Month: December 2023

The Defiance of Hope

Image from Photos of Biblical Explanations Pt. 2

I wonder if you might close your eyes for a moment – and conjure an image of those last moments before and following the act of creation. In the book of Genesis, we find a description of the darkness covering the face of the deep – the only sound –the divine wind as it sweeps across the face of the void.

Our sci-fi shaped imaginations offer us images to complement the Genesis description of the darkness of the deep. Maybe an image comes to you from the opening scene from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise looking ahead into a vast and empty panorama of receding space; perhaps it’s an image from the Hubble Telescope relaying from its earth orbit images of far-flung star formations – arresting in their resplendent shapes and colors; maybe it’s the gamma ray images from the newer Webb Telescope – which from solar orbit at the second Lagrange point – a million miles away from the Earth – captures images from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang in the evolution of our own Solar System. Whatever images your imagination conjures – sit with them for a moment with eyes still closed.

Now return to the Genesis image of the darkness of the deep – the only sound being that of the divine wind sweeping across the face of the void. Suddenly, the eyes of your imagination catch a pinpoint of light flickering on at the heart of the void. Watch as this pinpoint of light expands at lightspeed to pierce the darkness of the deep – bringing forth the light of life.

You can open your eyes now.

This Christmas Eve, I deliberately chose to use the gospel reading from John’s Prologue in preference to Luke’s birth narrative. How fortunate we are to be given such a rich variety in the NT accounts of the Incarnation – the event of the Creator’s entry into the creation.

In the opening verses of his Gospel, John the Evangelist is constructing a second Genesis event. The opening verses of his first chapter are collectively known as the Prologue – because a prologue comes before the actual story begins.  Like the authors of Genesis, John uses the opening words – in the beginning – to set his scene. As in the first Genesis creation account, John tells us that in the beginning there was only the Creator from whom all life came into being – as John phrases it. But John tells us much more than this.

Now close your eyes and once more picture within the darkness the pinprick of light expanding at light’s speed to illumine the void’s deep darkness. Writing in Greek, John identifies this light as the Logos.

Open your eyes again.

Logos has a range of possible meanings, among them – to put in order, to arrange, to gather, to choose, to count, reckon, and discern, and finally, to say, to speak. In the Genesis event God does not create something from nothing. The creator creates by ordering, arranging, choosing, counting, reckoning, discerning, and finally speaking into the elements concealed within the darkness of the deep.

In English we translate John’s logos as the Word. The Word is the communicative aspect of the Creator. The Word is the Creator’s speaking into the void to arrange and structure the elements swirling in the chaos of the deep. In the moment of creation, the Logos – the Word -speaks-out the divine life into the void. Because as John further tells us, the Word is the light of the divine life at the heart of everything. And here John arrives at what is for me – his crucial point. He tells us that this light – the light of the divine life – illumines the darkness in such a way that the darkness can never – ever – overcome it! Let’s listen to John again.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it!

John identifies Jesus as the Word. This seems at first sight a rather huge leap to contemplate. So how does he get there? Well for John it’s simple. The Word is Jesus because at a pivotal moment in human history – the Word that in the first moments of creation spoke-forth the light of the divine life into creation -in the second moment of the Incarnation, speaks-forth the divine self into a human life. For John, in Jesus, the divine Word has come to dwell. So let’s just pause here for a moment to let the impression of these words form in us.

Follow me as I want to take a short detour. In 1849, the Reverend Edmund Spears, then the Unitarian Minister in Wayland Massachusetts, wrote the words of his poem It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. The striking feature of Sears’ poem is the way he sets the birth of the Christ-Child’s in Bethlehem not in its historical setting but in the context of his own day’s issues of war and peace – for him most probably it’s the Mexican American War of 1849 he has in mind.

Sears sets the Savior’s incarnation in the harshness of the New England bleak midwinter when the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels’ song of peace and good will. But he notes that the angels’ song can barely be heard above the clamor of the world’s Babel sounds. And in his third stanza he packs his punch:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

Sears tempers his current despair at the warlike state of the nation with his Christian hope – eventually steering his poem towards the expectation of the Second Coming when the whole world will finally echo (give back) the song which presently, only the angels’ sing.

We celebrate this Christmas amidst unparalleled rancor and vitriol at home and against the background of the heart-rending images of devastation and loss of life in Ukraine and the Holy Land – to name only the two conflicts most clamoring for our Western attention. This year, Christmas celebrations in the Holy Land will be muted. Bethlehem, a town now under the siege of occupation will be dark to protest events in Gaza and the escalation of military repression and settler vigilante violence in the West Bank. This year throughout the Holy Land the liturgical observance of Christmas will be shorn of festive expression.

The irony between the 1st century setting for Jesus’ birth and today is captured in the French expression: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose -things change only to remain the same. O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

Many of us can be excused if we are drawn to despair by the current course of events. At the heart of John’s Prologue lies the message we most need to hear. The most startling thing about the Incarnation is this. In the human life of Jesus – the Word the light of the divine life – enfleshed – to live among us full of grace and truth. John reminds us that it is our choice whether we recognize this as a reality – capable of shaping our lives – or not. To behold the glory of the light of the divine life shining through the radiance of a human life is a powerful life shaping, earth changing narrative of hope – we just need the courage to believe and to act in accordance with our belief. And courage is what it takes to believe in the face of everything that conspires to entrap us in the darkness of despair.

In the midst of the darkness of this world we can feel like we’ve fallen into the fathomlessness of the primordial deep where we confront all that saps us of Christian conviction and hope-filled purpose. In despair, how easily we forget that the darkness is simply the fuel that the light consumes to shine ever brighter.

In this then, lies the defiance of hope – that no matter how dark things may appear, darkness not only has no power to extinguish the light – but actually, provides the fuel for the light to burn even brighter. Take heart! The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never, ever overcome it. Renewed by this hope we have work to do, and that work is to align ourselves with God in the restoration of the creation – so that the world may be ready to receive Christ’s coming again in glory.

How might we achieve this? By cherishing the light burning deep within each one of us – and by sharing that light with one another – collectively pooling the light – so that it may grow ever brighter and to give a good account of the hope that propels us forward.

Given the state of the world around us at this Christmas in 2023 – perhaps merry is not the word we want to use but hope-filled might be. Amen!

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It’s all in the waiting

In East Coker, the second in T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets the following lines attract and repel me in equal measure.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Try as I might, the conundrum of these words registers deep in my gut – where I intuit them sounding a warning. I dislike waiting. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some things are only made possible when we have the patience to wait for them.

The experience of waiting is for many of us today a kind of agony because we are now shaped by a culture in which waiting has been abolished. From download speeds to the endless deluge of things arriving same day- or at most, next day from Amazon our new Godfather in the sky – instantaneous getting gratifies us as our capacity for enjoyment vanishes along with our ability to give attention to anything for more than a few seconds – minutes at most. We become more impatient as our tolerance for waiting erodes. What use have we for the enigma posed by Eliot’s words in a culture where fewer and fewer things are considered worth the inconvenience of having to wait for them?

Yet, Advent is the season of waiting. We curtail its waiting as much as possible. Advent no sooner begins when Christmas overwhelms us. Every year, with Advent Sunday barely in the rear-view mirror, I’m asked by the staff – is it all right to put the Christmas trees up now? Because I’m thinking about the pressure to get things done in time for Christmas I say yes, but don’t switch on the lights until Advent 4. Of-course I realize my desire to preserve the prominence of the visuals of Advent is out of step with the culture – I mean I’ve had the Christmas tree up at home for weeks now.

Eliot used to famously – and to my mind somewhat disingenuously – deny any particular meaning to his words over and beyond the immediacy of their impact on the reader in the moment of reading. Who knows what Eliot intended with these words from East Coker – which incidentally is the name of a picturesque Somerset village? If he is to be believed, then he didn’t intend any particular meaning to be read into these lines – beyond what one critic referred to as his narcissistic gloom.

In a way Eliot has achieved his intention. Left to puzzle over the meaning – his words are still immediately impactful. I receive them deep in my gut as some kind of profound warning about the choices and the inevitable disappointments which usually accompany improbable hope; the folly of misplaced affection for things, causes, and people I love; faith misdirected as a defense against my need for unending denial.

At this point in the 21st century, what is the state of our capacity for hope? We have become increasingly fearful of the future as we see the world unraveling around us. A consequence of the erosion of our capacity for waiting is we no longer think ahead. You see the point of waiting is preparation. Increasingly addicted to short-term thinking – as a society we satisfy the needs of today with short-term patches – seemingly without concern for tomorrow. We become increasingly uneasy at any prospect of a future – preferring to live in a state of self-sustaining denial of a future that becomes more and more a source of fear.

Our capacity to imagine and to dream now seems to be limited to the preservation of the status quo – as with fingers crossed our whistling in the dark becomes deafening. As evidenced by the recent message from COP23 and our general malaise concerning the realities of climate change – our hope is reduced to staving off the eventual reckoning for at least a little bit longer. The majority in the House crows loudly about border security but shows little interest in long term immigration reform. It dilly-dallies over funding for Ukraine oblivious to the future cost of facing down a Russian juggernaut should the defense of Ukraine fail. Politics is now the game of empty posture – of impeachment enquiries without the evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. That old line about Nero fiddling while Rome burned comes to mind.

Our aversion to waiting focuses our attention exclusively on today so that in crucial areas of our public life we are failing to invest in the future. The future is tomorrow’s problem and we thank God we won’t live to see it. Our generation of decision makers – of world shapers – has become so self-preoccupied that they – and we because we put them there – no longer care about the world our children and their children are likely to inherit.

Proverbs 29:18 is a reminder that Where the vision fails, the people perish.

For us, hope remains a word out of place. It’s a word that conjures risk in a risk averse culture. Whatever hope might be – we console ourselves it’s certainly not practical. In our society hope is a word out of place because it beckons us to dream dreams and see visions of a better tomorrow. It summons us to the audacity of shattering the projections of impoverished imagination limited by utilitarian practicality.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Whatever Eliot intended or didn’t – his words are impactful – and therefore we are justified in finding our own meaning in them. I hear them as a warning that without the patience to wait – without a tolerance for surviving a delay between wanting and getting – without a capacity to await the objects of our hopes, to with patience nurture our loves, our faith will always be misplaced. When we no longer know how to wait, we deprive ourselves of time to reflect and to prepare. We seem to have forgotten the old adage that all good things come only to those who wait for them.

In the vision of Isaiah chapter 61 we hear God inviting us to dream moving beyond the poverty of only what can be imagined within imaginations limited by a lack of courage to have faith. God is inviting us to bind-up one another’s wounds and cease from wounding one another further. God is longing for us to liberate ourselves from being captive to the short-termism of our current addiction to self-interest and self-protection. God is calling us to rebuild the ruins of our civilization, to inhabit the spaces long forsaken; reminding us that no good end can be achieved through evil action; that no peace can be ensured without its foundation in justice.

Isaiah 61 comes from the prophet – the third of that name – who is addressing the returning exiles now freed by the emancipation edict of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC. The hope embodied in Trito-Isaiah’s words is of a new society in which healing, freedom, compassion, joyful celebration, repentance, and justice will mark the end of exile.

Of course, there is always a discrepancy between hope and reality. The difficulty of the task, the scarcity of resources, the animosity of the surrounding peoples towards the returning exiles engendered a society where the rich diverted the scarce resources away from the reconstruction of the Temple and the repair of the city wall in order to build fine houses for themselves. A culture of oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful quickly reestablished itself. We read of this painful situation described by the prophet Zechariah, Nehemiah, the governor entrusted with the rebuilding project, and Ezra, the scribe responsible for implementing the religious reforms that were the fruit of the pain of exile.

The hope to which Trito-Isaiah speaks is the hope of a future of expanded inclusion for all of humanity within the promises God had hitherto only made to Israel. The purpose of this vision of future hope was not that it be realized immediately, but that it would reset the compass settings in the direction of its ultimate fulfillment in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It was a vision of hope that would come only through the process of waiting.

Hope is not only a dream for a future better than the past. It is that of course. But through the experience of waiting – we prepare – allowing for a future directed hope to resets our direction of travel in the present. Waiting is not a passive state of just hanging around. Waiting is a state in which we are actively engaged in a process of preparing for the future by action in the present. Our present-time action is guided and directed by the vision of that for which we hope.

Future hope comes through waiting – which is a state of actively preparing the conditions for hope’s fulfilment. But the important point here is to note that future hope guides by changing the compass settings - altering the direction of travel in the here and now. Therefore, the quality of the vision of that for which we hope matters. Misdirected hope – Eliot’s hope for the wrong thing – only sets us in a wrong direction of travel through decisions made or not made; opportunities grasped or missed in real time.

Between the realization of future hope and the present time lies the experience of waiting. Waiting is a process of preparing, reflecting and acting in the present – guided by future hope. In waiting we are already being changed by the hope we are still waiting for.

To paraphrase Eliot – true hope, real love, and effective faith come together only in the experience of waiting.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
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Wounded Expectations

Apologies there is no recording today due to my knocking the recorder off the pulpit in an impassioned action. I trust the text will suffice or you can view the sermon section on our livestream channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bpvn6sJak

In her sermon last Sunday, Linda+ quoted Anne Lamott: Expectations are resentments waiting to happen – which is quite a statement to make in Advent – the season of expectations. She went on to describe the context into which Trito-Isaiah – or to use the language from Game of Thrones – Isaiah, the third of this name -prophesied to the Jews returning from exile in Babylon in 539 BC.

The book of Isaiah comprises 66 chapters spanning over three centuries – a timespan greatly exceeding the lifetime of the man we know as Proto-Isaiah – whose prophecies populate only the first 39 chapters dated to between 742 and 701 BC. This is a period of considerable political turmoil for Judah – esp. heightened after the catastrophe of the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721. Proto-Isaiah sounds the voice of God’s warning in the face of Hezekiah’s increasingly reckless political calculations as Judah jockeys for position on the faultline between the competing Egyptian and Assyrian empires.

Are expectations simply resentments waiting to happen? Maybe. The story of Israel is a story in which the experience of hope and expectation flowing from deliverance are never enough to avert the next hubristic miscalculation!!

In 587 BC, the armies of Babylon – the successor to the Assyrian Empire – besieged and sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple, plundering its gold and silver ornaments, creaming off the royal court and intelligentsia into captivity in Babylon – leaving the peasantry to scratch out livelihoods amidst the ruins. This is the period covered by the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah – the second of this name in chapters 40-55. It’s his voice we hear on the second Sunday in Advent.

Deutero-Isaiah addressing the exiles proclaims: “Comfort, O comfort my people”, says your God. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins”.

It is this Isaiah – the second of this name – who gives us the heart-wrenching poetry of the four servant songs telling of God’s hope-filled expectation in sending his chosen servant to the nations, only to be horribly abused – a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. The early Christians read the servant songs as prophecies referring to Christ – and these poems are intimately familiar to us as the mainstay texts of the libretto for Handel’s Messiah.

Linda+, last week noted that it’s estimated that fewer than 50,000 of the exiles returned after Cyrus’ emancipation edict in 538 BC. Many remained in Babylon, only trickling back over the next century or so. Even so, not everyone went home – to which the modern-day Jewish communities of Iraq and Iran bear testimony.  

You’ve heard me say time and again that human beings are storied creatures. As individuals, communities, and nations, we construct stories to explain ourselves to ourselves and the world around us. But the intriguing question is what comes first? Do our stories merely articulate an already formed identity, or is our identity constructed by the stories, and in particular, the way we tell these stories about ourselves? Even if you think that identity precedes the story that articulates it, our identity continually evolves as we explore different ways to tell our story.

A key feature of identity stories concerns their vision of home. The Babylonian Exile lasted for 60+ years and as Linda+ noted last week – that’s two generations. …a lot can happen in two generations, including a transformation in the perception of what someone calls home. 

In these days our anxiety grows concerning the potential for the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land to escalate into regional conflagrations from which we will not escape unscathed. February 22nd, 2022, and October 7th, this year, have changed the trajectory of the international order. We are already feeling these changes esp. as the US becomes further implicated in aiding and abetting Israeli genocide in Gaza. Aiding and abetting is a legal definition encompassed by the international human rights law on genocide. Our government seems to be willing to squander the moral high ground it achieved by our unstinting support for Ukraine, for war crime complicity in Gaza.

The wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land are conflicts that center on cherished stories of identity rooted in a contested homeland. Each side to the conflict has a story of ethnic origins and national identity that justifies their claim to a contested homeland. What really matters however is – is there a capacity by each for the telling of an old story in new ways to accommodate the challenges of a changing context?

Palestinians and Israelis recite their national stories to justify their historical claim to a contested homeland. It seems that no degree of Palestinian resistance punctuated by sporadic terrorist outbursts – no amount of Israeli military backed force of occupation attempting to deny the very existence of Palestinians can move the needle of history separating two peoples with a shared claim to a contested homeland. There can be no future that is not a painful repetition of the past until the futility of the status quo is recognized by both sides – opening the way to a retelling of each national story not as a maximalist demand but as a minimalist statement – laying out the minimum fundamentals that each community requires to move forward together.

History does show that expectations are resentments waiting to happen. National stories of identity and homeland promise dreams of liberation while imposing dilemmas of ensnarement. The potential for becoming ensnared by our identity stories is great when we refuse to recognize the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground are that our foundational stories are never fixed, static, immutable, but always shifting, developing, going astray, and capable of redemption (Bernard Lonergan[1]). Our stories of identity and homeland are always in a dance with changing contexts. Our foundational stories need to be capable of evolving in response to the challenge posed by changing contexts – that is – the changing facts on the ground.  

It’s not important to know that there are three Isaiah’s of that name. It is important to notice how the book records an evolution in Jewish understanding of identity and the location of home. The essence of Israel’s foundation story as a people formed and shaped by a revelation and ongoing encounter with the living God does not change.  What we can see in the book of Isaiah is an evolution in the struggle to rewrite Israel’s identity story in response to the challenges of a changing context – even when the changed context results in a loss of a key component of identity – a homeland. The message of the book of Isaiah is that things change and the story of national identity needs to change to accommodate new facts on the ground. 721, nor 587, nor 539 BC; neither AD 70 is the last word fixing Israel’s story at a certain stage of history. Neither can 1948, nor 1967, be allowed to offer the last word – ensnaring the the identity stories for Palestinians and Israelis in an endless cycle of mortal conflict.

Open the book of Isaiah anywhere in the first 39 chapters and you will find a story of national hubris and political miscalculation. Open it between chapters 40 and 55 and you will find a profound articulation of repentance as the fruit of national suffering and humiliation resulting from loss of homeland. In chapters 55 -66 the element of repentance that had entered to national story during the exile – flowers in an increasingly inclusive and universalist message of salvation, a salvation now no longer exclusive to Israel but with implications for all of humanity.

It’s dangerous as well as painful when nations become ensnared in stories of identity that no longer serve them – that are no longer capable of responding to changing context – that is, the facts on the ground. Ensnarement ensures a future of intercommunal violence as the only sure trajectory. It is with considerable humility that we dare speak about other nations ensnarement in identity stories that no longer serve them at a time when America is struggling with a similar dilemma.

I read a byline on the BBC’s webpage of an organization called Road to Recovery. It is an organization of Israelis who transport mostly children from the occupied West Bank through the many checkpoints separating the two peoples so that the children can receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Yael Noy, one of the founders of this organization and a woman originating from the area of Southern Israel attacked by Hamas on October 7th moved me when she said: I’m fighting to stay moral when both sides are in such terrible pain. I’m fighting to be the same person as I was before. On October 7th I could hardly breath, my heart was broken, and I said I’ll never help people in Gaza again. But after a few days I realized I couldn’t let the atrocities change me.

The power in our stories of identity and homeland lie in our capacity to imagine them taking us into a future different from our past – and like Yael Noy to retell our stories accordingly. Expectations will always involve the possibility of disappointment. But the pain of disappointment won’t kill us whereas the anger of resentment just might.

[1] Quoted by Lagita Ryliskyte in Why the Cross, page17

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