Liberating Hope
June 10, 2007
Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
The lectionary this week pairs a few miracles – a resurrection story in Luke and another, which we did not read, from the chronicles of the kings in which the prophet Elijah raises a child from the dead. In this post-Easter season, these stories serve to remind us yet again that resurrection, for the writers of scripture, was unusual, yes, but not unheard of. If not quite the order of things, then certainly at least the order of hope.
For post-Enlightenment eyes and ears, these stories have long presented the challenge of drawing meaning from the miraculous after the “age of miracles.” Our own time presents a distinct and more difficult challenge: how do we hold on to hope in an age of despair?
Interestingly, in almost all of these stories of resurrection in scripture the reaction of ordinary people to the miraculous is the same: fear.
In the Elijah story, the prophet comes and brings food in the midst of famine, but people are suspicious. When a child dies, the accusations fly: “What have you against me, O man of God?”
When Jesus raises a young man from his funeral bier, “fear seized” everyone who saw it.
Just as surely, when Paul, who had breathed threats and death upon the early church, has his own experience of resurrection, the people of the way are fearful and suspicious.
I think I understand how they must have felt. The phrase, “if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t” comes to mind. Paul offering to preach the good news of the gospel must have sounded, at first blush, like Pat Robertson offering to officiate at a gay wedding or Dick Cheney embracing Gandhian nonviolence. Inconceivable.
Something that unusual is surely not to be believed. Someone acting so counter to our expectation is surely not to be trusted. Someone we do not trust is someone to fear. And all the more so someone about whom we have no clear expectations.
How many times, when you meet a stranger along the way, is your first reaction mistrust mixed with fear? I have been recognized by strangers on the street a few times – people who have read about Clarendon or seen me at some public event. Often, my first response when someone I don’t know calls after me, is suspicion. “What does this person want from me?” “Am I going to have to defend myself?”
In other words, I am seized by fear. I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. Many of us react to the unfamiliar with fear: not some knee-shaking terror, but a constant fearfulness out of which arises a certain undefineable distance between us that stifles relationship and bars the way to community.
Now don’t get me wrong here. There is a place for intelligent caution in a world filled not only with brokenness that sometimes turns violent and also with people who have embraced domination and violence as their way in the world. Nevertheless, when we approach the world with cynical despair we are enslaved to our own fear.
A while back a friend said to me, “I’m sick and tire of leaders talking about ‘hope.’ I want to hear about action.”
Surely, in a broken world, action for healing and wholeness is necessary, but such action, scripture tells us, happens precisely where there is hope.
The hope that scripture speaks of is born in the midst of the brokenness of the world. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”
Hope begins in brokenness because compassion is not possible in the absence of passion – where there is no suffering there can be no suffering with. Where there is no such compassion there is no healing.
In the gospel story for this morning Jesus sees the grieving mother – a widow who has lost her only son – and he is moved deeply. The Greek in this text is instructive. Where the English reads, “he had compassion for her,” the Greek word is Splagchnizomai. It means literally to be moved in one’s bowels. In other words, Jesus reacts at a gut-level. He finds the situation gut-wrenching.
In the New Testament this verb is only used ten times, and aside from three uses in parables, it is only used in reference to Jesus. He is the one who is moved deeply to compassion.
And in the story in front of us, he is moved to such compassion not for someone who is a member of his family or tribe or town, but for a stranger. Indeed, Jesus feels this gut-wrenching compassion for the outsiders, the marginalized, the sick and the crowds. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus feels this deep turning in response to two blind men (20:35). According to Mark’s account, Jesus feels it for a leper (1:41) and a demoniac (9:23). Both Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus felt this deep and transformative compassion for the crowds that followed him.
Since I’ve already dragged you into a bit of New Testament Greek, I’m going to drag you through a bit more. There’s a pattern in scripture throughout that is captured in this series of Greek words that share a common suffix: paranoia, metanoia, koinonia. The first one you probably recognize – it has to do with fear. The second, metanoia, is most often translated by repent, to turn from an old way to a new one. The final word in the series, koinania, means community. The pattern in scripture captured in these words is this: from fear we turn to community. It’s what happens in the miracle stories when Jesus is moved to action and the sufferers are restored to community.
When Jesus feels so deeply moved he moves to action – healing, feeding, bringing new life to situations fraught with fear where death seems to have triumphed and despair holds sway.
Precisely in these places where Jesus feels so moved we are called to follow, to go and do likewise, to be compassionate as God is compassionate, as Jesus instructed his followers.
Yet such places are the ones where we most often most fear to go: to the hovels of the poor where our own economic status burdens us; to places torn by violence where our own security might be at stake; to the bedside of the dying where our own mortality feels threatened; to the public square were for too long our silence has underscored our complicity in an unjust status quo.
But when our guts are moved that status quo shifts. That’s when we find ourselves walking in the Pride parade listening again to the stories of friends whose coming out cost them jobs and friends and family. That’s when we find ourselves serving meals at a soup kitchen and listening again to the stories of folks who live on the city’s streets. That’s when we find ourselves down on the Gulf Coast sweltering alongside a man who’s playing a blues riff on the guitar he just picked up and dumped flood water out of in the back room of his mother’s condemned house. That’s when we find ourselves considering again our deepest sense of call to lives of compassion, of suffering with.
And precisely there, with blues echoing out of a water-damaged old guitar, we find liberating hope. For when we stand in solidarity with one another, sharing each other’s burdens, binding one another up, feeling our hearts turned in compassion, we experience the transformative power of hope.
That guy with the guitar? That’s one of my own experiences that came back to me this week as I thought about the liberating power of hope. I cannot recall the man’s name any longer, but I do remember laughing out loud with him as he picked up the ruined instrument and dumped a gallon of fetid flood water from it. As he started strumming it, and making up a ridiculous blues song, he said that the time for tears had passed. They’d cried a few rivers into those rising storm tides, but the river of compassion embodied by the thousands of people who came to help had, indeed, turned their mourning into, if not quite dancing, then at least into laughter and song – into hope.
From that hope comes the power to free us from fear and the strength to rebuild shattered lives. From that hope comes new life. Out of places of deep fearfulness, through the transformation of hope comes recreation and new community.
May our lives conform to this pattern and may we follow the way of the compassionate Christ. Amen.
Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
The lectionary this week pairs a few miracles – a resurrection story in Luke and another, which we did not read, from the chronicles of the kings in which the prophet Elijah raises a child from the dead. In this post-Easter season, these stories serve to remind us yet again that resurrection, for the writers of scripture, was unusual, yes, but not unheard of. If not quite the order of things, then certainly at least the order of hope.
For post-Enlightenment eyes and ears, these stories have long presented the challenge of drawing meaning from the miraculous after the “age of miracles.” Our own time presents a distinct and more difficult challenge: how do we hold on to hope in an age of despair?
Interestingly, in almost all of these stories of resurrection in scripture the reaction of ordinary people to the miraculous is the same: fear.
In the Elijah story, the prophet comes and brings food in the midst of famine, but people are suspicious. When a child dies, the accusations fly: “What have you against me, O man of God?”
When Jesus raises a young man from his funeral bier, “fear seized” everyone who saw it.
Just as surely, when Paul, who had breathed threats and death upon the early church, has his own experience of resurrection, the people of the way are fearful and suspicious.
I think I understand how they must have felt. The phrase, “if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t” comes to mind. Paul offering to preach the good news of the gospel must have sounded, at first blush, like Pat Robertson offering to officiate at a gay wedding or Dick Cheney embracing Gandhian nonviolence. Inconceivable.
Something that unusual is surely not to be believed. Someone acting so counter to our expectation is surely not to be trusted. Someone we do not trust is someone to fear. And all the more so someone about whom we have no clear expectations.
How many times, when you meet a stranger along the way, is your first reaction mistrust mixed with fear? I have been recognized by strangers on the street a few times – people who have read about Clarendon or seen me at some public event. Often, my first response when someone I don’t know calls after me, is suspicion. “What does this person want from me?” “Am I going to have to defend myself?”
In other words, I am seized by fear. I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. Many of us react to the unfamiliar with fear: not some knee-shaking terror, but a constant fearfulness out of which arises a certain undefineable distance between us that stifles relationship and bars the way to community.
Now don’t get me wrong here. There is a place for intelligent caution in a world filled not only with brokenness that sometimes turns violent and also with people who have embraced domination and violence as their way in the world. Nevertheless, when we approach the world with cynical despair we are enslaved to our own fear.
A while back a friend said to me, “I’m sick and tire of leaders talking about ‘hope.’ I want to hear about action.”
Surely, in a broken world, action for healing and wholeness is necessary, but such action, scripture tells us, happens precisely where there is hope.
The hope that scripture speaks of is born in the midst of the brokenness of the world. As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”
Hope begins in brokenness because compassion is not possible in the absence of passion – where there is no suffering there can be no suffering with. Where there is no such compassion there is no healing.
In the gospel story for this morning Jesus sees the grieving mother – a widow who has lost her only son – and he is moved deeply. The Greek in this text is instructive. Where the English reads, “he had compassion for her,” the Greek word is Splagchnizomai. It means literally to be moved in one’s bowels. In other words, Jesus reacts at a gut-level. He finds the situation gut-wrenching.
In the New Testament this verb is only used ten times, and aside from three uses in parables, it is only used in reference to Jesus. He is the one who is moved deeply to compassion.
And in the story in front of us, he is moved to such compassion not for someone who is a member of his family or tribe or town, but for a stranger. Indeed, Jesus feels this gut-wrenching compassion for the outsiders, the marginalized, the sick and the crowds. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus feels this deep turning in response to two blind men (20:35). According to Mark’s account, Jesus feels it for a leper (1:41) and a demoniac (9:23). Both Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus felt this deep and transformative compassion for the crowds that followed him.
Since I’ve already dragged you into a bit of New Testament Greek, I’m going to drag you through a bit more. There’s a pattern in scripture throughout that is captured in this series of Greek words that share a common suffix: paranoia, metanoia, koinonia. The first one you probably recognize – it has to do with fear. The second, metanoia, is most often translated by repent, to turn from an old way to a new one. The final word in the series, koinania, means community. The pattern in scripture captured in these words is this: from fear we turn to community. It’s what happens in the miracle stories when Jesus is moved to action and the sufferers are restored to community.
When Jesus feels so deeply moved he moves to action – healing, feeding, bringing new life to situations fraught with fear where death seems to have triumphed and despair holds sway.
Precisely in these places where Jesus feels so moved we are called to follow, to go and do likewise, to be compassionate as God is compassionate, as Jesus instructed his followers.
Yet such places are the ones where we most often most fear to go: to the hovels of the poor where our own economic status burdens us; to places torn by violence where our own security might be at stake; to the bedside of the dying where our own mortality feels threatened; to the public square were for too long our silence has underscored our complicity in an unjust status quo.
But when our guts are moved that status quo shifts. That’s when we find ourselves walking in the Pride parade listening again to the stories of friends whose coming out cost them jobs and friends and family. That’s when we find ourselves serving meals at a soup kitchen and listening again to the stories of folks who live on the city’s streets. That’s when we find ourselves down on the Gulf Coast sweltering alongside a man who’s playing a blues riff on the guitar he just picked up and dumped flood water out of in the back room of his mother’s condemned house. That’s when we find ourselves considering again our deepest sense of call to lives of compassion, of suffering with.
And precisely there, with blues echoing out of a water-damaged old guitar, we find liberating hope. For when we stand in solidarity with one another, sharing each other’s burdens, binding one another up, feeling our hearts turned in compassion, we experience the transformative power of hope.
That guy with the guitar? That’s one of my own experiences that came back to me this week as I thought about the liberating power of hope. I cannot recall the man’s name any longer, but I do remember laughing out loud with him as he picked up the ruined instrument and dumped a gallon of fetid flood water from it. As he started strumming it, and making up a ridiculous blues song, he said that the time for tears had passed. They’d cried a few rivers into those rising storm tides, but the river of compassion embodied by the thousands of people who came to help had, indeed, turned their mourning into, if not quite dancing, then at least into laughter and song – into hope.
From that hope comes the power to free us from fear and the strength to rebuild shattered lives. From that hope comes new life. Out of places of deep fearfulness, through the transformation of hope comes recreation and new community.
May our lives conform to this pattern and may we follow the way of the compassionate Christ. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:27 AM
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