Jeremiah 29, 31
Some of you will remember the Lent we hid Alleluias and then didn’t find them again for two years. I don’t mean a few of them that got mixed up with the next year’s messages. I mean, we didn’t even look for them.
The theme that year for Lent was Hope. We wore it on bracelets and hung a banner in our hallway that read:
Fear says “what if…?”
Hope answers, “even if…!”
And then, all of a sudden, a what if worse than our fears gripped the entire world and life as we knew it screeched to a terrible and terrifying halt. And what ifs were suddenly the reality we were living in –What if nobody can go to work or school or restaurants or to church or get haircuts or ? What if all the things everybody has been working on suddenly don’t matter –the school plays and tournaments, final projects and work trips, and community gatherings, the goals and plans just disappear, unfinished? What if tons of people are sick and dying and the threat of sickness and death overshadows everything we do?
Throughout it all, we gathered on zoom – seeing each other’s face and each other’s pets, sharing show-n-tell videos, and delivering advent bags and making mix cds. We prayed every morning and night with a family while mom was dying of cancer, and even had a masked, open windows retreat following directions from her oncologist, and day after day, week after week, we showed up for each other in a thousand tiny ways we’d never thought of before. And behind our backs, while our Fear and Hope banners hung in the empty hallway, and the hallelujahs stayed hidden in corners and under cushions in the abandoned sanctuary, the basement was buzzing with life, transforming into a space for a school to move in to one day even if.
Through it all, God met us again and again and again, and we felt the presence of the risen Jesus who came into this life to be with and for us when we were with and for each other. Even though we couldn’t often bephysically with each other, nevertheless God kept taking care of us and helping us take care of each other, and redemption and hope were tangible.
And then came Good Friday, and we came back together into the darkness to tell poignantly the story of Jesus coming into our death. And on Easter Sunday we celebrated the resurrection and found those two-year-old hidden hallelujahs, and Hope’s Even if never rang truer, because we had lived it.
Even though we were weary and worn out, our trust and the confidence of our faith was unshakable: the God who made and loved this world is redeeming it. And despite all the suffering and loss and death – and many of our people died in those two years – we trusted that God is still God, life is for love, redemption is afoot, we participate in joy, and share in healing, and Jesus meets us right here when we come alongside one another in suffering. God is holding the world and moving everything toward wholeness, relentlessly and unceasingly. And God is trustworthy.
In our scriptures today the people of God are still in exile. The feeling of abandonment and hopelessness, ripped from home and all that made up their daily lives, the loss of all the structures that gave them stability as a nation and identity as a people had become their new normal. This desolation has gone on and on, for decades, with no end in sight.
It is into this hopelessness that the prophets speak the promises of God. Promises of hope for a future. I know the plans I have for you – God says – plans for goodness and not harm. When you seek me, you will find me. I will turn your sadness into joy, your grief into gladness.
Hope isn’t when we feel great about how great things are going and project that they’ll keep being great. That’s optimism and positive thinking. That’s not hope.
Hope comes to us in hopelessness. But hope is also not just uplifting platitudes chucked like water balloons at a house fire. Hope does not deny the suffering and pain of the moment. It begins in what is. It starts in our place of need. Hope is always about wrongs made right, always about redemption and new life, so hope starts in what is broken and dead.
One of my favorite explanations of hope comes from David Steindl-Rast: “ Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism.... A far more accurate picture would be the hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism. We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.
And since patience is as contagious as impatience, it will also be our way of strengthening each other's hope.
In order for hope to awaken in a hopeless people, their imaginations must be awakened for the impossible made possible. It’s one thing for the prophets to say that God brings life out of death. It’s another to show it. Ezekiel paints the vision of a valley littered with forgotten dried-out bones, the most over and done with, past tense, lifeless of things. Is there anything more bleak than sun-bleached bones scattered in the dust? As the coroner of Munchkin Land famously said, They’re not only merely dead, they’re really most sincerely dead.
But then, at the word of God the dry bones clack and rattle together, and bodies form, and finally, the breath of God—the same breath that hovered over the waters at creation bringing life from utter nothingness, the same breath that breathed life into clay of the newly formed human in the hands of God, the same breath the dead and alive again Jesus will, on resurrection day, breathe on the disciples, when he gives them the Holy Spirit and says receive my peace—this breath arrives on the wind from every direction and fills these reassembled bodies into living, breathing, moving, vibrant newness, remade people, standing and dancing and laughing and walking freely about, as far as the eye could see.
This, the prophet says, is what God does. What God will do. Wait and Watch.
The prophets awaken our ‘eschatological imagination,’ which means, they invite us to let our vision of a good life be shaped not by what we can see in front of us, but by God’s promised future. Eschatology means the finale of everything, so eschatological imagination means that the coming fullness so fills and animates us that we can live right now into God’s final destiny for humanity.
Love. Restoration. Forgiveness. Peace. Joy. Connection. Belonging for all. No more sin – which is just a fancy word for being separated from God and each other. God will wipe away every tear and bring wholeness to all that is broken. And when death ends, all that remains is life and love. That’s what’s coming.
A couple days ago I saw an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the writers of South Park. They said that two important words when writing a good story are ‘because’ and ‘therefore’. A story that of ‘ands’ – and then this happens and then this happens, is just a boring list of events. A good says this happens, therefore this happens, or this happens because this happens.
The story of life on earth is written with another key word, one we can hear when we live with awakened eschatological imaginations. That word is nevertheless. Every circumstance, experience and situation pulses underneath with this insistent and defiant, nevertheless, moving everything unceasingly toward God’s promised future.
Nevertheless, even if, despite, anyway, and always. This means that into every single This is not ok comes the prophets’ confident response of hope, so this is not the end.
So how do we 'get hopeful?' How do we feel hope and trust it?
Like everything else real and permanent, we can’t force hope to happen to us or make other people feel hopeful. And striving for it will surely wear you out. "Let the bottom drop out of your pessimism" and fall into the motherly care of God. Dry bones don't make themselves alive.
So maybe the question of those languishing in exile is, instead, how do we cultivate eschatological imagination? How do we live in contagious patience? Can we make ourselves available to the hope that only God can give?
Last week I talked with several people about how they are living open to hope, who used the words ‘disciplines.’ “The disciplines are sustaining me,” one said.
This sounds like drudgery, but ‘the disciplines’ are simply the things we do on purpose that practice living in the way of God instead of the way of fear. That is, whether or not we are feeling it, we practice trust and availability to God. So how are the disciplines sustaining you? Another way of saying this is, how are you praying these days?
One person I know has started praying by baking bread. Surrendering to the patient attentiveness and gentle miracle of mixing ingredients and letting what happens happen– with all the textures and smells and tastes this involves, creating and feeding, connecting to others in the presence this practice demands is something sustaining her and helping her to be available to God’s hope. So, she’s showing up to regularly do it.
Another person told me the discipline of lament is sustaining her. That when yet another story of injustice or horror came across her newsfeed, she felt like wearing all black in mourning. This was a bit out there, so instead she’s begun putting on what she calls her ‘lament bracelets’ – a series of braided black cords on her wrist, her symbolic sackcloth and ashes. She joins the prophets of old in enacting her holy lament. Her dialogue with God reignites every time she catches sight of the bracelets on her wrist, bearing on her body in the world a marker that this is not ok. And so also, this is not the end.
The disciplines don’t have to be the ways of praying that you first think of, or that you’ve always done. Where in your life are you being invited to turn something ordinary into prayer?
A lifelong non-gardener told me last week that suddenly she is attending to the ground beneath her feet, hands in the soil, turning her back yard into a butterfly sanctuary and discovering that the earth knows the great nevertheless better than we do and will tell us if we listen.
For me, a new discipline has emerged walking the dog in the morning. It’s the task I often dread, and frequently try to put off, but I can only delay Bertie’s demands until about 7 am before I am begrudgingly out there on the sidewalk wrangling 75 lbs of curious energy through the neighborhood. But after these conversations about the disciplines, I saw the invitation to for this daily chore to become, instead, a discipline, a practice of prayer.
By walking alongside Bertie day after day, I am attuning her to my presence and my voice, I am teaching my dog to know and trust me, to listen to me, and respond to my commands. Perhaps her need for this with me could meet my need for this with God. So, I put my phone on do not disturb, and step into the morning air with this dog, to walk alongside God, so the Holy Spirit can attune me to God’s presence and voice, teach me to know and trust God, help me to listen to God and respond to God’s commands.
Talking to God while loading the dishwasher. Singing hymns in the shower. Memorizing a bible verse and reciting it to yourself in the car. Praying blessings on each little person who climbs into your carpool. What ordinary activity or ritual might become for you a discipline? Or what disciplines might attune you to God’s presence and voice?
Last week I preached at Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina about blessing. I said blessing something or someone acknowledges their belonging to God and names God’s sovereignty over them. The act of walking around blessing the world and the people in it resists evil and counters fear by refusing to treat the world, or any person in it, as beyond hope. Instead, it places each person or thing squarely back in the arms of God and awaits with anticipation what God will do with it. In other words, blessing is a way of exercising our eschatological imagination, and cultivating a waiting readiness to join in God’s work of healing whenever and however it might arise.
Living like this is not a solo gig. This is why we are church. We pray for each other, and we pray for the world together. We tell each other the stories of how God met us and where we saw life come out of death. We stay rooted in the ancient story of God’s faithfulness to generations gone by, and remember how God sustained us in our own crises gone by.
We tell each other again and again how God was with us then, and help each other notice what God is doing now. We recognize struggle as longing for wrongs to be made right, and see despair as the very place where hope is needed, so that’s where we go to await and anticipate hope. Together we stand in the pain and of what is, and practice living from what will be, knowing that the God who arrives will arrive among us again.
With a patience that is contagious we wait and watch, because always and nevertheless, God is still God, life is for love, redemption is afoot, we can participate in joy and share in healing, and the risen Jesus will meet us right here when we come alongside one another in suffering. Relentlessly and unceasingly, God is holding the world and moving everything toward wholeness. And God is trustworthy.
Amen.