In What do you Hope?
By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Interim Rector
In what do you hope?
As an English major, I believe grammar matters, and grammar especially matters here. I did not ask the more common question, the more expected one—for what do you hope. A lot of people are asking that question at this time of the year, and most of them are working at the mall selling something.
But in church we ask instead a harder question, a more complex one—in what do you hope. What is the ground of your hope? The basis for it? What allows you to have hope?
Paul’s epistle to the Romans this morning answers that question. And his answer is not what we might expect.
You have to dig a little bit to get at it. Paul tends to write these long, elliptical sentences that capture elaborate, looping, thoughts, and that’s what he’s doing here, too. It takes him a while to work up to his point. He starts off talking about scripture—by which he means the Old Testament, which was the scripture for anyone who first followed Jesus—and he says that scripture was written for “steadfastness” and “encouragement,” that these qualities enable hope. Sounds pretty straightforward.
But then Paul pokes it at a little more. He suggests that the whole point of that encouragement is not to help you, or to help me, or to help any one of us. The purpose of scripture is not the creation of individual hope, but something more profound: it is so that we might live in harmony with one another, that the followers of Jesus might have one voice.
And then he finally gets to what he really wants to say—the conclusion that he’s been building toward: “Welcome one another . . . just as Christ has welcomed you.” Welcome one another. That’s his real answer to the question of how hope works; that’s his understanding of where hope is grounded, where it comes from. We are able to hope because of Jesus Christ, of course. But not just because of Jesus. We are able to hope because of the way we have known Jesus in one another. Hope exists not just for one person, but for and because of a people all together.
Paul’s spends a lot of time talking about this point at the end of the letter to the Romans, about the necessity of community for salvation. If you read before and after what we heard today, you’ll find it all over the place. Let us resolve never to be a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of one another. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. But here in chapter 15, verse 7, Paul is at his most explicit. If we are to have hope in this world, we have hope because Christ has shown it to us through one another. We need to one another to see Christ. And we need to see Christ so desperately, don’t we?
This idea is maybe a strange pairing with our gospel this week, a gospel that talks about John the Baptist coming after the brood of vipers. Welcoming one another seems a bit incongruous when we are also hearing how lousy we really are. It seems kind of crazy that God would make salvation dependent on this broken, messed up pool of human beings. And it seems even crazier that we could look at one another in all our brokenness and messed-up-ness and know anything other than despair. But Paul doesn’t seem to think so. Paul insists that we are the source of one another’s hope. Paul insists that it is in the face of our neighbor that we have any glimpse of the promises God makes to us.
There is no question that welcoming one another is challenging, of course. I am willing to be that every single person in this room can name someone who pushes his or her buttons. Who gets under your skin. Who knows just how to hurt you. Who has hurt you. And I am willing to bet that those people keep showing up in your life. Maybe they keep showing up in this room. It is really, really hard to think about welcoming them.
The thing is, it was hard 2,000 years ago, too. There is this tendency to think that no people have ever struggled like we struggle, but history tells us that the early church just had all the same fights we had today. Broods of vipers have been around for a long time. The human story is a long account of people who lie to one another, and cheat on one another, and deceive one another, and who get caught in pettiness and nastiness and half truths. And yet Paul reminds us that we get saved together or not at all. We cannot know the welcome of Jesus without knowing the welcome of our neighbor. We cannot see Jesus without seeing our neighbor. And whatever hope we have is grounded in that.
The best way I can explain this phenomenon is to tell you about my second year in seminary, which was a really rotten year. It was 2001, and the country was reeling from the attacks of September 11. Our seminary dean was accused of financial misconduct, and there was talk of losing our affiliation with the university and our accreditation. The community was imploding. People were rushing to takes sides before they even figured out what sides there were to take. And, of course, this happened against the wallpaper of dense and regrettably academic lectures on theology and scripture.
I was writing a paper on hope and, honestly, it made no sense to me. I was reading theologians with German names and putting in footnotes wherever I could, but I was learning nothing.
Except, there was Jackie. Jackie was not a professor. She was the 70-something receptionist who sat at the seminary’s front desk every day and who asked how I was and who remembered my husband’s name, who was never grumpy back even if I was grumpy first. She welcomed me. And it was in her daily greeting that I learned what it was to be welcomed.
And it was from her welcome that I realized that maybe others desperately needed that same welcome, too. It was because she did not judge me that I began to realize that my professors and classmates maybe didn’t need judgment, either. That maybe we would do better by cutting each other some slack, or maybe even showing each other some compassion.
Jackie was not what I hoped for. But she made me realize what I hoped in. I hoped in Christ. And I would only see Christ if I looked into the longing, scared faces all around me.
Brothers and sisters, Christ has welcomed you. What would it mean to welcome one another? What might you lose? What might you have to lay down? What would be hard? What would give you life?
I’m not sure what we are all hoping for. But I know what we are hoping in. We hope in Christ, Christ as he is revealed in this body broken, here, in the place. And so, with Paul, I urge you to give one another the gift of Christ, which is another way to say, give one another the gift of yourselves, the gift of your open hearts.
Christmas Eve Service
December 24, 2016 by Elaine Horsfield • sermons • Tags: Anne, Bridge Interim Rector, Turner •
By The Rev. Anne Michele Turner, Bridge Rector
O come let us adore him. So we sing, this night. Come let us adore him. I want us to think together, for just a minute, about what we mean when we sing that: adore him.
Most of us have heard Luke’s gospel so many times that it dangerously familiar. But forget the poinsettias and the evergreens, if you can, and listen to what this story is talking about. It is about ordinary people displaced by political maneuvering. It is about an unwed mother. It is about a couple forced to spend the night in a shelter. It is about migrant workers. It is about religious and ethnic minorities in the middle of a vast empire. It is about where power and authority might really reside in an unstable and broken world.
Luke’s gospel begins by saying, “in those days”—but, honestly, we might say, “in these days.” This story did not only happen two thousand years ago. This is not only a story of the past, the story of Jesus’s birth. It is a story of the present. And the central question is just as urgent now as it was two thousand years ago. In the midst of all these competing claims for our loyalties, which one should win? Whom do you worship? Whom do you adore?
There is a lot of competition for our hearts. So many of the systems of this world want to co-opt our affections. Do you have a customer loyalty card somewhere in your wallet? Have you gotten on the mailing list for a major political party? If so, you know how it works. These systems are not necessarily evil and sometimes they are very ordinary but they are relentless in their pursuit. Give your attention to us, they say, in one way or another. Give your attention, and so give your identity, and so give your heart.
The gospel reminds us if we mean what we sing—if we come to adore Jesus—then we are defying all those other things. If we believe that story we just read—if we believe that God’s love for humanity is best shown by a baby born in poverty to two nobodies from a backwater town—then we are not going to fall for glossy ads or slick campaigns or partisan rhetoric. God is not shown in power but in weakness. And we will not be afraid to find him there, or to honor him there, or to love him there.
I can’t say that coming to church on Christmas Eve is exactly counter-cultural, although maybe it is more so than it used to be. In this part of the world, coming to church is an easy thing to do. But it is nonetheless a powerful thing. When you come to this place, on this night, you make a statement to yourself and to others about to whom your heart belongs and to whom it does not. And when you get on your knees and sing Silent Night, you are making it clear that you do not bow down before political power, and that you do not bow down before wealth. When we say that we come to adore Jesus, you and I, we say that we will not adore anyone less, and that our deepest loyalties are spoken for and are not for sale.
Most of us tonight will do something else that doesn’t exactly seem countercultural. We will feel joy. We will adore God, and then we will feel joy. We will leave this place with light hearts, I hope. I mean, it’s Christmas Eve, right? And yet this seemingly ordinary experience of sentiment is not remotely sentimental. It’s been said that joy is an act of resistance in the face of despair. It seems especially true on this night. We have so much to despair about, in the story then, and in our story now. Read the paper. Berlin. Aleppo. Unjust governments prosper. Bigotry thrives. Poverty persists. Moral indifference and human cowardice allows evil to flourish unchecked. Despair would make sense.
And yet we who adore Jesus know joy. We who come and lay our hearts down at Bethlehem are given peace—not because all is well in the world but because all is well with our souls, and with our God. In Jesus, we know a love stronger than hate, or evil, or death. And so, yes, we are joyful, persistently, even defiantly. We believe the good news. We do not have to be afraid, as the angels are always reminding us. It’s the first thing they always say.
What we do tonight is simple. But it might also be the most important thing we can do this night, or any night. We lay our hearts where they belong. And so we prepare ourselves to lay the rest of our lives where they belong, too. Because God has not just come to us here, of course. God has come to us here. And we prepare to honor and love him in all the places we encounter him.
Unto us a child us born, unto us a son is given. So, this night, all nights, in this place and in all places, come, let us adore him.