Rocks and Hard Places
Romans 8:22-25; Genesis 28:10-15
July 23,
2017
Let’s
crowd-source some definitions this morning. First off, what does “hope” mean to
you? Is “hope” the same as “wish”? What does hope do?
+++++
Last
week’s Christian Century includes a
lovely essay called How to live in hope,
by theologian Charles R. Pinches. He opens with this story:
Chief Plenty Coups of the
Crow Nation guided his people through the deep crisis brought by the invasion
of the white man. Shortly before his death in 1932, he said to his biographer:
“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and
they could not lift them again. After this nothing happened.”[1]
As
Pinches explains, “while the Crow remained alive after the buffalo went away,
their lives had no place in their own history. This is,” he argues, “a fitting
way to characterize a life without hope: having no place within a history.”
Hope is
what ties our past to a longed-for future that gives our present struggles
meaning. Hope gives us a place in time. Hope is, in this understanding, what
makes something happen. We act in the world to bring about the change we wish
to see such that the world of the future more closely aligns with our present
hopes.
As
Pinches notes, Thomas Aquinas called despair
– that is, a life without hope – the greatest sin because despair “consists in
[…] ceasing to hope for a share of God’s goodness.” If, as we talked about last
week, sin amounts to separation from God, despair separates us from God’s
story. In despair, there is nothing in God’s story for me. Nothing happens.
In
despair, we remain silent, as well. While the phrase, “wallowing in despair”
carries an entirely unhelpful moralism, it nevertheless captures a deep truth
about despair: despair incapacitates us and leaves us mute.
Paul,
writing to the church at Rome, might have fallen into despair given his
circumstances. Caught between a council in Jerusalem that doubted the validity
of the increasingly gentile church, and that growing gentile church’s doubts
about the faith of Jewish Christians, Paul might easily have thrown up his
hands and said, “what’s the use?”
Given
his experiences in jail along the way, despair seems a perfectly legitimate
option. Moreover, when one pauses to consider that the founder of the movement
that Paul has joined wound up on a Roman cross, it’s not hard to wonder how any
of the early Christians found a place for themselves in the story of God.
Hope
seems like the least likely of the three great virtues Paul names – faith,
hope, and love – to persist in a tiny movement emerging from a fringe religious
group in a backwater of an empire that persecuted them. Nevertheless, they
breathed hope.
It was
the same hope that Jacob carried – a hope against all odds that somehow there
was a place for him in the story of God’s people.
I’ve
long been fascinated by the Jacob story, and particularly by the small but
significant detail of the pillow for his head. Why, I have wondered for as long
as I can remember, did Jacob think he’d get a good night’s sleep resting his
head on a rock? Granted, I’ve never been to the Holy Land. Maybe their rocks
are softer than our rocks, but I doubt it.
Sure, he
was travelling light and on the run from his older brother, Esau, whom Jacob
had cheated out of the eldest’s birthright. Still, why is this even a
believable symbolic detail in this historical mythology of Israel?
Because
that early mythology already regularly refers to God as the Rock of Israel’s
salvation – from Jacob’s final blessing to his sons referring to the Rock of
Israel (Gen. 49:24) to David’s song of gratitude following his deliverance from
Saul that opens with “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my
God, my rock, in whom I take refuge” (2 Sam. 22:2-3). That symbol continues to
pertain right on through Jesus changing Simon
to Peter – the Greek is petras, or rock, and Jesus proclaims
that Peter will become the rock upon which the church will be built.
One can
find one’s self in the story of God when resting upon the rock. Jacob gives
himself over to God’s providence and surrenders both to sleep and to trust when
he lays his head upon the rock.
Rocks,
however, remain hard, and thus this is a difficult hope we cling to in faith.
As
Pinches notes in his essay,
“Difficulty
is part of the definition of hope. […] Hope is what sustains us when the
stories in which we have a share turn unjust and require our dissent.”
He goes
on to quote a Wendell Berry essay, “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” from more than
25 years ago. Berry was writing in response to Hayden Carruth’s poem “On Being
Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam.” Carruth’s short poem
protests the war by protesting the invitation to speak against it in a poem.
Berry
suggests that “much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and
despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold
out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If
protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or
significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s
individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a
hope far more modest that that of public success: namely, the hope of
preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by
acquiescence.”[2]
In other
words, in, for example, Martin Luther’s words: “here I stand, I can do no
other.” If I am to preserve what matters in my own heart and spirit, I must
stand up. If I am to claim a place in the story of God’s love I must stand up
for that love in the life and history of the world in my own time and place in
it.
It may
be as comfortable as trying to sleep with one’s head on a rock, but hope that
is worthy of the name will never be a soft and fluffy thing.
With
that in mind, I invite you to take the stone you received when you came in this
morning and think about your own hopes. What hope do you hold on to that holds
you fast in the face of challenges in your own life and in the life of the
world?
Let us
bring these challenges and these hopes to God in prayer.
posted by David Ensign at
8:00 AM
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