Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis Hebrews 11:1-3

January 25, 2009

“Harnessing Hope”

Scripture:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Sermon:

How did you feel watching the presidential inauguration on Tuesday? I’ll never forget the sea of over a million flags waving exuberantly from the Capitol building all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial; the tears streaming down the faces of so many people; the spontaneous hugs; the looks of wonder and joy on the faces of people all over the world as they watched this amazing event.

This was not a celebration of one political party’s victory over another. This was the celebration of hope flowing back into our collective veins. I feel that hope too–the hope that we might have a government of the people, by the people and for the people, instead of a government of, by and for special interests. I have hope that our nation might command the worlds’ respect by living out its principles, rather than demanding respect by threatening those who disagree. I have hope that we Americans might lead the world in pursuing our common human interests, rather than pressing our short-sighted national and corporate interests.

These are some of my hopes. But I’ve been around long enough to know that these hopes could be quickly dashed by an assassin’s bullet, God forbid, or gradually deflated by the grinding compromises of politics.

9/11 taught me a hard lesson about hope. In the post Cold War years before 9/11, I felt a kind of hope that, little by little, the human race was gradually progressing towards mutual tolerence, interdependence and a coordination of efforts. When the Twin Towers collapsed and then we tried to defeat terrorism by going to war with Iraq, my hope felt defeated and depleted.

To live in this world without hope is both dismal and dangerous. And hopelessness isn’t a strong asset to a pastor. Fortunately something in me and beyond me pushed me to look for hope in something deeper than the daily news. And I began to see that hope isn’t the same as optimism. Hope is a force that we can harness, whether or not the news is good or bad, or whether the circumstances of our own lives are just what we wanted or just what we didn’t want.

Some of you are struggling to hold onto hope right now. Some of you have lost your job or are afraid of losing your job. Some of you have lost loved ones or are afraid of losing a loved one. Some of you have lost your health or are afraid of losing your health. All of us knows what it’s like to be disappointed by what life has thrown at us, or to be afraid of what life might throw at us.

But no matter what our circumstances and no matter what the day’s headlines are, we can always live in hope and hope can always live in us. In fact, wherever there is life, there is hope.

To explain why this is true, I’m going to draw from a book I just picked up Friday called God Is a Verb by Rabbi David Cooper. The book tries to interpret for modern ears the kabbalah, a body of teachings from the mystical strand of Judaism that were quietly passed down through the centuries to help people have a direct experience of God.

David Cooper says that part of our difficulty in knowing God directly is that we tend to think of God as a being. The beings that we know are ones that we can see and touch and hear. And there are those rare times when people hear a voice or feel a touch they just know is God. But Cooper suggests that we can connect with God at any place and any time, not as a static, changeless thing, but as the ongoing eternal process¹ that brings forth all things, brings us to life, awakens us to the heights and depths of living, and opens to us the realm of the eternal. Cooper suggests we think of God as a verb. God is God-ing us to being in every moment. “God-ing” is a verb like sharing, playing, loving or dancing. It’s about two subjects interacting together. As you are God-ed into life, you awaken, grow hope, share love, learn serve and create. All of this is your being flowing out of the dynamic beingness of God and the “doingness” of God.

This is what Paul alluded to in today’s scripture lesson: “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word (the Logos) of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” We are the visible manifestation of an invisible power that is working throughout the universe–a power that continually brings forth life, love, order, and beauty, even out of chaos, death and destruction. Where there is God, there is hope. And there is nowhere that God isn’t.

Now we don’t usually feel like we’re manifestations of God’s creativity, wisdom, love, and power. We often feel alone, anxious and discouraged. That’s because being in the flow of life’s constant changes feels scary to us. And sometimes we’ve gotten hurt by life. So our ego jumps in and says, “Hey, let me help you avoid life’s pain and go after life’s pleasure. If you say or do the wrong thing, you might lose your job or your approval rating or your self esteem. So let me tell you what image of yourself you need to project. And you’re in constant danger of losing people you’re counting on. Let me tell you how to control people and avoid rejection. You might get taken advantage of if you give of yourself, and you might fail if you risk your gifts. Let me tell you who to avoid and what to avoid to keep from embarrassing yourself. I’ll help you go after the things that will cover up your inner emptiness and loneliness. And a little divine intervention wouldn’t hurt, so I’ll show you how to stay on God’s good side so He’ll grant you what you want and spare you from what you don’t want.”

And so we create our own reality with our own identity, rules, goals, and beliefs. We think that’s what our life is. We think that if we improve it here and do more there, we’ll have the lives we want. But that’s not where real hope, power or love are. In fact, this life that we create out of fear and self centeredness is the very thing that separates us from the God of life and hope and power.

So how can we connect with God’s hope-filled action in our lives? Paul tells us how in our scripture reading. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” By faith, Paul didn’t mean a set of beliefs that we hold. Faith is something that we do. We do faith by trusting, releasing, opening to that unseen, dynamic power of God. That’s what takes us out of the fear-based life we have created and down into the hope-based life God is creating through us.

You can begin to do that right now. You might find it helpful to close your eyes for a minute and bring your awareness to your breath as it fills your lungs and empties, fills and empties. It does that all by itself, while your heart is beating and your breakfast is digesting. Your Creator is alive in you as the wondrous miracle of life every moment, without your creating or controlling it.

Now bring your awareness to your experience so far in worship. Have you felt lifted, touched, filled, fed? Your Redeemer is alive in you as the even more wondrous miracle of life abundant and life eternal–the life of the soul, which flows into our awareness like living water in the dessert when we let go of ourselves enough to open to God. You can open your eyes.

God can work in us and through us as we move out of our fear-based ego, and “let go and let God”. This week I was talking to someone who recently lost his job. He readily agreed to let me share his experience with you. One of his first weekdays at home with his kids, his young daughter wanted him to play with her. He was absently going through the motions of playing with her, but his mind was full of anxiety about how he was going to provide for his family, and what if he couldn’t find another job. “Daaaaddy! Play with me!” his daughter persisted. He tuned into his little girl, noisily blew on her belly, and just enjoyed laughing and playing with her as she enjoyed being with him. The anxiety that had been driving him was released. He had the impetus to call someone at his old job about a project that might be related to a job opening he had heard about. He got a lot of information, his creative mind went to work, and soon he had a job interview for that position. He began the interview by offering to save the manager his usual spiel by showing him a little slide presentation he had put together about what he thought the job was about, what the current needs were, and the kind of person he was looking for. Then the manager could make any additions or corrections. The manager was surprised and impressed.

We don’t know yet if he got the job, but he had a heck of a lot more fun than if he had come into the interview hat in hand and filled with powerless apprehension. Even in a very stressful situation, he had experienced God’s creative energy working in his mind to create an ingenious approach to a stressful situation.

We try to hold onto the belief that God is always with us. That belief can turn into an experience when we come down out of our fears and open to what God is doing within us all the time.

For me, to live in hope is to let God do God’s thing in us in every way we can. Sometimes it means to stop listening to our self doubt, self blame and victimhood and start listening to God telling us who we really are. I just read of a teenage girl whose face is covered with acne. Every morning when she looks in the mirror she renews her baptism by splashing her face with water and saying to herself, “I am God’s beloved child.”

Sometimes living in hope means listening to our longings for a life more aligned with God’s love and truth, or for a world more aligned with God’s kingdom, or for a church that has the space to help us fulfill the mission God has called us to. Wasn’t our Annual Meeting last week filled with hope?

Sometimes living in hope means taking risks when you don’t know the outcome, stepping out when you don’t know where you’ll end up, reaching out when you don’t know if you’ll find an open hand or a clenched fist.

Martin Luther King often got into arguments with his advisors when they were planning his next move during the Civil Rights Movement, because his advisors wanted to make sure his strategies would be successful. But King kept telling them, “It’s not for us to analyze whether or not I will succeed. It’s my obligation to do the right thing, and leave the unknown to God.” This is living in hope.

But King didn’t have the naive belief that if he did the right thing, God would protect him. He knew he might well die for it. But he said, "If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive."² This is true hope–that every action we take that is inspired by the God who is living in us and through us will work for ultimate good (Romans 8:28).

I’ll be very interested to see how things unfold under the Obama administration. I very much hope that things will change for the better. But no matter what I read in the daily news, I know that the real source of my hope lies deeper than this administration’s successes or failures. It lies with “the One who is able to do in us far more abundantly than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20)–the One who is working in you and me right now and in every moment. This is the force that will change our lives and change the world.

Eric Fromm wrote:

Those whose hope is weak settle for comfort or for violence.

Those whose hope is strong

See and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment

to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

If we each just do that wherever we are, we will see the world changing around us.

As Jeffrey Sachs said,

Great social forces are the mere accumulation of individual actions. Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.³