That little four-letter word called Hope

Chris Jimmerson
July 21, 2013

Chris Jimmerson just completed his second year of seminary at Meadville Lombard School of Theology, one of only two Unitarian Universalist seminaries in the United States. He is currently the minister intern at Wildflower Church. Before entering seminary, Chris served in a variety of lay leadership positions at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin where he helped to coordinate the church’s process of discerning its mission and reorganizing its governance structure.

What is hope? One of the theologians we studied in seminary last year says that basically there is no such thing as hope, and we should abandon hope and embrace struggle because the struggle is all we have. I am thinking that would not make a very inspiring sermon. How do we have hope without it becoming just wishful thinking?

Reading
-Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the faith that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Prayer

Spirit of Love and Life, breathe into us the compassion and courage that will sustain us.

Fill us with gratitude for the faith, grounding and hope to be found through living life filled with boundless and endless love.

When the news from our world is filled with injustice and struggle, as it often has been in these past weeks – when our work to end oppression and bring about the beloved community seems challenging and the road ahead seems long – when we face struggles sometimes just in our daily lives, let us breathe in the spirit of life and dwell in the essence of love.

For in doing so, we find renewal and the knowledge that love shall indeed, in the end, overcome.

For in doing so, we create greater faith and more hope. In doing so, we create our world anew.

So may it be. Amen

Sermon

Not long ago, one of my instructors at seminary was trying to explain to us a theology he called “non-theistic, liberative, naturalistic humanism.” I’m still not sure I completely understand it, but it does make for a great vocal warm up. Before giving any talk or sermon, I just say “non-theistic, liberative, naturalistic humanism” three or four times very quickly and then anything else comes trippingly off the tongue.

Now, I think he was engaging in a bit of seminary professor witticism when he bound all those words and concepts together; however, he was quite serious when he explained that this theology expresses the idea that oppression and human suffering — natural disasters and disease – imperialism and war — just the vagaries of the human condition are so random and so dire that we cannot realistically think that there is a God, much less a kind and loving God. On top of that, according to this theology, our struggles to end oppression occur within a sort of “zero sum game,” where advances attained by one group can only be made at the expense of greater oppression of another. Justice for all cannot be realized.

Thus, a central tenant of this theology is that we should abandon hope and embrace struggle, because the struggle is all we really have. And have a nice day. I ended the class discussion feeling something less than uplifted.

Later, I talked with my partner, Wayne, about it.

He said, “I don’t think you should try preaching that when you get out of seminary and start the search process for a church. None of them will hire you.”

Now, I think Wayne was absolutely right about that, so don’t worry — I’m not testing out an “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here” sermon on you today.

However, it did get me thinking about that little four-letter word called “hope”. What exactly is hope, really? Should we have hope?

What is its source and how do we sustain it, especially during the more difficult times of struggle that we do encounter in life? How do we keep it from becoming just wishful thinking?

So, I went on a theological search – a metaphysical quest, if you will, to find the meaning and source of hope. Like any good, modern day spiritual seeker, I did a Google search.

The first link I followed was to the Emily Dickinson poem titled, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”.

The next thing I saw was a link to a book by Woody Allen called, “Without Feathers”.

It seemed I was right back where I had started. Thanks a lot, Woody. At least the book is really funny.

So, “Google as a pathway into spiritual enlightenment” having failed, I turned to looking at what some of our leading thinkers among Unitarian Universalists have had to say about hope. I know those of you who have been UU s for a while may not be overly surprised to hear that Unitarian Universalists have had quite a lot to say about it, rather often not agreeing with each other on the subject.

However, I did find much that moved me in reflections on faith and hope from Rebecca Ann Parker, President of our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkley, California, as well as those of Sharon Welch, Provost at the seminary I attend in Chicago.

The two have very different philosophical and theological perspectives and yet out of both of them I drew that indeed we must start by embracing the struggle – that hope may be found by realistically acknowledging that suffering and oppression are a part of life, but then seeking to transcend them in several ways:

By steadfastly continuing to act in ways that are loving and life- giving;

By persistently seeking justice; and

By purposefully finding the wisdom we need to sustain ourselves in the voices of those who have suffered oppression people who so often have found ways to restore hope out of hopelessness by creating joy, grace and beauty in day-to-day life. We must also guard against a kind of false hope that can lead to disillusionment and making harmful choices — a hope that seeks certainty, wherein we only have faith if we believe that we can control the outcomes of our actions.

For example, we are faced with the fact that the effects of global climate change are likely to get much worse before they get better, even if the world begins truly acting to try to mitigate them now. Given that, how do we hold onto a hope that can sustain environmental activism? Where do we find the resilience to continue to act, even knowing that we may not be able to prevent great loss?

The answer may lie in embracing this paradox:

Faith can exist only when there is uncertainty.

Hope arises out of what we cannot know – our choosing to act out of love for each other and the web of existence even in the midst of our not knowing, even when we encounter great challenges.

I saw this element of hope — this faith even in the face of an uncertain future – a future clouded by unexpected loss and grief, when I was a chaplain intern at a local Hospital last summer.

I’m changing the details a little to protect the privacy of the people involved, but here is in essence what happened.

I was with the husband and the father of a woman in her early forties who had collapsed near the end of the workday. Despite valiant efforts to revive her, she had died in one of the trauma rooms in the emergency center of the hospital. We learned later that a blood clot had loosened and traveled through her blood system to her heart, likely the result of a long flight she had recently taken to visit her sisters in South America. Her husband and her father were at her bedside, mourning over her now lifeless body.

The family was Catholic and spoke both Spanish and English.

They asked me to contact their Priest to come and say prayers and perform the sacraments in Spanish. They wanted me to stay with them as the rest of the family gathered and they waited on the priest.

Soon after, her daughter and son arrived, both of whom looked like they might be in their late teens or early twenties, followed by other family members. All that I could really do was to be with them, to put a comforting hand on a shoulder sometimes, a provide a soothing voice at others _ at times just stand at the doorway, trying to provide them sanctuary from the noise and commotion of the rest of the emergency center.

After the Priest came and performed the sacraments and a final prayer, I turned to walk him out, when suddenly the husband looked up at me from where he was sitting by her bedside and said, “would you stay with us while we tell her ‘goodbye’?”

I hadn’t even known that he knew I was still in the room. I stayed, of course.

They gathered around her – this mother, this wife, this daughter of theirs. They began to tell stories of her, blending laughter with tears, as they joined together in their love for one another and their love for her, as they one by one said goodbye to her.

The amazing love, the astounding human resilience, the astonishing courage they showed in being able to tell her goodbye, leave that hospital and move forward into an uncertain future bound tightly in their love for one another and their shared memories of her – sometimes, that is faith. Sometimes, that is hope.

Sometimes, hope is finding a way to continue our stories, even up against a struggle that turns toward the tragic at times. Hope is to be found in the fact that we carry forward the stories of even those we have lost _ just as the story of that mother, wife and daughter goes on through her loved ones continuing the telling of it.

Hope is that a grand narrative is still unfolding, and we get to participate in the telling of it, even if in only small ways,

And I think hope involves even a bit more. I think it also compels us to move toward a vision ofthe future, even though we cannot control and may not ever even know what happens in that future,

I think about something my Grandfather did when I reflect on this aspect of hope. My parents divorced when I was young, so my mother’s parents helped raise me and my younger brother and sister while mom was at work. My grandfather, Leo, became very much a father figure for me.

I still carry great love for him. He was a person who loved largely, embracing with true warmth and compassion everyone he met. I love that he would go from hyperkinetic in one moment to having an amazing stillness in the next. I love that he also had a strong vision for living and doing rightly in the world. In fact, the family always joked about how he could sometimes be a little irritating because he wouldn’t hesitate to tell you when he thought you could do something better in life,

That wasn’t really the irritating part though. The really annoying thing was that he was almost always right.

My family still pokes fun at me because they say I am so much like him, though I suspect not nearly as often right! Whether through nature or nurture or both, lowe much of who I have become to him. Another way of saying that is to say that many of his values and much of what mattered to him most live on in me, and I think there is a lot of hope to be found just in that.

To give you some idea of how much of who I am comes from my Grandfather, I want to tell you what happened the first time I brought my partner Wayne to meet my grandparents. I must have been in my thirties at the time. We drove to their house and sat in their living room for several hours, talking and being treated to delicious baked items from my grandmother’s kitchen.

My grandmother had to take us around their yard and show us all of her beautiful flowering plants, and my grandfather had to get out his maps and show us all the places they were going on their next trip (something I find myself subjecting others to even today).

After the visit, we said our goodbyes and got in the car to leave. I noticed that Wayne had this perplexed, maybe even bewildered look on his face.

I asked him, “What is it?”

There was a slight pause, and then he replied, “I feel like I just met an 80 year old YOU.”

To this day, he still tells me that I am “pulling a Leo” from time to time.

After my grandfather died, our family opened his safe where he kept his important papers. In it, we found letters he had written to my grandmother and to their children — my mother and her brother and sister.

In the letters, he spoke of his love for them, the joy they had brought to his life – his delight in who they had become and how they were living their lives. He wrote of his love for his grandchildren and his faith in the lives we would live. He thanked my grandmother for their life together.

Even all these years later, I am still overwhelmed by the fact that he even thought to do that. How much love can one heart possibly hold? How can we call this anything else but hope grounded in boundless and endless love?

Hope is writing letters to the future, even though it is a future that will not include us, at least not in our current form. Hope is writing letters to the future knowing that we may never know whether or how they will be received – never know what difference they may make.

I have to pause here and say, “Thanks, Leo, your letters made a huge difference to me.” It turns out he was right again – because he taught me something else:

The lives we live are our letters to the future. They are our hope for how the story will continue.

Isn’t it remarkable that hope turns out to be contained within how we live our lives in the here and now?

And so, as we leave today and go back out into our daily lives, may we continually be asking ourselves, “What story are we helping to write? What are we putting into our letters to the future?”

Even in the midst of life’s struggles and hardships, we can choose to live grounded in love for all that is, all that came before and all that will follow.

The poet, Adrienne Rich put it like this:

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. A passion to make, and make again where such un-making reigns.”

And so may we create hope where hope has been lost.

And so, may we dwell in a faith courageous enough to embrace uncertainty.

As we go out into our world today, may we co-create the ever- unfolding story in ways we hope will bend the narrative toward justice, transformation and love.

May an enduring faith sustain us. May love continue to overcome.

May hope abound. Amen.

Offering words

People say, what is the sense of our small effort.

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.

There is too much work to do.

Benediction

May your days to come be filled with peace and your spirit overflow with boundless and endless love.

Grounded in such love, may your courage rise up and embrace uncertainty as an opportunity and possibility for hope that glimmers eternally and a faith that sustains.

May you know Grace and may you bring Grace into the lives of others. Go in peace. Go in love. Go knowing that part of this place and of this beloved community travel with you until next you return.

Blessed be. Amen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776