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Hope at the Heart of the Universe – Easter 2010

By Charles Rush

April 4, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 4.8Mb) ]

y the God whose power breaks through the stone, break into your life and free you from all that binds you. May the Risen Christ whose love is stronger than death speak your name and bring you new life and joy; May the Spirit who walks the road with you give you wisdom to understand and courage to share God's new life for the whole world.

I began Good Friday at Sloane Kettering Hospital. I was visiting folks who are there from Christ Church and someone from town. I suppose it is a good place for a Christian to be on Good Friday as people throughout those halls going through their own brush with the ‘shadow of the valley of death.'

I ended the day up at the farm. I was rebuilding a stone wall on the upper part. I guess I'd been out there an hour or two, completely alone in the quiet, stacking rocks. Right before dusk, I looked up. I saw something but I couldn't see anything. It is like a sense. I started focusing on different thing and finally, I saw the bear, incredibly only about 40 yards away.

I try to live in peace with the bear, so I put my arms up and started talking to him, just like the rangers tell you to do. But Friday, like I needed a reminder, I felt vulnerable and old. He was moving towards me, so I kept backing up, with no possibility of outrunning him if this doesn't work.

And who can say what the honest response in the face of death? That is a deeply personal answer and your answer will be unique to you.

The six guys that I lived around my Freshman year at college are still in contact today. The one guy among us that was the most optimistic among us developed a cancerous brain tumor.

We all got back together on-line and worked our contacts so he got the best care we could come up with. And we had some real victories there early on but after a couple years, the complications grew, the responses were not promising. Through all of the ups and downs when you would talk to Jeremy, he was incredibly positive, appreciative, insisted on keeping as much normalcy for his family as he possibly could. He acknowledged his condition and kept coming back to being positive about what he could control and what there was to be grateful for in his life. He was a little bit of a puppy dog in college and really he still was at middle age.

Came the day when we tried one more thing and it didn't work… And that was about it for what medicine could do to treat this problem. Jeremy was still in that incredibly positive focus. We got a call from his wife. We've known her, also, since we were 18. She didn't know how to broach this subject, but his optimism started to look like denial to her, so she called up the Minister and the Physician because she figured that we would know more about this than she did. The physician, who all along had been directing care and lining up experts, agreed to drive over and talk to him. But, we had to explain one thing to her, that we are only professionals about death when it comes to people we don't know very well. When it comes to facing our own death or those of people we love, we are all in the same threatened spot.

The physician Mickey gets to the house, Jeremy, who has the brain tumor and his wife meet him. They are making small talk. Jeremy is explaining that the results of these latest tests are disappointing but he is keeping his game face on and tacking ahead, making most of the winds against him. His wife decides this is a good moment to leave the room and let the two of them talk alone.

Jeremy is doing his ebullient shtick about everything that he has to be grateful for and the great team that Mickey had lined up to help him. It is pretty much the same ebullient manner Freshman year when he made C's in Calculus look like a good thing. Very positive and upbeat… Jeremy leans over to the physician and says, “Mickey, I have one more favor to ask of you.” Mickey, the physician, had been lining up all these other treatments, so he was wondering what possible treatment might he ask for- probably some new age alternative thing- that he had heard about now. He was hoping it wasn't something like that.

But Mickey said, ‘sure man what is it?'

Jeremy said, “will you watch over my sons? ... I figure that you will know more than anyone what they need to remember from me.”

Mickey said, “It will be an honor… and I do know what they need to remember.” They sat there in the quiet for a while and then they started chit chat about the normal stuff of life, like Wake Forest's chances in the NCAA tournament, their kids and their friends. They talked for a while longer until Jeremy was too tired. They bear hugged and said ‘goodbye'.

What is the honest response in the face of death? That is only for you to answer because you won't stop being you- somewhat honest, somewhat in denial. But, I know that the warm and humane part from those two had to do with the fact that they are both Christians and they both believe that resurrection hope is at the heart of the universe. They both have their final trust that God is good, so however difficult death remains, it does not stop God's goodness. Hope is at the heart of the universe… Among other things, it frees us to be humane with each other.

Twenty years ago, I was at an academic conference, and the subject of hope came up among a dozen of us in different disciplines, only me in religion. One of the literary professors was a Ph.d. from Harvard, full of that crusty secularity and skepticism that so pervades the ethos of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was commenting about the importance of hope and he interrupted my point to announce to the whole table, “it is easier for you Christians to believe in hope than the rest of us”.

I turned to him and said, ‘what makes you say that?' thinking that we know as much hardship as anyone else. He said, ‘you have the greatest story of redemption and hope ever told.' I reflected again on that comment for years.

There is a very powerful hope that pervades the Bible. The story of the Passover, the story of a people enslaved and oppressed, that are set free by a series of events that come together in such a way that they can only be described as miraculous. They are led through the desert and they eventually find their own home and can be their own people. We read that story together every year and we say, “I was led out of Egypt” and “I was set free”. “God delivered me”. Every oppressed people since then have seen their story in this Epic story, and rightfully so. It is such a powerful hope that our people will be free, that our people will have their own land, that our people will live in peace.

Isaiah is filled with such simple, profound hopes. You shall build homes and inhabit them. You shall repair the walls that have been devastated. You shall plant fruit trees and eat from them. You shall see the birth of your children's children. It is such a powerful, profound hope that we will find peace and home.

And the women come to a tomb devastated that loveless power has unjustly tortured and killed powerless love. But they do not find what they expect and they are startled to the point of being overwhelmed. And in that moment, it dawns on them that death itself has been transcended, not that death is over, but that we cannot stop God's goodness even when we try to kill it. At the very heart of things is God's hope for us and nothing we can do will change that. It is just there.

Several years ago, I participated in a year long discussion on this subject with a number of other physicists, theologians, and a few pastors. As you probably know, at the moment, the consensus opinion in among physicists is that the universe will one day come to a end- but not to worry, we have about 15 billion more years. But, the question was posed, if the universe comes to an end, do we have any reason for hope?

You are thinking the same thing I was thinking my first seminar- hey, we have 15 billion years to reflect on this, why don't we start with a couple beers tonight before we get exhausted? I discovered that physicists that study cosmology have a different conception of time than the rest of us pea brains. For them, this was more of an existential question.

What made the year so interesting was to see how people interpreted the meaning of essentially the same evidence. Is there reason for hope or not? It turned out to be such a subjective enterprise and your answer most often said as much about you as it did about the evidence at hand. It is such a personal question to answer. Is there reason for hope?

What are you living for? What gets you going in the morning? What do you keep coming back to when the going is rough? What is it that the Spirit moves in your life?

We are here today because the Spirit of God still moves in quite powerful ways. Those first women and men were powerfully changed. During the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, they did what most of us would do, they hid, fled, stayed alive. They were afraid of being tortured themselves and who isn't? They weren't interested in being subjected to arbitrary power and injustice. They fled. They lied. They took cover under dark of night.

But this Spirit that moved among them, first in fear and astonishment, on that first Sunday. But then it washed over all of them and gave them this incredible, miraculous courage. They reassemble themselves back in Jerusalem. They start praying together. Most of them quit what they had been doing and took up a new life together and this new life that they had together became the driving force in their life.

And they started these illegal churches all across the Roman Empire, regardless of the threats against them. Almost immediately they went to Damascus, to Cairo, to Ethiopia, to Baghdad, all the way to India, and we now have pretty good evidence, to Ireland in the west and Armenia in the east- all within a few decades. In their world, they went to the four corners of the world. They did not care if the authorities persecuted them and killed them and the Roman authorities in those decades most certainly did persecute and kill them

They were changed people. They were utterly convinced that the life of love, the life of compassion, the life of forgiveness, reconciliation, the life of justice and peace- the life that Jesus taught them about- they were utterly convinced that it was the profounder spiritual way to live. They were convinced that this way of living opens a new Spiritual community that was so freeing and fulfilling that ordinary men and women turned into heroes.

My brothers and sisters, that seemingly miraculous transformation is still happening today. God love for you is stronger than fear. God's hope for you is longer than despair. God's faith in you is stronger than your doubt. Step out. Break out. God doesn't want you to sell yourself short; God wants you to risk something big for something good. This is much bigger than you are by yourself. Hope at the center of the universe is behind it.

May the Spirit pour over you in this season. May you grow strong in the love. May the God whose power breaks through the stone, break into your life and free you from all that binds you. May the Risen Christ whose love is stronger than death speak your name and bring you new life and joy; May the Spirit who walks the road with you give you wisdom to understand and courage to share God's new life for the whole world. Amen.