Text: I
Peter 3: 13-16
13Now who will harm you if you
are eager to do what is good? 14But even if you do suffer for doing
what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be
intimidated, 15but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be
ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the
hope that is in you; 16yet do it with gentleness and reverence.
Ashley
Smith had every reason to give up hope.
Nine years ago Brian Nichols forced his way into her apartment after
murdering four people in an Atlanta courthouse and then he held this young
woman hostage for the next seven hours.
He told her that he had lost all hope. “Look into my eyes,” he
reportedly said, "and you’ll see I’m a dead man already.” But Ashley Smith looked into those eyes, deep
and dark as tombs, and told this desperate soul that she saw hope for him. Can
you imagine? He could not. He could not imagine
a hopeful outcome. So he demanded—I’ll use the language of today’s
scripture—“an accounting for the hope that was in [her].” And she gave her
account, with a theological vocabulary you and I might not use, but with a
gentleness and respect today’s scripture commends. The hope she claimed in the midst of fear she
then offered to one who was utterly hopeless.
And
the pattern of violence ended there. He
called her "an angel sent from God." I
offer Ashley Smith as a modern example of Christian hope that transforms fear
into love and fosters spiritual imagination.
I’ve
been trying to recall if anyone has ever demanded that I “account for the hope
that is in me.” I admit no one has ever
literally said: “Wow, Ellen, what’s your secret? How is it that you seem—even during the tough
times—so darn hopeful?” Yet I look out
at you and see folks who regained hope after great disappointments, found
hope despite rejection by family or friends or church, lived hope even when
disheartened by world events or personal struggles. We as a congregation demonstrate hope
by starting a progressive Christian communion in a conservative culture
and at a time when church going is in steep decline.
1
Peter has sometimes been called the Epistle of Hope. Whereas Paul sums up the gospel with the word
grace, the writer of 1 Peter encapsulates all the good news in that tiny
word hope. Resurrection hope of
which this epistle speaks sees beyond graves and dead ends to resurrections and
possibilities. Hope happens as the
Spirit dances out ahead of us, beckoning us forward. Hope is that capacity, even when we have no
hope, to long for hope at least and to be sustained enough in that
longing until real hope can arrive once more, to at least sing the hopeful tune
if we haven’t the words, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. Hope is rooted in the recognition that you
and I are not God; that is, we are not the sum total of life’s goodness and worth,
that for all our value, there is more, there is always more beyond us but
connected to us and supporting us. The companion
of this kind of hope is imagination, which works alongside our best dreams to
show us the world as God might see it.
Let me illustrate the role of imagination in support of hope.
IMAGINATION
AND HOPE
Years
ago my mother-in-law gave my husband a waffle iron for his birthday. George hadn’t requested such a gift. He hadn’t realized he needed it. But new culinary possibilities opened up for
our family with this simple gadget, and it thrilled our daughter, then about
4-years-old. Soon we developed a family
tradition of having waffles for supper on Sunday evenings. On that first evening when we sat down to
plates of piping hot waffles dripping with melting butter and maple syrup,
Georgia prayed this blessing: “Thank
you, God, for giving Gran a brain to know we needed a waffle maker.” It was
such an odd way of expressing her thanks that I’ve remembered it all these
years. And I think she was on to
something. What she was realizing is
that our gift of the waffle maker came from her grandmother’s
gift of imagination. Her grandmother had
to imagine a new good thing for us, a new way for us to have Sunday night
suppers, a new paradigm that, from Georgia’s perspective, eliminated vegetables
entirely from the dinner table. She was
saying, “Thank you, God, for giving Gran the gift of imagination. Thank you that Gran was able to imagine
something new and good for us.”
Jesus
was the ultimate paradigm shifter who confounded expectations and brought new
life out of death and imagined a new way.
The table spread before us offers a new kind of sustenance that is
imaginatively hopeful. It defies
expectations. Rather than being trapped
in our routines of meat and vegetables for supper, why not have waffles? Rather than being locked in unhealthy
patterns of relating to others, why not experience forgiving forms of
community? Rather than pursuing
fruitless goals, why not see the full array of possibilities for our
lives? Jesus opens up an imaginatively
hopeful way.
WHAT HOPE IS
NOT
I
want to suggest how we can live out that hope.
But first let me insist we do not live hopefully through denial. Hope is
not about feigning a positive attitude with a superficial smile, something my
Southern upbringing instilled and I’m trying to unlearn. Cheerfulness, in the
face of suffering, is sickness. Dietrich
Bonhoffer coined the phrase cheap grace; I offer the term “cheap hope” to distinguish
a romanticized optimism that overlooks human suffering from a deep hope that
straightforwardly faces suffering and then grows deeper by seeing God’s
transforming presence in the midst of suffering. Rather than a phony or “cheap hope,” deep
hope goes all the way to the grave—and then beyond. Deep hope is a lens on life that does not
block out the ugly but expands the line of vision in such a way that all is
seen in proper perspective. And out on
that horizon that Hope permits us to see—is the dawn of resurrection.
Fear,
of course, is what threatens Hope. That
is why biblical angels say “fear not” before bringing words of hope to
shepherds or virgins or women visiting empty tombs. "Fear not" is what modern angels tell men
who’ve already murdered. By resisting fear, Ashley Smith was able to become an
angel to Brian Nichols. By using hope to
dispel fear, we are able to love.
DEEP HOPE
Deep
hope is what poet May Sarton captures in her poem entitled “AIDS.” Writing during the worst of the AIDS epidemic
in the late 1980s, Sarton bore witness to the physical devastation of the
disease as well as the emotional despair as family and friends abandoned
HIV-AIDS victims and society in general damned the diseased and persecuted the
sufferers. This poem offers a poignant
image of one friend regularly giving his dying friend or lover his nightly shot of
morphine. But Sarton’s poem, which
you’ll hear in a moment, also testifies to the transforming power of hope that
stretches people to move beyond fear into an imaginative kind of love to
receive a new grace. Thus, “we are blest”—echoing
I Peter’s phrase “you are blessed”—even though we suffer.
“AIDS”
We
are stretched to meet a new dimension
Of
love, a more demanding range
Where
despair and hope must intertwine.
How
grow to meet it? Intention
Here
can neither move nor change
The
raw truth. Death is on the line.
It
comes to separate and estrange
Lover
from lover in some reckless design.
Where
do we go from here?
Fear. Fear.
Fear. Fear.
Our
world has never been more stark
Or
more in peril.
It
is very lonely now in the dark.
Lonely
and sterile.
And
yet in the simple turn of a head
Mercy
lives. I heard it when someone said
“I
must go now to a dying friend.
Every
night at nine I tuck him into bed,
And
give him a shot of morphine.”
And
added, “I go where I have never been.”
I
saw he meant into a new discipline he
had
not imagined before, and a new grace.
Every
day now we meet face to face.
Every
day now devotion is the test.
Through
the long hours, the hard, caring nights
We
are forging a new union. We are blest.
As
closed hands open to each other
Closed
lives open to strange tenderness.
We
are learning the hard way how to mother.
Who
says it is easy? But we have the power.
I
watch the faces deepen all around me.
It
is the time of change, the saving hour.
The
word is not fear, the word we live.
But
an old word suddenly made new,
As
we learn it again, as we bring it alive:
Love. Love.
Love. Love.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HOPE
The consequence of living hopefully is that love,
not fear, rules our lives, and this transformation will so startle others
they’ll demand to know the reason for our hope.
Christian witness is simply living hopefully, not debating antagonistically. We are not told to shove Jesus down someone’s
throat. Listen once more to our central
verse and don’t miss its final phrase: “Always be ready to make your defense to
anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do
it with gentleness and reverence” or, as others render the last phrase, “with meekness
and respect.” We are not told WHAT to
say, in accounting for our hope, but HOW to explain why we have hope: respectful
of another’s faith perspective, humble about our own. We are challenged to imagine and prepare our
response in case we are asked. Each of
us has a different story that can be shared about hope we have found in this
place, perhaps, and among these people and through our Resurrecting God. Whatever our explanation for our hope, we
should respond respectfully to those of a different version of our faith, or of
other faiths, or of little faith—or people no faith. But primarily we are simply to live in such a
way that hope itself becomes a compelling witness. Our hope during adversity will attract
attention —and produce a new kind of love that will change us and others.
Death
IS on the line. The gay community Sarton
paid poetic tribute to faced and still faces suffering and persecution—as we’ve
heard today from our friends at UCC Pensacola.
Death WAS on the line. The
recipients of the letter we call I Peter risked deadly persecution when they
were baptized. Death is CONTINUALLY on
the line for us: the death of relationships, of self-images, of the world as we
have known it. But God’s hope can
enlarge our imaginations, break open constraining prejudices and
self-perceptions, rewrite the stories of our lives. The world will be astonished to see this work
of Jesus the Christ in us. We, an Easter
people, will face suffering, our own and that of others, but DEEP HOPE
can move us from fear to love.
We
can cultivate a holy imagination to see that a man who has just been on
a shooting rampage in an Atlanta courthouse--a man who has just invaded a home
and taken a new victim--is nevertheless a man capable of relinquishing
violence. No one else thought that
event could have ended without more bloodshed. Only deep hope could have planted that
possibility in the imagination of a young woman—at a time when Death was on the
line. Many likewise doubt that the
Church will survive. Only a new discipline of imagination can take us through
the “hard caring nights” into a "new union" we might still call church.
PRAYER
Thank you, God, for giving Ashley
Smith a brain to know that a desperate man needed a word of hope. Thank you, God, for giving us brains and
spirits to imagine something beyond suffering, something deeply hopeful that
moves us past fear all the way to love, something past me all the way to the
More. Amen
