Sermon for Sunday, November 18, 2018 || Proper 28B || Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
We were talking theology over pizza last week at confirmation class, and one of the teens asked a question that was so thought-provoking, I spent the next several days thinking about it. Because the question was on my mind this week, my response to it ended up being this sermon. The question went something like this: “Adam, how do you believe all the time? Are there any times when you don’t really know about all this God stuff?”Continue reading “The Posture of Belief”→
Sermon for Sunday, November 15, 2015 || Proper 28B || Hebrews 10:11-25
Note: For the sermon at St. Mark’s on 11/15, I was planning to read the Bishop’s address to the Diocesan Annual Convention, which took place the same weekend. Then when the terrorist attack in Parish happened, I knew I needed to say something different. Arriving home from convention in the evening of Saturday, I had little time to put a sermon together, so I went back in my vault to see if I had anything appropriate. I found a sermon from six years ago and started with that as my base. But with the Paris attacks on my mind, the old sermon morphed into something completely different, with nearly two-thirds of the words being new.
I know I already used my yearly allotment of Princess Bride references in sermons, but I was a little time-crunched this week after my homiletic plan changed, so I went back to the deep well that is one of my favorite movies. So imagine this scene: Inigo Montoya, the Spanish hired sword who helped kidnap Princess Buttercup, is losing his duel with the Man in Black. The fight has ranged all over the rocky terrain at the precipice of the Cliffs of Insanity. The two swordsmen had both begun left-handed, but have switched to their dominant hands when they recognized the masterful fencing of the other. Thrust. Parry. Riposte. The Man in Black acrobatically flips off the ruins. Inigo stares at him, clearly amazed: “Who are you?” he asks.
“No one of consequence,” replies the Man in Black.
“I must know,” pleads the Spaniard.
“Get used to disappointment.”
The fight continues, only to end a minute later with an increasingly flustered Inigo receiving a knock to the back of the head. And I’m sure the Man in Black’s words rang in his mind.
Get used to disappointment. Sounds like quite sensible advice. Sounds like the Man in Black has been around the block a few times. Sounds like he knows something about the ways of the world. However, this worldly wisdom is often counterproductive to a life of faith. The Letter to the Hebrews urges us this morning to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for Christ who has promised is faithful.” In a world that teaches us to “get used to disappointment,” holding fast to our hope can be so very difficult.
Our inoculation begins at an early age. Children enter life with bright, wide eyes and unbounded, unfettered imaginations. Every couch cushion is a stone in a castle under siege by the invading hordes who desire nothing more than to pillage the kingdom. Every bath is a deep-sea expedition to find the lost city of Atlantis. Every day is another chance to see a unicorn. But before long, we start getting used to disappointment. We are told that couch cushions are for sitting, baths are for bathing, and there’s no such thing as unicorns.
I remember my mother shouting: “Young man, there are no dinosaur bones in the backyard. Stop digging up my flowerbeds.” But what she didn’t know was that my imagination was equipped with ground-penetrating sonar and that there was an intact velociraptor skeleton just beneath the gardenias. It was the find of the century. Any moment, Richard Attenborough was going to land in a helicopter and whisk me off to Jurassic Park.
But in the grand scheme of things, from the moment we are born, our imaginations do nothing but shrink as our understanding of so-called reality grows. The trouble is that hope exists in the imagination’s ability to frustrate the enclosing nature of the “real” world. We are made in the image of God; therefore, our imagination connects us to the creative spark of our Creator within each of us. And hope resides in this spark. As mounting disappointment attempts to snuff out our imaginations, we encounter great difficulty in accessing the hope, which our Creator installed in us.
This disappointment comes in both the mundane and the catastrophic. First the mundane: another chance for promotion and you’re passed over. A promising new relationships ends abruptly – and you thought it had been going so well. The new water heater has inferior parts and you have to jury-rig what should be a simply installation. Each of us has such mundane disappointments, setbacks, and frustrations all the time. They sap our vitality. And they obscure our hope.
Then there are those catastrophes that make hope seem silly and microscopic in comparison. A parent dies; or a child. A missed payment turns into two and three and the landslide has started and before you know it you’re out on the street with nowhere to live. A war rips through your town and the next day you’re a refugee fleeing the violence. A terrorist attacks ignites the Parisian sky with explosions and gunfire and litters the ground with the slain bodies of the innocent.
How can hope possibly compete with this twin barrage of mundane disappointment and heartbreaking catastrophe? Shouldn’t we, as the Man in Black suggests, get used to such things? They seem to be the natural order, after all. Shouldn’t we just get used to disappointment?
No.
No – because we have been to the foot of the cross. No – because we have seen the ultimate disappointment that was the Savior of the World gasping for his final breath: betrayed, abandoned, mocked, hanging limp.
But that’s not the end of the story. The last vestige of hope was buried with Christ in the tomb. His hopeless friends then entombed themselves in their own hideout. But as Andy Dufresne reminds Red in another of my favorite moves, The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Such was proven true three days after the ultimate failure when the ultimate triumph changed everything. Hope rose from the tomb with Christ. Hope does not die. Hope might hide. Hope might be obscured or hard to find. But hope does not die.
The next day dawns. The catastrophe has still happened. The Parisian streets are still awash with innocent blood. But the next day still dawns. And the day after that. And the only thing that keeps those of us who remain alive and eating our breakfast and hugging our children – is hope. Hope does not die. Hope will never die.
And do you know why?
Because Christ who has promised is faithful. That’s the reason the Letter to the Hebrews gives. The writer states emphatically: “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for [Christ] who has promised is faithful.” We hold fast to hope not through the strength of our own faith, but through the surpassing faith of Christ, the same Christ who early on that Sunday morning simply would not break a promise to be with us always.
We do not manufacture our faith. Faith is not self-centered. Faith is God-centered. The confession of our hope proclaims that the reality of resurrection life exists, and that we will encounter its utter joy when we finally and fully enter God’s eternal presence.
We believe that this happens in the power of the resurrection when we pass from life through death to new life. But the confession of our hope does not merely cast our thoughts to the life beyond death. Remember, hope exists in the imagination’s ability to frustrate the enclosing nature of the so-called “real” world. This real world is full of disappointments, frustrations, and, yes, catastrophes.
But God has blessed us with hope-fueled imaginations. God has blessed us with the mission, as Hebrews says, “to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” God has blessed us with the resources to feed and clothe everyone in this world. God has blessed us with the patience and love to stand together against terror and senseless violence. We must only provide the will. We must set our disappointments in the context of the hope that God’s own faith makes real in our lives.
When we were children, the magical words “Once upon a time” lost their luster when we heard their counterparts: “Sweetheart, it’s only make-believe.” But I say to you that we have the opportunity, we have the imagination, we have the will to change this world for the better. Because God keeps God’s promises, we are able to keep our promises. We are able to make a difference in people’s lives. Get used to disappointment? Not a chance – because hope is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies.
(Sermon for November 15, 2009 ||Proper 28, Year B, RCL || 1 Samuel 1:4-20; Hebrews 10:11-25)
Inigo Montoya, the Spanish hired sword who helped kidnap Princess Buttercup, is losing his duel with the Man in Black. The fight has ranged all over the rocky terrain at the precipice of the Cliffs of Insanity. The two swordsmen had both begun left-handed, but have switched to their dominant hands when they recognized the masterful fencing of the other. Thrust. Parry. Riposte. The Man in Black acrobatically flips off the ruins. Inigo stares at him, clearly amazed: “Who are you?” he asks.
“No one of consequence,” replies the Man in Black.
“I must know,” pleads the Spaniard.
“Get used to disappointment.”
The fight continues, only to end a minute later with an increasingly flustered Inigo receiving a knock to the back of the head. And the Man in Black sprints off to track down the title character of The Princess Bride.
Get used to disappointment. Sounds like quite sensible advice. Sounds like the Man in Black has been around the block a few times. Sounds like he knows something about the ways of the world. However, this worldly wisdom is often counterproductive to a life of faith. The Letter to the Hebrews urges us this morning to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.” In a world that teaches us to “get used to disappointment,” holding fast to our hope can be so very difficult.
Our inoculation begins at an early age. Children enter life with bright, wide eyes and unbounded, unfettered imaginations. Every couch cushion is a stone in a castle under siege by the invading hordes who desire nothing more than to pillage your kingdom. Every bath is a deep-sea expedition to find the lost city of Atlantis. Every day is another chance to see a unicorn. But before long, we start getting used to disappointment. We are told that couch cushions are for sitting, baths are for bathing, and there’s no such thing as unicorns.
I remember my mother shouting: “Young man, there are no dinosaur bones in the backyard. Stop digging up my flowerbeds.”But what she didn’t know was that my imagination was equipped with ground-penetrating sonar and that there was an intact velociraptor skeleton just underneath the gardenias. It was the find of the century. Any moment, Richard Attenborough was going to land in a helicopter and whisk me off to Jurassic Park. (I don’t mean to rag on my mother – she always cultivated her children’s imaginations as long as we left her flowers alone.)
But in the grand scheme of things, from the moment we are born, our imaginations do nothing but shrink as our understanding of so-called reality grows. Only a few people make it to the major leagues or become astronauts or famous singers. But children always start out dreaming about these things. Do you know anyone at age six who wanted to be a CPA?
As we get used to disappointment, our ability to imagine new worlds wanes. The trouble is that hope exists in the imagination’s ability to frustrate the enclosing nature of the so-called “real” world. We are made in the image of God; therefore, our imagination connects us to the creative spark of our Creator within each of us. And hope resides in this spark. As mounting disappointment attempts to snuff out our imaginations, we encounter great difficulty in accessing the hope, which our Creator installed in us.
In this morning’s lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, Hannah has gotten used to disappointment. She has no children, and her husband’s other, very fertile wife, provokes her on this account. Every year, when the family goes up to the house of the Lord to sacrifice, Hannah weeps and does not eat because of her situation, which is made all the more humiliating by Penninah’s taunting.
But Hannah does not let her disappointment snuff out the hope she has in the Lord. Hannah goes to the temple and asks God to remember her. She pours out her soul before the Lord. She prays so fervently that Eli, the priest, supposes she’s drunk. But no: Hannah is only anxious and vexed. She still believes that God continues to be present in her life, despite the worthlessness, which the world tells her she should be feeling. Hannah combats her own disappointment with the hope that she still has in God to act in her life. Soon God remembers Hannah. She bears a son named Samuel, and he grows up to be the prophet of the Lord.
Hannah’s devotion and perseverance serve as a model for the words of the Letter to the Hebrews. Hannah approaches God “with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” And she “hold[s] fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,” for she knows that “he who has promised is faithful.”
We, too, hold fast to the confession of our hope because he who has promised is faithful. Too often, we think that our faith in God needs to sustain us. We think that if we had been just a bit more faith, everything would turn out the way we want and there’d be no more disappointment. But our faith is a wavering, sporadic thing. If we had to feed on our faith alone, we would have starved long ago.
But Hebrews urges us to reorient our understanding of faith. Our wavering, sporadic faith in God pales in comparison with the ultimate reality that God is the faithful One. God keeps God’s promises. God is the rock upon which our disappointments shatter. We do not manufacture our faith. Faith is not self-centered. Faith is God-centered, and God invites us to step into the reality where our faith is as constant as God’s. The confession of our hope proclaims that this reality exists and that we will encounter its utter joy when we finally and fully enter God’s eternal presence.
We believe that this happens in the power of the resurrection when we pass from life through death to new life. But the confession of our hope does not merely cast our thoughts to the life beyond death. Remember, hope exists in the imagination’s ability to frustrate the enclosing nature of the so-called “real” world. This real world is full of disappointments, but it doesn’t have to be. While we may never find the lost city of Atlantis or see a unicorn, concrete disappointments, which may be better termed “crises,” abound in our world.
But God has blessed us with hope-fueled imaginations. God has blessed us with the mission, as Hebrews says, “to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” God has blessed us with the resources to feed and clothe everyone in this world. We must only provide the will. We must only get over our own disappointments and harness the hope that God’s own faith makes real in our lives.
When we were children, the magical words “Once upon a time” lost their luster when we heard their counterparts: “Sweetheart, it’s only make-believe.” But I say to you that we have the opportunity, we have the imagination, we have the will to change this world for the better. Because God keeps God’s promises, we are able to keep our promises. We are able to make a difference in people’s lives. We are able because God’s own faithfulness makes us believe.
Note: For the sermon at St. Mark’s on 11/15, I was planning to read the Bishop’s address to the Diocesan Annual Convention, which took place the same weekend. Then when the terrorist attack in Parish happened, I knew I needed to say something different. Arriving home from convention in the evening of Saturday, I had little time to put a sermon together, so I went back in my vault to see if I had anything appropriate. I found a sermon from six years ago and started with that as my base. But with the Paris attacks on my mind, the old sermon morphed into something completely different, with nearly two-thirds of the words being new.
Where the Wind... 