You’ve Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, part 4
Matthew 25: 34-43; Amos 5: 21-24
June 27, 2010
The word “hope” appears a bit more than 200 times in scripture. Interestingly enough, almost 10 percent of those occurrences come in the book of Job. Think about that for a moment. The story of Job – beaten down, picked on, abandoned by God – is full of hope. Perhaps it’s simply because when everything else has been taken from you all you’ve got left is hope.
When Harvey Milk uttered the phrase that I’ve borrowed as the title for this month’s series of sermons he also said this: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.”
You’ve gotta give ‘em hope! You’ve gotta give ‘em hope!
Perhaps that is, in and of itself, the best and simplest articulation for my own hope for the world. I hope for a world of hope, a world filled with people full of hope, a world overflowing with hope. For it is the absence of hope that leads to the desperate acts of violence that tear asunder the fabric of society, that rip apart families, that leave us lost in the midnight hours of mourning and grief, is a desert of despair parched and desperately thirsty for living waters, for justice waters to roll down upon us.
The brilliance, and the continued resonance, of Milk’s formulation lies in its imperative voice: “you – you have got to give them hope.” In other words, it is up to each and every one of us to give each one hope. We are in this thing together. Hope does not arise in individuals in isolation, but is rather a gift that we give to each other. You have got to give them hope.
More than forty years ago, in the majestic Confession of 1967, the Presbyterian Church articulated powerfully some of the specific content of the hope that we Christians have to offer to the world. Less than 20 years later, in A Brief Statement of Faith, the church again spoke a prophetic word of hope to the world. The power of those documents, just like the power of the gospels themselves, comes in the counter-intuitive fact that the hope we have to offer is not something that the world generally wants to receive.
Most of us, when we think of the specific things we hope for, would like to be offered, oh, perhaps a winning lottery ticket, or, at least, a good job, as the means to the ends for which we hope. For example, I hope that our kids will go to the colleges of their choice, so having a pair of good jobs is an excellent means to that end. I hope that, someday, we’ll be able to do some things to our house, so a winning lottery ticket would be a nice means to that end. I hope that we’ll retire some day and enjoy that season of life. Jobs and the lottery may be in order for that hope to be realized. For these hopes I’ll need to reconcile the balance sheet of the home economics.
But in its powerful wisdom, the Confession of 67 offers something else. In its introduction, the Confession says, “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
It spoke directly to several specific areas of contemporary life that cry out for reconciliation, including: racism, militarism, and poverty. A Brief Statement of Faith, though far less a systematic theological statement than a liturgical confession, lifts up an additional area: environmental concern or creation care, as it’s become known in church circles of late.
The Confession of 67 warned that “Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize others, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.”
It urged the church “to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search,” the Confession continues,” requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security […].”
The Confession proclaims “that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.” It went on to say that any “church that is indifferent to poverty, or evades responsibility in economic affairs, or is open to one social class only, or expects gratitude for its beneficence makes a mockery of reconciliation and offer no acceptable worship to God.”
A few years further on, the church noted plainly in A Brief Statement of Faith that “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”
These statements retain all of their original power. The world is still torn by extreme poverty and seemingly endless war. Church and society still practice exclusion and domination. And we continue to threaten death to our own planet. In short, we remain caught in what our Presbyterian sisters and brothers in 1967 called “the moral confusion of our time.”
Consider the situations that the Presbyterian Church’s great confessional statements of the past half century name: Identity-based exclusion, extreme poverty, violence, environmental destruction. Now imagine the people whose lives are captured in those situations.
Imagine a young man in, say, Malawi. He happens to be gay, and he’s just met a man in whose presence he simply lights up. Enthralled in those first blissful days of a crush, he simply wants to stroll hand-in-hand with his boyfriend along the beautiful shores of Lake Malawi.
Imagine a family in, say, Baghdad. It’s a beautiful summer evening and they just want to have a picnic along the banks of the Tigris River.
Imagine a young woman in Eritrea, kneeling beside the Red Sea, in tears because she cannot feed her child.
Imagine a fisherman in Niger, no longer able to provide for his family because the once rich waters of the Niger Delta have been befouled by oil spills that dwarf the spill along our own Gulf Coast – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill once a year for the past 40 years.
All of that sounds so far from home. But imagine a man being denied access to the Northern Virginia hospital room of his beloved – and legally married husband who fell ill on a dinner cruise on the Potomac – because they are gay and their marriage is not recognized in the Commonwealth.
Imagine a family in Greenville, Mississippi, who lost their home along the banks of the great river having lost their jobs in the great recession and joined the more than 20 percent of Mississippian who live below the poverty line in America.
Imagine a young African-American man watching the sun set over the Pacific and feeling that the light has gone out of his life as yet another friend has fallen victim to gun violence.
Imagine a pastor in a little town in Appalachia wondering how she’ll explain to the children of her congregation what has happened to the mountain that used to cast its shade across the church yard on Sunday mornings, and why the creek that used to run clean behind the church is now black and foul.
It does not take any great imagination to picture these folks. Indeed, we probably know some of them, and the others we’ve seen on the news. All of this is all too real.
So where is the hope in this? What is the good news?
The wisdom and power of Matthew 25 lies in incarnation. Participating in the planning for GA with other overture advocates I’ve heard over and over the ugly yet useful phrase, “personning the issue.” Matthew 25 not only insists that hunger, imprisonment, poverty, homelessness are not abstractions, not “issues,” but are, instead, people – people caught in seemingly hopeless situations, but the passage also insists that each of these people is the son – or daughter – of God. Each of them -- each of these people we just imagined together – each of them is Jesus.
What we do – what you and I do – to give them hope in these hopeless situations is what we do for Jesus.
Next month in Minneapolis, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will consider adding to our Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, a statement of faith written by the church in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid. If affirmed, it would become the first confession from the global South embraced by our church as an authentic expression of Reformed faith with constitutional authority in the church.
Belhar concludes with this affirmation. We believe, it states,
• that God has revealed himself as the one who wishes to bring about justice and true peace among people;
• that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged
• that God calls the church to follow him in this; for God brings justice to the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry;
• that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind;
• that God supports the downtrodden, protects the stranger, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly;
• that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the widows in their suffering;
• that God wishes to teach the church to do what is good and to seek the right;
• that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others.
These are words of hope and conviction. To be sure, they are just words, but they can shape lives if we so choose.
You will have noticed, to be sure, that as I imagined people in various situations I imagined them at the water’s edge. Most of us do live close to water, for all the obvious reasons. And, we are, ourselves, mostly water.
My friend David LaMotte has a song – ostensibly for kids – that concludes like this:
"And the water gonna roll from the mountain to the stream
And the water gonna roll from the river to the sea
We will roll on together until everyone can see
That the mighty tidal wave is made of little bitty drops like me"
When we say, with Amos, let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, we are talking about ourselves and we are affirming that our lives touch ever other life, just like all water rolls to the sea which touches every shore.
That is our hope. That our lives will touch and be touched by other lives. That we are all part of an ever-flowing stream. That we will roll down together, a mighty tidal wave of hope.
June 27, 2010
The word “hope” appears a bit more than 200 times in scripture. Interestingly enough, almost 10 percent of those occurrences come in the book of Job. Think about that for a moment. The story of Job – beaten down, picked on, abandoned by God – is full of hope. Perhaps it’s simply because when everything else has been taken from you all you’ve got left is hope.
When Harvey Milk uttered the phrase that I’ve borrowed as the title for this month’s series of sermons he also said this: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.”
You’ve gotta give ‘em hope! You’ve gotta give ‘em hope!
Perhaps that is, in and of itself, the best and simplest articulation for my own hope for the world. I hope for a world of hope, a world filled with people full of hope, a world overflowing with hope. For it is the absence of hope that leads to the desperate acts of violence that tear asunder the fabric of society, that rip apart families, that leave us lost in the midnight hours of mourning and grief, is a desert of despair parched and desperately thirsty for living waters, for justice waters to roll down upon us.
The brilliance, and the continued resonance, of Milk’s formulation lies in its imperative voice: “you – you have got to give them hope.” In other words, it is up to each and every one of us to give each one hope. We are in this thing together. Hope does not arise in individuals in isolation, but is rather a gift that we give to each other. You have got to give them hope.
More than forty years ago, in the majestic Confession of 1967, the Presbyterian Church articulated powerfully some of the specific content of the hope that we Christians have to offer to the world. Less than 20 years later, in A Brief Statement of Faith, the church again spoke a prophetic word of hope to the world. The power of those documents, just like the power of the gospels themselves, comes in the counter-intuitive fact that the hope we have to offer is not something that the world generally wants to receive.
Most of us, when we think of the specific things we hope for, would like to be offered, oh, perhaps a winning lottery ticket, or, at least, a good job, as the means to the ends for which we hope. For example, I hope that our kids will go to the colleges of their choice, so having a pair of good jobs is an excellent means to that end. I hope that, someday, we’ll be able to do some things to our house, so a winning lottery ticket would be a nice means to that end. I hope that we’ll retire some day and enjoy that season of life. Jobs and the lottery may be in order for that hope to be realized. For these hopes I’ll need to reconcile the balance sheet of the home economics.
But in its powerful wisdom, the Confession of 67 offers something else. In its introduction, the Confession says, “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
It spoke directly to several specific areas of contemporary life that cry out for reconciliation, including: racism, militarism, and poverty. A Brief Statement of Faith, though far less a systematic theological statement than a liturgical confession, lifts up an additional area: environmental concern or creation care, as it’s become known in church circles of late.
The Confession of 67 warned that “Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize others, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.”
It urged the church “to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search,” the Confession continues,” requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security […].”
The Confession proclaims “that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.” It went on to say that any “church that is indifferent to poverty, or evades responsibility in economic affairs, or is open to one social class only, or expects gratitude for its beneficence makes a mockery of reconciliation and offer no acceptable worship to God.”
A few years further on, the church noted plainly in A Brief Statement of Faith that “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”
These statements retain all of their original power. The world is still torn by extreme poverty and seemingly endless war. Church and society still practice exclusion and domination. And we continue to threaten death to our own planet. In short, we remain caught in what our Presbyterian sisters and brothers in 1967 called “the moral confusion of our time.”
Consider the situations that the Presbyterian Church’s great confessional statements of the past half century name: Identity-based exclusion, extreme poverty, violence, environmental destruction. Now imagine the people whose lives are captured in those situations.
Imagine a young man in, say, Malawi. He happens to be gay, and he’s just met a man in whose presence he simply lights up. Enthralled in those first blissful days of a crush, he simply wants to stroll hand-in-hand with his boyfriend along the beautiful shores of Lake Malawi.
Imagine a family in, say, Baghdad. It’s a beautiful summer evening and they just want to have a picnic along the banks of the Tigris River.
Imagine a young woman in Eritrea, kneeling beside the Red Sea, in tears because she cannot feed her child.
Imagine a fisherman in Niger, no longer able to provide for his family because the once rich waters of the Niger Delta have been befouled by oil spills that dwarf the spill along our own Gulf Coast – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill once a year for the past 40 years.
All of that sounds so far from home. But imagine a man being denied access to the Northern Virginia hospital room of his beloved – and legally married husband who fell ill on a dinner cruise on the Potomac – because they are gay and their marriage is not recognized in the Commonwealth.
Imagine a family in Greenville, Mississippi, who lost their home along the banks of the great river having lost their jobs in the great recession and joined the more than 20 percent of Mississippian who live below the poverty line in America.
Imagine a young African-American man watching the sun set over the Pacific and feeling that the light has gone out of his life as yet another friend has fallen victim to gun violence.
Imagine a pastor in a little town in Appalachia wondering how she’ll explain to the children of her congregation what has happened to the mountain that used to cast its shade across the church yard on Sunday mornings, and why the creek that used to run clean behind the church is now black and foul.
It does not take any great imagination to picture these folks. Indeed, we probably know some of them, and the others we’ve seen on the news. All of this is all too real.
So where is the hope in this? What is the good news?
The wisdom and power of Matthew 25 lies in incarnation. Participating in the planning for GA with other overture advocates I’ve heard over and over the ugly yet useful phrase, “personning the issue.” Matthew 25 not only insists that hunger, imprisonment, poverty, homelessness are not abstractions, not “issues,” but are, instead, people – people caught in seemingly hopeless situations, but the passage also insists that each of these people is the son – or daughter – of God. Each of them -- each of these people we just imagined together – each of them is Jesus.
What we do – what you and I do – to give them hope in these hopeless situations is what we do for Jesus.
Next month in Minneapolis, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will consider adding to our Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, a statement of faith written by the church in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid. If affirmed, it would become the first confession from the global South embraced by our church as an authentic expression of Reformed faith with constitutional authority in the church.
Belhar concludes with this affirmation. We believe, it states,
• that God has revealed himself as the one who wishes to bring about justice and true peace among people;
• that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged
• that God calls the church to follow him in this; for God brings justice to the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry;
• that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind;
• that God supports the downtrodden, protects the stranger, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly;
• that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the widows in their suffering;
• that God wishes to teach the church to do what is good and to seek the right;
• that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others.
These are words of hope and conviction. To be sure, they are just words, but they can shape lives if we so choose.
You will have noticed, to be sure, that as I imagined people in various situations I imagined them at the water’s edge. Most of us do live close to water, for all the obvious reasons. And, we are, ourselves, mostly water.
My friend David LaMotte has a song – ostensibly for kids – that concludes like this:
"And the water gonna roll from the mountain to the stream
And the water gonna roll from the river to the sea
We will roll on together until everyone can see
That the mighty tidal wave is made of little bitty drops like me"
When we say, with Amos, let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, we are talking about ourselves and we are affirming that our lives touch ever other life, just like all water rolls to the sea which touches every shore.
That is our hope. That our lives will touch and be touched by other lives. That we are all part of an ever-flowing stream. That we will roll down together, a mighty tidal wave of hope.
posted by David Ensign at
10:02 AM
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