Greg Garrett, a previous Day1 preacher teaches at Baylor. And he once led a retreat in Cody, Wyoming, and his hosts built in time so he could take a long hike in Yellowstone.
Knowing that he was going ALONE, they warned him about a hiker who had been attacked by bears recently on that trail. That warning affected his whole Yellowstone experience.
On his hike, he saw bears everywhere: this stump…that clump of grass, those shadows deep in the forest.
Bears.
Bears everywhere.
He was so jumpy thinking he was seeing bears, it was hard for him to enjoy the amazing vistas.
In fact, he DIDN’T see vistas at all--just lots and lots of things that looked like bears.
Garrett reflected:
From the news we consume,
to the opinions we hold,
to the pain we feel,
--in today’s world:
if you're looking for bears,
you will most certainly see bears…
…But bears may be ALL you see.
These days a remarkably large share of our interaction has devolved to the point that people of faith come to God’s promises, but DON’T experience those promises—INSTEAD we see bears everywhere because we expect to find them there.
“Everything has changed” that’s a mantra we hear in response to the uncertainty of today, and the implied bleakness of tomorrow.
HOPE is a prime casualty of this. Faith, trust, community, and HOPE are luxuries we are being told we can no longer afford.
Paul, in writing his letter to Rome, had many choices at the beginning of the fifth chapter.
Paul had been experiencing affliction and now he reflects on that by writing suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope…
WAIT - CHARACTER produces HOPE?
…SUFFERING produces…ENDURANCE?
Paul could have said—that SUFFERING produces…bitterness, or discouragement.
No. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope…AND, Paul says, *HOPE does NOT disappoint us.***
This is a HOPE that our social media posts, our strident binary politics, our institutionally suspicious culture today does NOT recognize.
If, indeed, suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and *HOPE does NOT disappoint us*—
THEN WE’VE got to be mobilizing all our resources as people of faith to share this HOPE.
HOPE is NOT just “optimism.” Optimism is largely a decision WE make. Hope is always and only God’s GIFT.
Hope is having confidence that God will keep God’s promises, no matter what life throws our way.
Has anyone ever said to you…
“Just look on the bright side,”
“Every cloud has a silver lining…”
What is that?
That’s somebody trying to get you to FEEL differently.
That’s fine - it’s just NOT the same as biblical hope.
Biblical hope?
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
Hope frees us from being strangled by fear, from being suffocated by death…
Hope frees us - because hope does NOT come from us.
But our world often seeks to substitute small wishes and shallow technique…for HOPE.[^1]
HOPE does not mean we IGNORE the world around us.
In June 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, for using a restaurant restroom while Black.
State troopers forced two prisoners, under threat, to beat her with a blackjack while she lay face down on a jail cell bed. She emerged from that cell with a blood clot behind one eye and a permanent limp.
A year later, standing in a Harlem church beside Malcolm X, Hamer told that story in full.
And then she said the line that outlived the speech:
“I've been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Hamer did not direct that at Washington DC. It was aimed at the church.
Note she didn't close her testimony on a note of exhaustion or policy.
She closed on something closer to resurrection hope —
“Working for the black children of Mississippi, to give them a life they have never had, I know my life will not be lived in vain.”
Hamer's witness was unmistakably and specifically Christian — not generically humanitarian and not borrowed from any party's platform.
The justice she demanded was rooted in Amos and in the cross. In Amos and the cross NOT in an ideology that happened to share her conclusions.
Hamer understood something the church keeps having to relearn:
the wellspring of HOPE has got to be deeper than the headlines,
or it runs dry exactly when it's needed most.
IF the church allows the world's categories: its parties, its language of left and right to become the substance of its preaching. IF "justice" stops being a word borrowed from Amos and becomes a word borrowed from a campaign—
THEN the church has handed the gospel to whatever political coalition currently agrees with it, tying Christ's promises to the fortunes of an election cycle.
TRUE HOPE for Hamer belonged to the crucible of the early church which lived the TRUTH that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and *HOPE does NOT disappoint us.*
HOPE creates and sustains God’s own reality.
In our holding fast to God’s promises, in our caring, in our choices, in our spending, in our praying, in our giving—we are called to follow Jesus Christ into God’s HOPE.
If HOPE is going to be REAL, if our HOPE is going to be able to stand up to ALL the pain and injustice of this world—then it has to be deep, and wide, and gentle, and strong. It needs to have an endurance, and a character that will go eye to eye with all suffering.
The late Harvard University minister Peter Gomes, once said:
**Christian hope is not just wishful thinking, and if we can communicate that (to this broken world) we will have done a very great service.* I fear, though, that we haven’t yet done that great service, and there may be a number of reasons why.*
One of them is that perhaps we are tired of telling the story.
It’s hard to get excited again and again about telling the story. But I tell you, if we don’t tell that story in effective ways and if NEW generations don’t learn this story, it will be a very sad day for the faith.
And I wish to remind us that there is NO new hope.
I am a collector of antiques, Gomes continued, when I go into an antiques shop and see a sign that says, “Nothing New Here,” I am reassured.
There is NOTHING NEW that surpasses this one witness and testimony of God’s HOPE in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This story has not changed since Jesus’ day, and if we have forgotten how to do it, or choose not to do it, it’s no wonder that (our world)does not hear it, does not act upon it, and does not take us as seriously as we might like.[^2]
We have HOPE to give to a world that fears that EVERYTHING is CHANGING.
For *suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope…and HOPE does NOT disappoint us.*
The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke used to give an essential piece of advice for a question-driven life:
Know something about something.
Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world.
Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.[^3]
What followers of Jesus know about the knowledge we have amassed is about HOPE.
Vincent Harding was a veteran of the civil rights movement. Before he died, he was chairperson of the
“Veterans of Hope Project” in Denver.
Not long before his death, Harding was interviewed about how the song "This Little Light of Mine" was sung in Selma during Bloody Sunday and the marches there across the Pettus Bridge.
Rather than saying, "Governor Wallace, give us our freedom." the whole contingent of marchers sang:
This little light of mine/I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine/I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine/I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine/Let it shine/Let it shine…
…in the face of government power
and angry mobs,
and dogs, and guns, and fire hoses…
…This little light of mine,
I'm gonna let it shine…
Harding said--the most basic, deepest word was:
"Whatever you do to us, we're gonna let our light shine. God gave it to us. We're gonna let it shine…"
For suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and HOPE does NOT disappoint us.
Then Vincent Harding said:Someone was writing recently about “a Kum Bah Ya moment” something that is seen now as cheap reconciliation where we have made fun of this whole experience that came out of the black church of the singing of that song.
Whenever somebody jokes about "Kum Bah Ya," my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where students came from all over the country, to take great risk in the process of voter registration.
The first week of orientation, Schwerner and Goodman and their beloved brother Jimmy were there. And it was during the time that they had left the campus that they were first arrested, then released, and then murdered. The word came back to us at the orientation that the three of them had not been heard from.
We got up and told these hundreds of predominantly white young people that, if any of them needed to return home we would NOT think less of them at all, but would be grateful to them for how far they had come.
What I found as I moved around among the small groups that began to gather together to help each other was that, in group after group, people were singing
"Kum Ba Yah: come by here, my Lord, somebody's missing, Lord, come by here. We all need you, Lord, come by here."
I could never laugh at "Kum Ba Yah moments” after that, Vincent Harding said because I saw then that almost no one went home from there.
A great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power
and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together "Kum Ba Yah."[^4]
Another Day 1 Preacher, The Rev. Fred Rogers better known as “Mr. Rogers” was often honored for his work and regularly found himself appearing before groups of celebrities. Whenever he did this, no matter the audience or the occasion, Fred Rogers never failed to end his remarks, NOT with “thank you very much” NOR with “have a good evening.” He concluded his remarks with the simple benediction: "May God be with you." He didn't say, "God bless you” asking God to do something new. He knew that God had already blessed them, couldn't help but bless them, would always seek to bless them.
"May God be with you" meant, "I hope you are aware that God is with you". An invitation to savor the presence of God, and to put a Name to that.[^5]
HOPE is exactly like that. It is present--God renews hope daily. God’s Hope is persistent, and it is lasting. God’s Hope goes eye to eye with suffering…and keeps on HOPING because suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and in this HOPE—God COMES BY HERE— to sustain us because THAT PROMISE to you and to us - will NEVER change.
Amen.
[^1]: This discussion of optimism and hope is informed by to an article by Miroslav Volf, “Not Optimistic,” found in his collection, Against the Tide: Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities, 2010
[^2]: Peter Gomes, The Christian Hope for a New Generation” posted at: http://www3.ptsem.edu/uploadedFiles/Offices/Continuing_Education/IYM/Lectures/PJGomes.pdf?n=573
[^3]: David Brooks, “The Question-Driven Life”, The New York Times, August 19, 2011
[^4]: From Krista Tippett’s interview with Vincent Harding on her show “On Being”, August 2011
[^5]: Eliot Daley, “The Presence of God in Fred Rogers’ Life and Work” The Huffington Post, June 30, 2011