You've Still Gotta Give 'Em Hope

Job 23:1-17; Mark 10:17-31

October 14, 2018

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 sermon 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 other day a friend noted on social media that she’s less interested in hope right now than she is in defiance. I get that, and, moreover, I believe that hope rises in defiance. We went to an art opening last weekend, and I was reminded that in the face of ugliness the defiant creation of beauty articulates hope that beauty might, at least, survive.

The brilliance, and the continued resonance, of Harvey 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 fifty 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.

In the face of that fantasy, the gospel offers instead, the text from Mark: “sell what you already own and give the money to the poor, then your deepest hopes will be realized.”

Similarly, in its powerful wisdom, the Confession of 67 offers a different kind of hope. 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, as last week’s report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscored with urgency, we are threatening 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 dejectedly walking along the water’s edge having just lost his job in Virginia Beach after coming out as gay and learning that he has no legal protections against such discrimination.

Imagine a family along the Gulf Coast combing through the wreckage of a home destroyed by a storm that, passing over the heat-charged waters of the Gulf of Mexico, became in a matter of days one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States. So far.

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?

A few years ago, the Presbyterian Church celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Confession of 1967, and added the Belhar Confession to our Book of Confessions.

Belhar concludes with this affirmation. We believe, it states,

• that God has revealed God’s self 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 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 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.