Hope -- A Truce With God

Hope – A Truce With God

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 1, 2014; 7 Easter, Year A

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11)  Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. 

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In our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the terror of the crucifixion is over. The resurrection is now real to them. It has been forty days since the disciples first sensed that Jesus still lived. Now, resurrection has become their new normal. Resurrection was so real to them that they described Christ’s presence with them in physical terms.

They are all together and they ask Christ the big question:  “So, now. Finally! Are you going to fix things?” Their first priority – When are you going to throw the Romans out and put the good guys back in charge? That’s what we want God to do. Stop the bad stuff; empower the good.

Jesus answers: “It is not for you to know.” Aggh. I hate that. Then Jesus tells them, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” Then Jesus leaves. For good.  That was about 2,000 years ago.

So we move forward a few decades, to the second reading from First Peter. Sounds like not much has changed for the good. “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” Fiery ordeal? I thought Jesus had overcome all of that “fiery ordeal” stuff with the resurrection – casting down death forever and inaugurating the new creation. But here we are years later and the Romans are still in charge and the little people are still going through fiery ordeals. What good is the resurrection anyway? What good is God, if nothing changes for the better?

You know how it is when someone writes what you’ve been thinking, only says it better than you could? That happened to me recently as I read Lonni Collins Pratt’s little book Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love. She’s lived through her own fiery ordeal, the six-month suffering from cancer that killed her first child before the baby’s first birthday. She says she’s got questions for God. Here’s how she frames some of it.

If I had it within my power to keep people from suffering with cancer, I would. If I could protect every child in the universe from abuse and neglect, I would. If I could feed every hungry person, bring justice to every injustice, I would. If my best friend had a brother she adored who was dying and suffering, and she asked me to heal him – if I had the power to do so, I would. No questions asked. No questions needed. I would do it because I love my friend. I would do it because it’s right. I would do it because cancer is a horrific disease. I would do it because I care – I care deeply.

Based on God’s track record, it appears that I am more loving than God. [i]

Have you ever felt that way? You might have had those thoughts repressed out of you by someone or some church that told you You can’t think that way. Well I can; and I do.

Lonni Pratt says that at times, doubt has driven a wedge in her relationship with God. She’s walked away, or tried to walk away. But she says her heart still yearns to believe, and her believer’s doubt leads her “back to God, deeper into God.” But in doing so, she’s had to give up some things she once believed about God. She finds she emerges from “the dark night of doubt battered, but clear-headed.” What she’s gained by doubting, is Hope.”  Here’s how she puts it:

Faith is a gift of God, a thing that overshadows us and chases us down. We do not find faith; it finds us. Hope is a choice to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that God is going to make sense of all of this insanity someday. Healing will come in the wings of God, a peace will cover the earth from shore to shore, and a thing so bright and beautiful will emerge that it will all have been worth it.

Faith crushes me sometimes, because I have found God to be maddening and inescapable. Hope is my response to this Divine Passion that chases me down when I run. Hope is the title of the truce between God and me.

“Hope is the title of the truce between God and me.”

How can you make sense of a horrible tragedy that happens to the innocent? Yet it happens thousands of times a day on this darkened earth. We can sound pretty silly saying something about knowing God’s will with one breath and then speaking of God’s unknowable mystery in the next? Maybe it’s more honest to surrender and admit that we don’t have a clue about what God is doing.

Lonni says this:  I have had to forgive God for being obscure and magnificently mystifying. I’ve come to realize that God is not intentionally baffling; it is not some part of the bigger plan that we find God inexplicable. There’s no big lesson in this state of God’s being. It is just the state of what is. All that godliness makes God completely other, completely unlike anything or anyone else, and beyond comprehension. In the twisting turns of my journey, I’ve learned that it is my ideas about God that need forgiving – my idea that God would protect me, God would heal people I love, God would grant me and mine special benefits, God would right the wrongs…

I believe God is good. I do not understand the goodness, though. I believe God loves, but it is a loving that in no way resembles my knowledge of loving. I cannot bring my knowledge or experience to this question of God and make sense of it. I hope in God’s love. I hope in God’s goodness. I don’t always comprehend the movements and presence of these realities in time and space, where I live.

Hospitality toward God has not come easy to me… I have had to make peace with God on the only terms that make any sense. Hope. I have lost all my ideas about God, but I hope in God more profoundly than ever before…

God, like any of us, insists on being accepted as is, even with the maddening obscurity, dark night of the soul, and rocks falling on innocent babies. Take it or leave it, but don’t paint it into a pretty picture, because it is anything but.

Welcoming God into my life is a daily exercise in faith and hope. When I extend hospitality to this baffling, enticing God, I also open myself to love the unlovable. To love God is to love the wild wind, the shaker of the universe, the fury of the stars, the broken child, the tortured captive; it is to find God where we don’t want to look and to walk where even devils flee. Can we really look up at the crossed beams on Good Friday and think otherwise?

As Christians, this is the God we receive. The bleeding one, misunderstood, judged, put into annihilation for nothing less than the truth. Like the long-ago disciples, we still look for the conquering God who sets up a kingdom among us. What we find is the God who suffers at our hands. Suffering may never make sense, but God is not indifferent. Christianity tells us that we do not suffer alone – God is present in our bleeding, aching, throbbing. We are not abandoned. Not forgotten. We are carved in the palm of God’s hand. We are unforgettable…

I have discovered a God I can joyfully welcome even though God is pure and absolute Stranger to me… the Divine who simultaneously bewilders and beguiles.

So the writer of First Peter tells his friends, “Don’t be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you…, as though something strange were happening to you… (Y)ou are sharing Christ’s sufferings…  Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” Remain steadfast, he says, “for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering.” Yet still, you can hope. Sure, “It’s not for you to know,” Jesus tells us. But we can hope.

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[i] Lonni Collins Pratt with Father Daniel Homan, OSB, Radical Hospitality, Benedict’s Way of Love, Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2011. The quotes throughout this sermon are from chapter 11, Calling a Truce – Hospitality Toward God.