Here's Hoping

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 01.19.14

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 49:1-9

Hope can be hard.

It is easy to feel that way, because life is rough.  Oh, sure, you were hopeful once.  But that was a long time ago, back before you had your hopes dashed to the ground and crushing under the rumbling wheels of ten thousand commutes to and from a soul-draining cubicle-farm.  That was a long time ago, before the story you had told yourself about your life got as messy as that wood chipper scene from Fargo. 

It’s easy to set aside hope when being hard and cold as stone feels so much safer.  Life makes it considerably easier to cast up a hard wall of jadedness around yourself.  Why be hopeful, when you can protect yourself from the world by casting a thick armored shell around yourself, doubting the motivations of everything and everyone?

It’s easy to feel that way, particularly given the way hope gets used in the world around us.  If you’ve been around other human beings for more than a couple of years, you know that the language of hope tends to be used by folks who are trying to sell you something, or trying to get your vote.  These days, I’m not even sure those are two different things.

I’ll confess to getting that feeling sometimes, particularly when I hear the Jesus-pitchmen on the teevee cranking out the health and wealth gospel.  No-one is easier to separate from their money than someone down on their luck, desperate for healing, desperate from something that might break the pattern that has ruled their lives.  Give ‘em a little bit of hope for a blessing, just a smidgen of hope for a miracle to turn their life around, just enough to tease out their credit card information.  It troubles me.  I’ll admit it.  Cynicism should not be too much of a pastor’s makeup, but it’s always been a part of the way I approach the world.

Which is why the last week has been good for my spirit, as I’ve delved into some of the latest approaches to blending Christian faith with therapeutic counseling.  Over and over again during a whole week coursework, a theme has been reinforced.  When you’re struggling with a mess, or trying to rebuild a life, nothing is more potent and more valuable than hope.  That’s true in dealing with a crisis of relationship, or a vocational struggle, or even a struggle with mortality itself. It is the basis and bulwark of almost every intervention we were taught during the week, because without a sense of hopefulness, nothing gets anywhere.

Hope builds resilience.  If you’re going to survive something disastrous, something like an earthquake, a sharknado, or the last Redskins season, a sense that things will get better is absolutely key.  It doesn’t guarantee anything, but if there’s one factor that makes it more likely that you’re going to make it through a time of trial, it’s your ability to hold out the possibility of getting through it that can make the difference.

Hope motivates and gives direction.  Without a sense that things can ever get better, you’re not going to seek help, or take steps to live a life that has within it the potential to be better.

You can know these things, and yet still struggle with hope.  Like the people of ancient Israel, who found themselves in a place where hope seemed completely pointless.  We’re in Second Isaiah again this week, the middle part of that great prophetic book, and that means that...just like last week...we’re hearing a story told when the people of Israel were in between a rock and a hard place.

It’s hard for us, here in the comfort of a sanctuary in a snug little town, to really grasp how much they’d lost.  For us, I suppose, we might know that feeling if Washington lay in ruins, the monuments destroyed, the Constitution burned, the internet blasted clean of every trace of our identity as a people.  Just like the Judeans, we’d then be dragged off to a strange land to the north...but then it breaks down a bit, because for us, that’d be Canada, where they’d probably just make us be polite to one another and give us access to health care.

It’s hard, as a people, for us to grasp how shattering that time would have been.

Hope, when you’re in the deepest possible despair and everything you’ve worked towards your whole life long is a shattered ruin?  It feels impossible.

And what Isaiah was telling them was a wild and impossible thing.  Hear it through those ancient ears, if you can.  You’ve been beaten down, broken and trampled.  Everything you thought was solid and real and eternal in the world had been smashed.  Around you, a great and powerful empire dominates the world, and they’ve done a great job of destroying your identity as a people.  They are everything that you hear and see, and you belong to them.  You are nothing.

Isaiah acknowledges this.  He names it.  He’s speaking to the “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations.”  Meaning, he’s talking to everyone around him.  He’s speaking to those who see themselves as slaves, to those who see power all around them and know that they aren’t anything.  Everything that was sacred and precious to them, everything that made them who they were, all of that will be forgotten.

To those people, Isaiah hits them up with a hope that is so far beyond their hoping that it must have seemed completely insane.  Let’s play that out a little bit.  If you’d sat down with one of those Judean slaves in Babylon, and you’d asked them:  “What’s the wildest hope you can imagine? ”  What would they have said?  They’d probably have sat there for a while and struggled to come up with anything.

Maybe some more food would be nice.  Or maybe fewer beatings.  Fewer beatings would be a pleasant change.  

If you gave it a little bit, and pressed them a little harder, they might have dreamed wildly that some day, some how, they might be allowed to return to their land.  Oh, it seemed completely crazy, because there’d never been an empire as mighty as Babylon, with it’s wonders and gold and gardens and armies.  But maybe we’ll get to go back home, to the life we knew.  That would have seemed like a wild and distant fantasy, a Walter Mitty daydream going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa through your mind, almost totally divorced from reality.

But the message received by the prophet was that even this image they had in their minds wasn’t enough.  It was too light.  It couldn’t even begin to match God’s future for their people.  Instead, to this broken people, Isaiah proclaims, speaking in the voice of the Lord: You will be a light to all nations....so that my salvation can reach to the ends of the earth.

This seems to go beyond hope and into the land of double extra crazy, completely wild and impossible, hope that is so preposterously beyond the reality that the people of Israel knew that it might as well have involved alien crop circles and magic.

And yet here we are, we sitting here in this little space, thousands of years later.  What do we have to say to those Judeans in their slavery?  What does the reality of this country, this place, and this gathering, have to say?  Imagine yourself suddenly back there, sitting with a Hebrew by the rivers of Babylon.  They look up at you, and ask you...what’s going to become of us?  Is there any future for the things that we hold sacred?  What could you honestly say to such a person?

You could say that two thousand and five hundred years from now, there will be a nation that is utterly unknown.  It will be a nation of many peoples, from many lands.  They will speak a language that your world has never heard.  It will be filled with strange and powerful magics.  People will fly great metal ships in the sky.  There will be tools that think and speak, pictures that seem to live and move.  This people will reach out their hands and touch the moon and the stars in the heavens.

Among this strange and magical people, millions will be telling your stories, and worshipping your God.

What sort of hope would that be?  It would make Isaiah’s wild proclamation seem almost tame by comparison...and yet it would be true.  

The reality of God’s creation can spin out futures that not only meet our hopes, but make our hopes look like a shadow by comparison.

So if you struggle with hope, if cynicism and anxiety have closed like a steel band around your heart, hear Isaiah’s message.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.