ourselves in bondage. God wills freedom for all of us. For freedom we were created. It is our destiny, the goal towards which we all are moving.

Christians have the same tradition in telling the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In our liturgy, told over the entire week, we are all present. When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, it is all of us who cheer. When Jesus says that someone will betray him at the last supper, it is all of us who say, ‘not I'. When Jesus says in response, ‘I tell you he who dips his bread in the wine with me', it is all of us who dip our bread in the wine. When Pilate calls out to the crowd and offers us the choice of Barabas or Jesus, it is all of us who say ‘Crucify Jesus'. We had goodness in our midst and we killed it. What is it about us humans that kill goodness over and over and over when we are acting collectively?

Today, we pick up the post script. Like children, we thought that the story was over when we killed Jesus. We thought that if we rejected God's anointed- in effect, if we reject God- that God would be done with us. It is not that simple. God gets the last word.

Too often, we are like the kids that were playing ‘hide and seek' outside the office of one of my colleagues. He was watching out of his window while this one child hid in a big pile of leaves and really hunkered down. All the other children had been found and they were standing around trying to figure out what to do because they just couldn't find this one last kid. The kid under the leaves could hear all of this but still he wouldn't budge. My friend is watching all of this, trying to figure out what he should do. He finally opens the window and yells down at the pile of leaves, “Hey Kid, get found”. We need to get in the game.

Our ladies in the story seem to need some kind of nudge too. They've been through this terrible tragedy. They feel guilty about how everything turned out. They are doing their duty, going to the grave to honor the dead. The tomb is empty. They don't know what to think. They don't know what to do. They don't know what to say. Apparently, the story is not over. Apparently, they need to get in the game.

The sublime message of the Easter story is that you cannot stop God. You can not reject God in a way that God will reject you. God is profoundly, foundationally about reconciliation in a way that we can't undo simply by refusing to participate in it. God loves us in a way that we can not stop simply by not being loving ourselves. Reconciliation and love are more intimately a part of our destiny than we realized. We are way, way more tracked in this direction than we knew.

We are a lot like Jorge Martinez. 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. Every single one 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… No, love that leads us towards a profound reconciliation, is more of our destiny than we realized.

Some of us are mute in the face of this good news because we just can't believe that God can believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. We live our life like a soldier that I read about. 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.

My grandmother used to say to me, “Remember who you are and whose you are”. You can fail, sometimes miserably. But you can't stop God from believing in you, for willing you purpose and meaning and integrity… For better and worse, God will not let go of you… You need to get in the game.

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. So, get in the game of reconciliation and love.

We spend most of our lives- wandering sometimes aimlessly, sometimes on track- in search of ourselves. In some sense we are all like the lead character in the movie Antwone Fisher. Antwone was a orphan. He spent his youth in foster-care homes and orphanages. His experience was not good. Sometimes he was controlled. He was slighted. He was even abused. He never knew unconditional love. He enrolled in the Navy out of high school, really his only choice. There he got into trouble because of anger management issues and he was assigned to visit a psychiatrist. Together, he reluctantly peeled back the layers of frustration and resentment, layers of internal fear and control…

And he could do it, I should hasten to add, because of two things. He had a new girlfriend who was a really solid emotional/spiritual person that was showing him the early face of real love and support and caring. And because the psychiatrist did too. He really took him under his wing, professionally as a psychiatrist, but also like a son.

At one point, Antwone decides that he needs to go find his birth mother. He wants to know why she gave him up, why she couldn't love him. And he is half-hoping that she will take him in now and some kind of new birth will happen.

He goes back to his home town with only the name of his father and mother, gets out a very large phone book, and just starts calling everyone with their last names. Finally, he gets someone on the phone who says she knows his mother. It is his aunt. She invites him over to her house.

He goes to her house and his aunt and uncle greet him warmly and tell him all they know about his father, the brief relationship with his mother, how he had since died. His uncle offers to take him to see his mother.

They drive over to a tenement apartment. His uncle goes inside and calls her name. The two men walk in. They walk into a tattered living room with one woman sitting in silence. His uncle tells her that her son is there. She never moves. The uncle leaves to give them some time alone. Antwone sits down and asks her many of the questions he had always wanted to ask her. She never responds. She just rocks… She is just not right.

Finally, he gets up and walks out of the room. He had come all that way, with all those hopes, all the questions that he wanted to get answered, to be comforted and held… only to find that spiritually he was a motherless child. He is just numb, leaden.

His uncle was waiting for him in the car. They drove across town in silence to another house. The two of them get out together and walk up to this other house. There are people out on the porch, people inside milling around. As Antwone walks up to the house, they start introducing themselves to him, “Antwone, I'm your cousin Clarice.” “Antwone, I'm your great uncle George.” There are more people in the living room, more in the hall. Dozens of people, all introducing themselves to him, until finally he gets back to the dining room, crammed full of people. They finally lead him up to a regal, elderly woman sitting at the table. And the table is spread full of Sunday Soul food- bowls of vegetables, steaming mashed potatoes.

She takes his hands in hers, her eyes brimming, and she says, “Antwone I'm your grandmother… Can you stay for dinner?”

In the resurrection, God comes to tell us the end of the story. You may not have the life that you would have chosen if you could have it all your way. You may have a lot of disappointments and pains. But you have a place at the table.

God, the great Matriarch of the family, is loving you, pulling for you, surrounding you with people that will build you up, praying for you when you are away, calling you back home. You are surrounded by a great throng of people that are pulling for you.

You are somebody. Remember who you are. Remember whose you are. Live forward into the full potential of your stature. No matter how lost or alone or confused you may feel, God is calling you home. In the midst of the darkness do not fear. In the terror, be not overwhelmed. You have a place at the table. Get in the game.