Prisoners of Hope
“Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope... ”
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now...We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to His purpose…”
In his novel Falconer, John Cheever tells the story of a group of men serving long term sentences in a maximum security prison. Their lives are grim. In one scene an old convict called Chicken goes into a rage because the prison visitor's room is so shabby: dirty walls, beat up table and chairs, no privacy, not even a Coke machine. Tiny, another convict, listens to Chicken's complaints. Finally, Tiny gets tired of Chicken's mouthing about the visitor's room and says: "You been in here twelve years...and you ain't never had a visitor. In twelve years nobody come to see you. That proves that there ain't nobody out on the street who knows your name. Even your own mother don't know who you are. Sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends, chicks – you ain't got nothing to sit down at a table with. You is worse than dead." At this Cheever says: "Chicken began to cry...until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping.”
Few of us have ever been a prisoner in jail, yet Cheever's story reminds us that life can make us all feel like hopeless prisoners. Our cells may not have physical bars on them, yet most of us know situations in which problems seem inescapable, predicaments our lives get in which sap our hope and strength for things getting any better.
Our bodies can make us feel like hopeless prisoners: they get sick, they get older, they don't look as good as we want, they hurt, they die, and we feel hopelessly trapped inside them. Depression has a way of making us feel like hopeless prisoners. Indeed, those periods of depression all humans encounter sooner or later can be defined as state of loss of hope caused by bad things that happen to us or good things that don't happen. Feelings of guilt, insecurity, inferiority, fear, and shame can put us all on a hopeless chain gang. Family situations, marital problems, and other relationships get so out of whack at times. Half-comic, half-tragic are those hope-straining times when it seems that we can't quite live with and can't quite live without a certain person. You people here today living by yourself can tell us all about the hopelessness that sometimes arises in the solitary confinement of loneliness. Some days we are hopeless prisoners to grief for persons and relationships that will never be again. Some might conclude that we live in a hopeless global prison during this time of high prices, nuclear war threat, and mass hunger. It is hard to escape the fear that we are hopeless prisoners on a planet running out of everything but corpses.
Yet in spite of all that, or perhaps better, because of all those realities which make us feel like hopeless prisoners, the word for today is HOPE. Some 300 or so years before Jesus, the prophet Zechariah called the ragged, besieged Israelites not hopeless prisoners but "prisoners of hope." Since Zechariah is probably not on the top ten list of most read books of the Bible, we need to know the situation in which he called the people of God "prisoners of hope." They were being attacked again. This time by the then super power of Greece first led by Alexander the Great. Attack, often followed by defeat, was nothing new to these Israelites. Centuries before, the Assyrians had conquered their ancestors. The Babylonians carried them off into exile. Then they were conquered by the Persians, then the Greeks of Zechariah's time, and then shortly before the time of Jesus, they were conquered by the Romans. That's tough to take when you believe that you are God's chosen people, special to him. They probably wished they weren't so special to him at times. God knows, they had reason to give up hope. But they didn't. They remained "prisoners of hope", never quite able to give up hope. Why? That’s the question. What are the grounds of hope for God's people? What is the nature of hope for Biblical faith? What is hope anyway?
So, hope is our word for today. Hopefully, it is more than a word. Hope is one of those dimensions of life which resist a neat, sweet definition. Hope is that mysterious substance in us that keeps us from giving up even when we feel like giving up and throwing up with life. It is the stubborn conviction that there is a point to our lives when, even when, we aren't quite sure what that point is. Hope is a great refusal to give up on others and this world although life for us might be more comfortable if we could just turn our backs on them.
Most of all, undergirding all hope, is the battered faith that we are not alone in this track through space, that a caring, mysterious force we call God is at work in us and in the world despite evidence to the contrary. This hope is a realistic strength that abides when chirpy, cockeyed optimism has flown out the window. Here are some suggestions about the Biblical grounds for human hope in one another and God.
FIRST, HOPE IS NOT SOMETHING I CAN ACCOMPLISH BY MYSELF. IT ONLY COMES IN RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS. Positive thinking self-pep talks will muster up little hope in me. I need to be in a community, in relationships, with people who refuse to give up on me even when I fall into temporary periods of giving up on myself.
The Israelites who Zechariah called "prisoners of hope" were and are a people who despite ups, downs, and squabbles have shown an almost unbelievable "stick-togetherness" through history. In our passage from Paul's letter to Rome, Paul speaks about hope in the conviction 'WE' not 'I' know that God works for good in all things for those who love him. He wrote to tiny congregations of Christians struggling together to stay alive in a world that didn't want them. Paul's words of hope about God working in their scary lives for good presuppose a church community of mutually supporting Christians building up and encouraging one another. It is nigh impossible to keep hope alive unless you live in relationships with people who love you with a Christly love that does not let go.
Humans can take almost anything, however painful, with the support of people who care about them. As you have heard me say before, people in trouble don't need someone to come on the scene with all the answers but someone willing to call, to come by, and listen to them in all the questions. If you are feeling hopeless about something today, chances are that it will not get much better unless you risk reaching out to someone: pastor, friend, spouse, lover, or professional person. And turning it around, you, even you, might just be the one to give a struggling human a reason to hope. Yes, God uses us that way.
SECOND, BIBLICAL HOPE IS NOT IN A GOD WHO MAGICALLY RESCUES HIS PEOPLE FROM ALL THEIR PAIN AND PROBLEMS. REAL HOPE IS IN A GOD WHO STRUGGLES WITH US IN OUR PAINFUL GROPING FOR A LIFE THAT IS WORTH THE EFFORT. Paul says: We know that all creation has been groaning in travail together until now. That is, there is evident in nature and humankind a struggle for life against all the hurts that injure us. Yet Paul is careful not to call it a futile struggle. He carefully chooses his words. What the Revised Version politely translates as "groans in travail" is the Greek word for a woman in birth labor. The pain and struggle are real but they are for a purpose: to give birth to a life worth living.
I have never personally given birth to a child. But I was close by when my best friend for the last twelve years did. And she tells me it hurt. Not one human being comes into the world without another struggling, literally giving a part of herself up, for that life to be. It doesn't stop there. It isn't easy to parent children once they get here. It is a struggle for both parent and child to reach maturity considering the tantrums that both children and parents can throw. I don't know anyone who has a strong marriage who has not struggled for understanding, affection, acceptance, and communication to be born against all sorts of problems that arise when two people seek to share their lives. When disappointment happens, loss of loved ones occur, it is struggle and travail to give birth to a new lease on life when the old one has been broken. It isn't easy for 4.5 billion humans to live together. It is a groaning process to give birth to a world where people try more to feed each other instead of a world that spends 600 billion dollars a year to bomb one another into oblivion. A broken world struggles for wholeness, so says Paul.
Paul goes on to say that God himself is not aloof from the struggle. Indeed, God got the whole throbbing evolutionary life process going against all sorts of obstacles. He is still struggling to keep things going. God, I do believe, is not finished with you, me, or the world yet! He is the power that struggles in his creation to bring love where there is hate, light where there is darkness, life where there is death. It isn't easy even for God to bring off life. But Paul says, God's Spirit, his mysterious presence in us and among us "helps us in our weakness". And that cautions us against writing off anything that happens to us as hopeless.
You I have been moved by the little book “Tracks of a Fellow Struggler” by John Claypool, a Baptist minister who writes about the illness and death of his ten year old daughter Laura. From her diagnosis of leukemia on, he shares that it was a battle to keep hope and not give up in despair. He speaks of help he received from some words of Isaiah: “...they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like an eagle, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Claypool confesses that God did not give him wings to soar over and escape his problems. Indeed, he had to keep both feet on the ground to be with Laura, to comfort his wife, and to assure his other son that he was not ever forgotten. Neither did he experience any burst of energy to run and do a round of acts. Here again, not appropriate in a situation cursed by the lack of being able to "DO" anything. But, he says, what he did receive was what he calls "strength not to faint," strength he knew that came from beyond him to keep him keeping on when he felt he could not do or take anymore.
Hope for Christians is that God is with us to empower us to take what we must take and face what we must face in all the uncertainties of life. "Likewise, Paul says, "the Spirit helps us in our weakness...he intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words." He is present in all sorts of crucifying experiences trying to bring good out of evil, life out of death, and love out of hate. God has been struggling for eons to give rise to life, to just keep it going, and to redeem all the perversions we humans have twisted into it with our bombs, fists, and cold shoulders. Christians have hope that God gets to us through people, through prayer, even from God only knows where within to have strength not to faint, to have the power to love and serve each other.
THIRD: BIBLICAL HOPE IS BASED NOT ON HAVING ALL OUR PERSONAL WISHES COME TRUE BUT ON GOD HAVING HIS WAY COME TRUE. How many of you learned to drive in a straight shift car? I did. I have to confess that it took three tries before I passed the driver's test for my license. Those State Troopers don't tend to give you a passing grade after you've whiplashed their necks with a popped clutch. At the time, I wanted to blame the car for lurching and gears for grinding. Yet, I had to finally recognize that there was little hope for my driving until I drove the car in the way it was made to be operated.
This applies to the way God has put life together. It just doesn't work very well, there is just not a lot of hope for happiness, when we try to do it our way instead of the best we know of his way. Some examples:
The Bible teaches throughout that people are a lot more important than things. Oh, yes, we agree with our mouths. But our lifestyles say something else. We live in a success-worshipping culture. We fret when we can't have the stuff we want, when we want it, as much as we want it. Then we wonder why our children are so materialistic. Men and women spend excessive hours earning money and learning a hobby, give leftover time to each other and the children, and then wonder what is wrong with the marriage and the family. Funny, when we make loved ones our priorities, they tend to make us their priorities. goes better when we love people and use things instead of loving things and using people. It is the way God put life together.
The Bible teaches that God's struggling direction in this cosmic mix of matter and motion, men and women, trees and doorknobs, is the beating of swords (instruments of death and war) into plows (instruments for food production). Isaiah, Micah, and Joel say it. Matthew 25 says that we should see Jesus' face in every hungry face. Yet mood and move in our nation right now is to spend even less on human services and even more on instruments of war and death. Groups having the audacity to call themselves Moral Majority and the presumption to name themselves Christian Voice dare to say increased armaments are Biblical when they are anything but. Yet we wonder why hope for peace and food for the hungry are so hard to come by. Does anyone really think things are going to be more peaceful when we spend more for war, more healthy when we cut back human services at home and abroad, when we blatantly go against God's design for life, grinding the gears of God's way for life?
Notice at the end of Paul's famous affirmation of hope: "In everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. God help us work for your purposes of human love and compassion on earth. God have mercy on us if we continue to work against your purposes on earth of a world free from war, hunger, and human degradation. He will not have to do a thing to punish us. A planet that continues to spend 600 billion dollars a year on instruments of war and death will do a fine job of destroying itself.
It is not easy to have hope. We need the support of others who refuse to give us up even when we feel like giving up. We need that mysterious help and strength God gives us not to faint so we can give and receive as much love as we can in the painful uncertainties of life, And thirdly, we are so desperate at times that we try to save our necks by writing off the necks and needs of others. We forget that God put life together according to his purpose. His purpose is, if we can believe the Bible, and I do, is that humans love and feed each other, not use and bomb one another.
"Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.... Because "We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
PASTORAL PRAYER:
Mystery, Mystery from whom all that is comes, some call you chance, fluke, accident. We call you God. Despite its dangers and pain, we are wonder-filled at the gift of life that courses through each one of us. We see your artistic precision in the workings of the planets and stars. This green and blue earth you have hurled through space is beautiful. It feeds us, clothes us, and provides us a home. You have provided life and the means of living for us like a cosmic father and mother rolled into one. And we thank you.
You have shown your face in Jesus Christ. Sometimes you show your love through the people around us. Most astonishing of all, you even love through us. You give us hope and strength when ours have vanished. You forgive us when we can hardly look at ourselves in the mirror. You disturb our consciences when we misuse our lives and the lives of others. even get our attention in our questions and doubts about you. When all is said and done, there is no peace for our lives until we make our peace with you. You won't leave us alone. And we thank you.
God, we have family and friends who are so precious. Help us show our love to them better than we do. Each of us are bundles of mixed feelings about ourselves. Can you help us like ourselves a little better? We confess that we do a better job of building bombs on your earth than we do of feeding people who are hungry. God, now more than ever we need for you to create a passion in us and a passion in our leaders to be your peace-mongers and food-mongers. With us or without us, you are going to change and save this world yet. But, God, let it be with us. Instead of in spite of us. Amen.