A recipe for hope (a message from 1.15.23)

 Matthew 3:13-17

Isaiah 42:1-9 

What is hope? Is it an emotion? Or a feeling?  “A thing with feathers,” like Emily Dickenson said. Is it positive vibes? Or a feeling of possibility or optimism?  

I know that hope has something to do with the future. I am an optimistic person by character, but we’ve got large-scale problems that worry me: deeper authoritarianism and fanaticism, global warming, corruption...  There are small scale problems too: illnesses, family stress, depression, you name it.  Just when I want that light of Christmas to shine (brilliantly please) hope can be illusive.  

Isaiah has some words for us this morning about hope. He writes of someone, of a servant who will “open the eyes that are blind, bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, …and liberate “those who sit in darkness.” This is a very hopeful vision.  While he was probably thinking of ancestors like Jacob or Moses, first century Christians began to understand these beautiful verses as referring to Jesus.

Isaiah’s vision is beautiful. And believe me, I want to liberate all people from all the dungeons that imprison us (from addiction, from debt, from stress, from mental turmoil, all of it). But this grand vision is so bold, and our problems so serious, hoping for something like this can feel like wishful thinking.

Chan Hellman and Casey Gwinn write about how we use the word “hope” in our everyday language:  “I hope you’re well,” “I hope you have a good day.” The thing is, when say those things, we don’t really have a control over whether or not someone is well or if they’ll have a good day.  Instead of a hope, it’s more of a wish. 

I don’t think the prophet Isaiah was idly wishing. “Oh, I wish people could be free from the dungeons that imprison them.” Nor do I think that Jesus, son of God had some kind of warm and fuzzy wish that the captives would be freed.  No, I think they actually hoping this.  

A handful of different researchers—all of them social workers from what I can tell—break hope down into a 3 part formula. 

1. You have a vision.  

We know about a vision as people of faith.  Isaiah is bursting at the seams with a vision of justice and righteousness.  Jesus Messiah, who was seeped in this Jewish tradition of Isaiah’s showed us a vision where people were healed, where folks were generous, where communities would care for the vulnerable, and where folks wouldn’t worship money or power but would worship God. It’s a vision where love would reign.  Sometimes Jesus called this “the kingdom of God.” We know what vision looks like in our faith.

2. The second part of hope is a path.  

How do we get from where we are to that vision? What’s the path?

In something like a recovery program or a training, there’s a clear path from A to B. Isaiah gives us a clear path. He reminds us that the people are called to stand firm in their traditions, which call them to talk care of folks. Isaiah says the very way people live will strengthen God’s justice. Beautiful.

Likewise, Jesus has a path for us.  He calls back to an old religious anchor and says we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves.  The path is love.  The path is service, grace, forgiveness.  Some of us have made a particular commitment to this path of righteousness (of right living) in our baptisms. 

3. The third part in the formula for hope is willpower. 

Do you have the mental energy, the passion, the drive to get there?

So about willpower: One of the first times I attempted to drive a manual transmission car in the real world and not a cornfield, I was driving on a highway in traffic with my brother.  I attempted to upshift, killed the car in the middle of the traffic, announced I was done, and swapped seats with my brother. I had my own automatic transmission car and learning to drive a stick wasn’t essential knowledge for me. A few years later when I was living in Tegucigalpa (basically the hilliest city in central America), I realized that the church had a truck sitting out back that no one knew how to drive.  They told me I could drive it.  Problem was, it was a stick. But I really wanted to be able to drive that car. I had a really clear goal and I was deeply motivated. And I learned it! 

I had the willpower to learn. 

The more we desire the outcome, the more likely, we’ll walk the path to achieve it and we won’t give up. 

We can get tripped up in this 3-part formula for hope. Sometimes, we can’t see the vision—that’s hard.  We don’t even know where we want to be.  Things are so tense or so tough or stressful that we can’t even imagine it. 

Other times, we can’t see the path—we know where we want to be, but we can’t figure out how to get there. Or we don’t have the opportunity open before us to get there. That’s a recipe for despair. (Global warming comes to mind here.  We know where we want to be, but we’re not sure of the path to get us there.)  

 

The third part, willpower, can also trip us up. With this one, the tricky question is do we actually want the vision enough to fight for it?  

Martin Luther King, who would have been 94 years old today dug into that vision of Justice, peace and love that the prophets and Jesus gave us. Sometimes he distilled into more manageable bites like a vision of being able to sit anywhere you wanted on the bus with a path of boycott to get you there, but the grand vision always tied back into to God’s love and justice. 

Now thinking of willpower, a lot of people around MLK had the will power to fight for this dream, especially those experiencing discrimination. Many other people gave the vision a solid thumbs up, but from a distance. They didn’t have the willpower to join into the fight particularly when things were smooth in their own lives and fighting for civil rights meant sacrificing something for the sake of justice.  

If you don’t passionately want the vision, you won’t fight for it. And this is tough.  When there’s nothing intrinsic that motivates us but God’s extrinsic higher standard of goodness (just for the sake of goodness), the vision can become a little less magnetic. Our willpower falters. 

Has this ever happened to you?  

It has to me.

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There is one final piece of hope that must be mentioned. 

 

Hope, it turns out, is a product of struggle. It is something that we develop in the uncomfortable and challenging times. It’s something that we learn. Isaiah’s hope was born out of the people who had been deported to Babylon.  

(Remember, quick history lesson: 600 years before Christ, the Babylonian empire ransacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, burned the city down and deported all the people to what we call “exile” in Babylon.  It was devastating and Isaiah’s hope was born in that struggle.  Or think of Jesus of Nazareth who lived in oppressively difficult times. A few weeks ago, we heard a sermon about the bloodthirsty King Herod who mascaraed all the baby boys.  Jesus’ hope was born in that struggle.)

Hope deepens when our vision/goals, our pathways to get to the vision, or our willpower and sense of agency are challenged. In those moments, we really have to clarify the what and the why of where we’re headed.

However, in those tough moments, hope doesn’t deepen in isolation. Some of us learn it from our families, but we also learn it from each other. Think of a time that has been really challenging for you—an illness, a family problem, a work mess. Who have been the people who have come up around you and reminded you of the vision or goal that you could no longer see? Who were the ones who shined a light on your path and then took your arm to help you along?  Or when were you the one who encouraged someone? Who said, “c’mon let’s do this.  I’m with you. A different world is possible.”

We restore hope in each other. Hope is a social gift.  It’s not something that happens in isolation.  It happens in relationship with each other. Sometimes, it happens in the church.

The baptism of Jesus drew on a hope that came before it. You can hear it in the way the Matthew story harmonizes with Isaiah.  MLK drew on a hope that came before him.  Our hope is one that has been passed down from our ancestors and that is strengthened and clarified in each other. 

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Now I can’t say where you might be feeling hopeless today. I can’t name what is going on in your life. I can’t say what is stressing you out about this broken world we live in.  

But I can say that we hold together in the collective a vision of grace where we pause to listen in moments of pain, where we confess and forgive and honor one another’s God given dignity and belovedness where we imagine a world where everyone has life abundant. 

I can also say that we hold together a vision of justice where we will no longer be divided by hate or ignorance or money. Where, as King said in his 1967 Christmas sermon at Ebenezer Baptist “every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality,” that “the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled,” that “men will beat their swords into plowshares” and that “justice will roll down like water.”

We hold that vision together and whether we are helping one another to take the next steps, or encouraging each other not to buy into the narratives of despair and pessimism, God’s Light Dawns.

We know the dream and the path of love. We’ve inherited it from those who’ve gone before it. We steward it and struggle for it for ourselves and for those who will come after. Now we must walk it.

 I leaned on work from Hellmen and Gwinn and Brene Brown both of whom reference C.R. Snyder as the original author of the 3-part formula for hope.