The Leading Cause of Life:  Informed Hope

A Sermon for October 25, 2009

By John Pitney

Hope is

dawn after a long dark night

the fever breaking

the tide turning

a smile from the teacher on the first day of school

coming home to the smell of cookies baking

hope is a tumor shrinking

hope is planting a garden where a meth house used to stand

 

hope is

you are the salt of the earth

you are the light of the world

hope is yeast in dough

heat in the compost

heat on the south side of a stone wall

 

Have you ever sat down on the south side of a stone wall and leaned up against it to soak up some heat on a crisp cold day?  How do you position yourself for hope?  Every day I’ve got to lean in and acknowledge that it’s God’s gravity that anchors me.  If I were more faithful you’d find me in the garden every morning praying and turning to the north, the east, south and west, receiving the gifts of those directions and from the sky and the earth because I believe a hopeful life begins with acknowledging where we live.  The greatest antedote to hope is thinking it’s all about us.  Since our kids were young, this time of year is building compost piles and seeing the heat rising from the decomposition in spirals of steam created in the sharp fall air. It reminds me that the most important things in the universe procede quite well without me.  For me that’s the beginning of hope of every day of hope and every season.

 

hope is

the last day of school

the first day of summer

ripening fruit

the smell of fresh cut hay

the snake shedding her skin

 

the first leaf drop of fall brings hope

a blaze of vine maple on black lava

salmon return to the very riffle of their birth

cranes circle the Alaskan sky heading south

hope is the first freeze

the first snowflake of winter

the first fire in the stove

the northern lights

 

hope is crocuses pushing up through the snow

the first buzzing bee of spring on the earliest blossom of the peach

deserts blooming

rivers swellling

salmon smolts swimming to sea

chickadees hatching

wood ducks fledging

 

hope is pink on the pregnancy test...or blue

the first kick

the water breaking

the first cry

the first step

the first dream

a first love

 

hope is

maybe you can play after you clean your room

hope is cleaning the room without being asked

the sound of the door opening when you thought she was lost

the sound of his voice on the phone saying “Mom something happened but I’m ok

hope is someone adopting you when someone else gave up on you.

 

                  I will forever be humbled and inspired by the number of us in this church who have adopted children and the number who have been adopted.  Signing those papers and making those investments was just the beginning of a journey both thankless and full of gratitude, joyous and full of pain, promises broken and kept.  Among the adopted children of Betsy Guinn is a woman who rescued hundreds of people she never knew, leading them from oppression in Cambodia stepping over the bodies through the killing fields to safety and hope.  Why did she do that?  Our church adopted a wetland in west Eugene 5 years ago and today it is an orphan no more.  Last Saturday, at the All-Church Retreat, as we pondered how to do no harm in this time, someone had the idea that we should go beyond sheltering the homeless to mentoring and adopting homeless families one by one to help them lead themselves out of poverty.

 Why would we do that?

 

hope is planting garlic in the fall

digging a hole for a tree that won’t bear fruit for seven years

dreaming a dream

hope is ”I think I can, I think I can”

going on inspite of the evidence

 

                  And the evidence is daunting.  Columnist Thomas Friedman, wrote in the NY Times on October 9, that his generation was lucky.  “We grew up in the shadow of just  one bomb.  But our children grow in the shadow of 3 bombs, any of which could go off at any time.  The first is the nuclear threat which in my generation basically came from one rational enemy, the Soviet Union who feared a nuclear holocaust as much as we.  Today the nuclear threat still looms but can be delivered by all kinds of states including terrorists for whom destruction is a delight, not a deterent.”

                  The 2 other bombs Friedman identifies are the climate bomb and the debt bomb. With the climate bomb we never know “when the next emitted moleculeof CO2 will tip over an ecosystem and trigger a non-linear event like the melting of the Siberian tundra, releasing all its locked up methane or drying up the Amazon.”

                  The same is true with America's debt bomb. Friedman says, “To recover from the Great Recession, we've had to go even deeper into debt. Lots of people are understandably worried that our next dollar of debt -- unbalanced by spending cuts or new tax revenues -- eventually will trigger a nonlinear move out of the dollar and make U.S. currency worthless.”    (Thomas Friedman (NY Times, Oct. 9, 2009)

 

hope is

the meek inherit the earth

swords into plowshares

everyone with their own vine and fig tree

everyone with health insurance

a city on a hill

a burning bush not consumed

the earth full of God’s glory

the kingdom of God within us

lions lay with lambs

evil passes over

hope is the sea parting

slavery ending

a promised land

 

                  When our son Joel and his wife Christy got married, they wanted their wedding to be a local feast.  They were working on a farm at the time and knew the farming community, so this hope, we thought, would be easy to bring to reality.  But some in the family didn’t think they could pull it off.  We flew to Maryland several days early to help.  After the ceremony, we brought out several tons of potatoes mashed from local producers, hot bread freshly baked from local flour, tomato-garlic soup from produce saved and stored throughout the summer, huge bowls of salad we had helped pick the day before and then, just as we were about to start the serving line, seemingly from out of nowhere came several trays of prepared foods from the local COSTCO.

We couldn’t believe our eyes.  When it comes right down to it, many of us have no hope when it comes to trusting the abundance of God right under our noses.

                  Welcome to Corporate World where trillions of dollars invested in advertising tell us how to look, love, eat, work, move ourselves around, what to worship and how to heal.  Every time we turn around our humanity and community are jerked around by their bottom lines disguised as life lines.  They put themselves up as leading causes of life while much of the time they are the leading causes of our death.  As we try to fashion new energy economies oil and coal corporations stand in the way.  As we try to care for obese children, feed the hungry and rebuild our farms, farmland and food economies the supermarket and processing corporations stand in the way.  As we try to cover the most marginalized with health insurance the health insurance corporations stand in the way.  As we try to use our money to fund and feed, house and harvest and heal for God’s new future we have to bail out the multinational banks while their CEO’s earn more and more as they tempt our disaster playing with our money in the stock exchange.

                  All the while we are learning how to create new economies of renewable energy industry, we know we can rebuild regenerative food economies and provide health care to all the people and guess what?  While the corrupt money giants continue to corrupt, our community banks and credit unions are doing fine investing in us.  Why do I bring this up today?  Because they have convinced us that the world can’t run any other way and we have bought it and because we have bought it we live without hope.

 

hope is getting out of bed in the morning even when we don’t feel like it

is hugging our loved ones even when we don’t feel loveable

going to bat when we can’t see the threads on the curveball

taking the anti-depressant even when we think we’re ok

hope is not getting God mixed up with Santa Claus

or Jesus confused with the Marlboro man

Hope is an overweight fashion model

And a woman who doesn’t need to marry the first man to notice her

 

Hope is taking your money out of the stock market and banking it at the credit union

buying a house in a bad part of town

talking back to the TV ads

saying no to adultery

hope is praying even though you have no words

Sometimes hope is a hairball

sometimes it’s just showing up.

 

 

hope is the blind seeing and deaf hearing

The former rich man walks calmly through the eye of the needle

The woman of wealth gives to the poor all she has

hope is going the second mile

walking in another’s mocassins

hope is turning the other cheek

 

Turning the other cheek is an act of hope.  It may not seem so on the face of it.  But theologian Walter Wink’s analysis makes more sense than any I have ever heard.  Wink says to see the hopefulness we’ve gotta know the culture and the time.  The Gospel of Jesus is always primarily one of hope because he and the peasant people of his time were living under such violent domination by the Roman Empire and the Jewish powerful who sought to appease it.  If a person were to strike another, they would use only their right hand because left hands (just as you will find in India still today) are used only for unclean activity. Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek...”  Well “to deliver a right-handed blow to someone’s right cheek requires using the back of ones hand,” says Wink, “and a backhand is an insult intended to humiliate, not to injure.  A person would not backhand a peer, only an underling.”                             And so, if someone is already the scum of the earth and a backhand to their right cheek from the oppressor heaps humiliation upon humiliation, turning the left cheek gives people of power a treacherous choice.  Either they must backhand the left cheek with their unclean hand, which is forbidden or they must hit directly with their right, which is the way equals would fight.  Maybe they would think again before engaging in humiliation.  Turning the left cheek invites the possibility of transformation for both oppressor and oppressed.  And the people on the margins deliver the clear message that the first blow did not insult them and no violence can take away their respect.  There is no hope in acts of retaliation that create more violence or in the flight from violence that doesn’t change anything.  Turning the other cheek is a choice for hope.  Where could we stand with people in humiliation and demonstrate respect?

(Walter Wink, “Reclaiming Jesus’ Nonviolent Alternative,” The Living Pulpit (Oct-Dec 1998; pg 40.)

 

an empty missile silo is hope

a new international treaty

a new breeze blowing

wind generators turning bring hope

 

30 church households signing on to save 5,000 pounds of carbon: that’s hope

a shorter shower to cool the earth

biking to work once a week

Hope is writing congresswomen and men

 running for office

volunteering to serve on a board or lead a mission trip

a visit to a prisoner

hope is a visit to the Mexican border, sitting on top of the fence

removing wild blackberries from the slough so the natives can come home

hope is noticing that the eggs of Bald Eagles are thicker now since the ban of DDT

hearing a meadowlark

 

Hope is the first swallow to Capistrano

the first woman to vote

the first in my family to go to college

the first african american president

the first woman clergy of a large church

the 10th leper returning

the hundrenth monkey rejoicing

the first gay and lesbian human beings to marry

the first church with solar panels

the first not to throw the first stone

hope is the first becoming last

hope is the mother of one becoming the mother of all

hope is a voice crying in the wilderness

hope is turning around

hope is Father forgive them

hope is the children leading

 

                  Diane Young, with her husband William are pastors of a church called “The Healing Place” down by the airport in South Memphis, Tennesee. This Fall, we have been identifying the Leading Causes of Life from the book by that title. Each Sunday we have shared threads of different colors to highlight a different lifeline and different cause of life...red for Connnection, yellloq for Coherence, lavender for Agency, green for Children, blue for Blessing and today purple for Hope.  The authors tell the story of The Healing Place because they say expresses itself there.  Emily Dickenson says “hope is a thing with feathers.”  They say the Youngs, in their ministry give hope wings.

                  More than a hundred children come to church at the healing place.  Diane knows the children not by type but by name and she knows them not as kids with needs but children with skills, assets and capacities.  She sees them smart, curious and capable of succeeding.  Most kids in Memphis schools face a tough and lonely journey through the valley of the shadow of failure.  A third never graduate high school.  In this community of fear and dispair, Diane began asking, “What if these kids were not on their own?  What if they weren’t left to be distracted?  She decided if not on their own or distracted they’d all be on the honor role.  So that’s what she announced, the authors say, “As if it were a memory of something that had already come to be, a memory of the future.”

                  Diane didn’t just announce her hope and sit back.  Hope moved her to find all 36 of the schools where these kids were enrolled.  One by one she went to every principal’s office and the school administrators sat astonished as she told them that every one of the church’s kids were going to be on the honor role and she told them if any of the students showed signs of not doing so or gave anyone at school any trouble, she wanted to hear about it.

                  The kids were not on their own.  If mom was in jail, somebody else in the church went to Parent’s Nite.  If they had homework someone got them to the church to study.  If they got in trouble, the pastor picked them up.  This is hope with an edge.

                  Now, animals learn  from the past to create future actions.  As human beings, we have more than the past to influence our future.  By our unique intelligence we live out of our expectations, not just our histories.  We have the capacity to anticipate, expect, weigh the likelihoods and then act as if that is what is unfolding.  Diane Young has what one noted psychologist calls a “memory of the future.”  Somehow she was able to see a counter cultural vision: kids actually doing homework, church members parenting other people’s children and preachers showing up in places nobody expects.  This is not wishful thinking, but informed hope. (The Leading Causes of Life by Gary Gunderson and Larry Pray)

 

hope is

the first raindrop after a long drought

a teardrop of forgiveness

a bride and groom saying yes

partners saying forever

friend and friend saying never alone

tribe and government saying never again

a doctor saying the tumor is benign

a patient deciding against chemotherapy

a patient embracing death

dying gratefully with family gathered around

 

Hope is a United Nations plane full of food circling the refugee camp

is no more planes needed

is feeding my own family with seed saved from last year’s crop

Hope is strength to leave after he hits me one more time

Hope is an old festering secret becoming a secret no more

Hope is a dormant dream blooming

Hope is 21 years sobriety, or 21 months or 21 minutes or hitting bottom

Hope is AA and the suicide support group

Hope is death camps liberated

     Japanese, German, VietCong, Afghani & Iraqi soldiers with American vets rejoined

     Hutus and Tutsis reconciled

     Israel and Palestine talking

     Darfur soothed

 

Hope is walking hand in hand

marching arm in arm with signs

sitting in

hanging out

closing the mall and rebuilding mainstreet

voicing for the voiceless

 

hope is

I baptize you in the name of love

this body is broken for you

the word becomes flesh and moves into the neighborhood

hope is an invitation to the banquet

a hug before we can explain

hope is blowing out all the candles

a party in your honor

hope is giving it all away

love till death

ashes to ashes

an empty tomb

hope is keeping a promise

 

hope is how can I keep from singing

hope is joy in the morning

is we shall over come

is si si pueda

dona nobis pacem

hope is after all that has happened still believing human beings are good at heart

hope is the only antedote to fear

hope is a memory of the future

hope is you

hope is the Divine within you

hope is me

hope is Christ in me

hope is now

hope is here.