Hope’s Firm Foundation

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 15 February 2009

I’ve chosen the words of two poets to help guide the way through our topic this morning.  The first is the environmentalist and poet, Wendell Berry.

Hope is a duty.  In the context of a planet and people in peril, we have an obligation to our own being and to our descendants

to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope.  If we look carefully, these

underpinnings can still be found.

And the second reading is from the poet, Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul

                                    And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

                                    And sweetest in the gale is heard and sore must be the storm

                                    That could abash the little bird that kept so many so warm.

                                    I’ve heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea.

                                    Yet never in extremity it asked a crumb of me.

When you face a great challenge in your life, what gets you through?  What sustains you through a cancer diagnosis, the death of a loved one, a lost job, a broken or lonely heart.  You heard the litany of prayers today.  What gets you through?  What gives you the faith that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, that “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well?”

This is not a rhetorical question.  I’m asking you, in your darkest hour, what is the source of your hope?  Is there any question more important than this?  For me, this is the essential religious question.  Many of you know my definition of religion.  For me, religion is, at its core, people telling stories of hope.  People like us, telling stories that sustain us, that inspire us, stories that give us courage in difficult times, times like these for example.  Now the skeptic replies, “Well, preacher, exactly what kind of stories are you talking about?  Tall tales? Fables of wishful thinking? Lies that distract the doomed from their fate? The opiate of the masses?  Isn’t this what your hopeful story really boils down to?”

The skeptic, no matter who it is – a friend, an enemy, or just a nagging voice in our own head – the skeptic challenges us.  Is the story that we tell about hope true?  Is it true?  This clash of skepticism and hope recently played out before our very eyes in our nation’s political life.  You may recall that last November the American people elected a President who campaigned on a platform of hope – hope and change.  You’ll remember that then-Senator Obama was then dismissed as naïve by the so-called realists who campaigned against him.  They accused him of selling snake oil.  They accused him of being, you remember the phrase, a “hope monger.”  [Laughter]  “Yes, we can!” said the candidate.  “Says who?” replied his critics.

Hope is in the air, he proclaimed.  That’s precisely the problem, said the skeptics; it’s in the air.  It’s ephemeral; it’s some wispy, flighty thing.  It’s like what Gertrude Stein said many years ago about the city of Oakland:  “There is no there there.”  [Laughter]  I think that’s what Emily Dickinson is getting at in her poem.  She writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”  Hope is a little song bird, she says, flighty, illusive and, inasmuch as its tune has no words, a little vague, frankly.  Hard to pin down.  She goes on, “I’ve heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea, yet never in extremity it asked a crumb of me.”  Dickinson seems to be suggesting that it’s a little too convenient when, in our time of trial, our hope asks nothing of us.  You get the feeling she’s wondering if this little songbird is for real.

And this is the criticism, my friends, that is leveled against those of us – and I count myself among them – who place our hope in an idealized future.  It’s just too easy, the skeptics say, to blithely claim that all will be well in the by and by, down the road, in the future.  This critique is most often leveled against those of us with a progressive religious or social outlook.  As progressives, we tend to place our hope in progress toward some idealized future.  It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Hebrew prophets who told the people of a fabled land of milk and honey, where justice would flow like water and righteousness like a mighty stream; an idealized future where all wrong would be banished.  These dreams of that far-off land gave the people hope in difficult times.  That kind of faith lives on today in our very own religious lives.  We might not realize it but you know, in one of our favorite hymns we sing, “We’ll build a land . . . .”  It’s one of my favorite hymns in the hymnal and I know it’s one of yours too because I can tell by the way you sing it:  “We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken; we’ll build a land where the captives go free, where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.  We’ll build a promised land that can be.”  But says who?  On whose authority do we make such claims? 

Is it because God said so?  And if so, does God have the power in this day and age, with a bunch of human beings around intent on foiling her plans?  Does God have the power to make good on her promise?  And if God can’t deliver for us, then does our faith rest on a flimsy ideology of progress that a century of world wars and holocausts has exposed as a dangerous myth?  You see, the problem with this kind of idealistic hope is that it tends to get a little thin after awhile.  Time after time when our ideals run up against reality, they tend to sputter and run out of gas.  I’ve seen lots of good people lose their faith in the good fight when their idealism ran out.  In the void left by their exhausted hope, cynicism quickly crept in.  Scratch the surface of any cynic and you’re almost sure to find an idealist who got burned.

Religion is people telling stories of hope.  But are our stories true?  Are they durable enough to sustain us?  Some people who got burned on the vision of the future took another turn, another path to hope that is prevalent in our culture.  I would call it a conservative tradition of hope.  It’s a kind of hope that feels like nostalgia, a hope for a return to the past, a return to some primordial Eden that we inhabited a long time ago, before our fall, and to which we hope to one day return.  Those who profess this kind of hope like to fancy themselves a little more clear-sighted than the rest of us because their hope is rooted in the past.  The problem is, a lost Eden is just as shifty a target as any future promised land, the nostalgic past just as susceptible to our idealistic projections as the hoped-for future. So where does this leave us, my friends? If neither the future nor the past are sufficient grounds for our hope, then where is hope’s firm foundation?  In our darkest hour, where can we securely stand? 

I believe that we must ground our hope in the goodness of life that we experience as a reality in the here and now.  We can hope for more love because we have felt love’s clasped hand.  We can hope for more compassion because we have shed its tear.  We don’t need the prophets to convince us of the land of milk and honey for we’ve tasted it, if only a sip, with our own lips.  And on that authority, on our lived experience, we must ground our hope.  Not in an idealistic future, but on the lived reality of what we know of our world.  That is hope’s firm foundation.  When I’ve seen it with my own eyes, no skeptic, no cynic can take my hope away from me. 

But to be this kind of hope-er is something of an art, because, of course, we only experience the goodness of life in our current reality in glimpses:  glimpses of reconciliation, glimpses of peace, glimpses of wholeness.  We hope-mongers need to learn to pay attention to the glimpses.  To fail to do so is irreverent.  That’s what Alice Walker was getting at in her book, “The Color Purple.”  Remember she said if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and you fail to take notice, said Walker, it pisses God off.  Don’t miss the beauty; don’t miss the grace that is already present in the world and that can serve as the firm foundation for our hope.  We must be attentive.  This is what Wendell Berry meant when he said “Hope is a duty.  In the context of a planet and people in peril, we have an obligation to our own being and to our descendants to study our life and our condition, searching always for the underpinnings of hope.”

Now let’s just test this out for a moment.  I want to go back for a second to the very first question I asked you this morning.  In your darkest hour, what is the source of your hope?  Close your eyes for a moment and think back.  I know, for me, that in my darkest hour it was a hand on the shoulder, it was the kindness of a stranger, it was the steadfast love of a friend, it was me remembering the inner strength I’d found to get through the time before.  It was a hope that was grounded in a reality, the reality of the present, that gave me the hope that saw me through. 

So we must notice the glimpses of hope in our lives.  And then we must do another thing.  We must cherish those glimpses; we must keep them alive in our spiritual lives by meditating on them, by making them the objects of our imagination.  This is where the prophets come in.  We don’t have to take the prophet’s word for it that there is a land of milk and honey.  But when they talk about it, they sure do sound beautiful.  And they remind us of the times that we tasted the milk and honey ourselves.  When the choir sings of the deep river that we cross over into Jordan, we don’t have to take their word for it.  We have experienced a moment of deliverance and of crossing over and their song reminds us of it and gives us strength.  We make those glimpses the object of our meditation and our imagination.

But finally, friends, we must be disciples of hope; we must be its instruments.  You know, the women of Sweet Honey in the Rock who wrote the words to our processional this morning – Ysaye wrote that, a member of All Souls – wrote “If we want hope to survive in this world today, then every day we’ve got to work on . . . sing on . . . pray on . . . march on.”  We must be disciples to the hope, creating it amongst ourselves, taking the glimpses that we find and building on them and making them into our firm foundation for the future.  Friends, we need hope in this world today.  We are going through a time of great uncertainty in our nation and in our world.

William James said something long ago that I believe rings true today; he said to us, “We live in a world that is uncertain of being saved,” and he asked, “Are you willing to participate in such a world?”  Are you willing to risk participating in a world that is uncertain of being saved?  I am.  I am.  And it’s because I find in the world today a firm foundation for my hope that we can indeed save our world.  Rooted in what we know of the goodness of life, let us look hopefully to the future.    Amen.