Why I Hope (midweek message)

Gustave Doré, Jesus Prechant Sur La Montagne, c. 1865, 
oil on canvas, 130 x 196 cm, private collection

Why I hope

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 20, 2020

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” (1 Peter 3:15-16)

When I heard these words read as part of last Sunday’s epistle, I felt convicted.   How long has it been since I gave an account to myself, let alone anyone else, of why I have hope?   In times like the present, when we all face fear and isolation on a daily basis, it is easy to lose faith, and with it, hope.   

I translate Hebrews 11:1 this way:  “Now trust in God is what undergirds and embodies the things for which we hope; it is what demonstrates things we cannot see.”    Having faith in God, being faithful to God—this is core to Christian hope. 

Faith is not about “believing that there is a God.”  It is a disposition of the heart, not a position of the mind.  It is about trusting in the love beneath and behind all things, and as a result becoming more and more trustworthy.  Remember that the commandment is “Love the Lord your God,” not “Subscribe to the proposition that ‘God’ exists.” 

Blessed Marcus Borg regularly told of students who said they did not believe in God.  He would ask them to describe what they didn't believe in, invariably an old irascible white guy with a beard up in the clouds, a supernatural patriarch who keeps scores and viciously punishes slights.  Marcus’ response was invariably, ‘I don’t believe in that, either.’   For him, this caricature was a form of idolatry.  Instead, he wrote, 

“Experience of God, not belief in God, is the invitation of Christianity… ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate’ is the defining mark of the follower of Jesus and the ethos of the Community of Jesus…  Reality is permeated indeed flooded with divine creativity, nourishment, and care… Imagine that Christianity is about loving God. Imagine that it’s not about the self and its concerns, about ‘what’s in it for me?’, whether that be a blessed afterlife or prosperity in this life. Imagine that loving God is about being attentive to the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Imagine that it is about becoming more and more deeply centered in God. Imagine that it is about loving what God loves. How would that change our lives?”

I am not a natively faithful person.  I tend to be skeptical and distrustful.  When faced with the ugly things and horror that we must face in life—say, the lingering sickness and prolonged death of a loved one—my default position seems to be to throw up my hands in despair and wonder whether life has any meaning, any sense beyond its apparent randomness.  But I have seen moments of glory and mystery as well: compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and steadfast commitment.   I may have felt the despair of being sick, but also the joy of getting better and having health once more. 

I may have felt grief at the loss of a loved one, but I have also had dreams and momentary glimpses of the departed in bliss.  I may have seen senescence and decrepitude, but I have also seen the beauty of children growing into healthy, grounded adults.  And as I see those about me live into their trust, and becoming more and more centered in love, I am affirmed and empowered to trust, to hope. 

The Psalter expresses the whole range of human emotions, and in so doing tells us it is okay to be a human being with feelings.  What matters is how we act of our feelings.  The stories of our Lord’s life in the Gospels are the heart of my faith and trust:  he too had moments of doubt and fear.  He died in seemingly random and meaningless torture, still chanting the psalms from the Cross expressing fear at being abandoned but ultimate hope in a loving God who would make even death right.  The apostolic proclamation of his rising from death and appearing to his disciples (1 Cor 15:1-12) and the various stories this proclamation generated over the first three generations of the Church (Mark 16; Matt 28; Luke 24; John 20)—these give me assurance that Jesus’ hope was grounded in the deepest reality, and, simply put, just plain true.      

God did not promise that if we had faith, all our woes and fears would be at an end. Rather, God promised to be with us in all that we must go through.   One of the great signs of hope for me is a crucifix:  God on the Cross, there alongside us all in our sufferings and joys, shows us that the way of the suffering is indeed the way of life and light.  As John’s Gospel startlingly puts it, Jesus was lifted up into glory even as he was being hoisted up on that killing tree. 

I have hope because I have trust in God.  I find this cruel, crazy, and beautiful world a place bursting with the love, creativity, and joy of God.  Yesterday I posted photos of Trinity Garden in its spring glory on the Trinity Facebook page (click here to see) in honor of Rogation week, filled with prayers for the natural world before this Thursday’s Feast of the Ascension:  even as we are hunkered down due to the pandemic, the natural world about us is in all its flowery glory.  As Jesus taught, it is in the very moments of suffering that we can best see the hand of God (happy are the poor, the starving, those dying of thirst, the grieving, the persecuted), not because the suffering is any less severe, or because God inflicted it on us (not!), but rather, because it is in the very moments where God seems most absent that God is actually most present, ready to help us, no matter what. 

That’s what trust is; that’s what hope is. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+