A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

November 23, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Hope Factor

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 108
1 Samuel 23:1–7
Revelation 1:4–8

Most gracious God, you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Come among us now in the power and glory of your word.
Amid the competing and conflicting claims for our loyalties and attention,
may we turn to you now and say with humble and grace-filled hearts,
“Our ears are open and our lives are yours,” for the sake of Christ. Amen

I once heard a father tell of a trip his family took to the North Carolina seashore. This was some years ago, before the days of television sets in automobiles, DVD players and earphones, and that sort of thing. Then, all you had to get you down the highway were endless renditions of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and fierce arguments over who crossed whose sacred line in that unending war over space in the backseat. I think my brother always won those arguments; he thinks I did.

My friend’s children were young and squirmy that late afternoon when they finally got away for their seashore vacation. As the drive wore on, the children became increasingly impatient with the pace of progress.

They began to ask, “When are we going to get there, Daddy? How much farther is it, Daddy? Please tell us when we are going to arrive.” On and on it went, until finally the father had had enough.

“Hush up,” he said. “We’ll get there when we get there. I do not want to hear another word.”

For a number of miles, not a word was spoken, until finally out of the silence a pitiful little voice from the backseat was heard to ask, “Daddy, how old will I be when we get there?”

This is exactly the kind of question that I would like to pose to John of Patmos. “How old will the world be when it sees the final triumph of God over all the unruly powers of the earth? When exactly will suffering and injustice end and the reign of righteousness and peace and love prevail?

Two thousand years ago, John of Patmos wrote as if the world were already basking in the light of the full, complete reign of God. And yet on the basis of objective evidence, his claims did not make a bit of sense. “Jesus is the ruler of the kings of the earth,” John announces, even as he, himself, is being held a political prisoner by the Roman Empire. The members of the seven little Christian communities across Asia Minor to whom he is writing were beleaguered, persecuted, and in danger of being put to death for the sake of their faith. And yet John invites them to live every day as if it were Thanksgiving Day. Freedom in Christ, the reality of his reign, the promise of his return, and the fullness of time—it is all as if it has happened already.

How can he get his timing so confused? How can we make the claim that Christ’s great kingdom already has come among us? How can we make the claim in such a way that we avoid the kind of literalism that expects Armageddon any moment—and looks forward to it, as a matter of fact? Some people actually look forward to ultimate destruction and disaster: it will be so wonderful when the world ends, and the moon turns to blood, and so on and so forth (Acts 2:20).

How can we avoid that kind of literalism and its sister danger, triumphalism? Triumphalism not only perverts the whole thrust of the reign of God, which is towards kindness and tenderness and strength from within, as opposed to triumph from above, but it also fails to take seriously the religious pluralism of our age.(1)

Today is a strange Sunday. It is designated on the liturgical calendar as Christ the King Sunday, an occasion that invites reflection upon some of the most serious questions one can imagine. Who is in charge of human history? Who is Lord of the world? What is the true nature of power?

John’s answer is clear: “God and God alone is the Alpha and the Omega.” He uses the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet to express the totality of God’s sovereignty. “God is in charge of everything,” John seems to maintain. And yet it appears to be just the opposite, doesn’t it? Two thousand years ago, and certainly today, the world appears to be dominated by purposes other than God’s great purposes. It appears to be ruled by rulers who are not God.

The newspapers suggest there are plenty of people who are in charge of things. Tony Blair and George Bush met in London this week. They are leaders with enormous power. Arial Sharon, Jacques Chirac are leading officials in the world of politics and the civic order. Aren’t they and others like them the ones in the driver’s seat? And if they are not, there are still forces loose in the world over which God seems to have no control. Economic forces continue to deepen the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Religious forces drive wedges between people and civilizations and are used to justify all manner of prejudice and destruction. The forces of violence strike anywhere at anytime. People were going about their business in downtown Istanbul this week and then truck bomb explosions there killed and injured hundreds—bankers, secretaries, mothers and fathers. The war in Iraq continues. We live in a world in which anything could happen, and what we expect anymore is not much that is good.

One thinks of the words of the nineteenth-century poet and critic Matthew Arnold. He wrote, . .

for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.(2)

Without doubt, there are forces loose in the world that are contrary to the great purposes of God, and they have a lot of power. To say otherwise is to be in massive denial, but to say that there are only negative forces at work in the world is to miss the most important part of the story that faith has to tell. It is to miss the part that is about hope and the work of redemption that God has already begun and continues even now, in spite of evidence to the contrary.(3) This work God will surely finish, because God alone is God.

I love this definition of the word almighty: “Almighty” is not about triumph and victory; it is about capability. When we say, “Almighty God,” we are naming the One who is “totally capable” of bringing about what has been promised.(4)

On the one hand, it seems ridiculous to make such claims—to say that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” that he was Lord in the beginning, that he will be Lord at the end, and even now he is Lord. But this is exactly the message of the New Testament, from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew until the last words of the Book of Revelation. There is not a second of time that is immune to the influx of God’s grace and power to transform and redeem.(5)

For my birthday in October, our daughter, Elizabeth, gave me a present I am trying to adjust to. It’s a Palm Pilot, and I’m just not sure I have the capacity to master its use. I have plugged it in and powered it up. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I like the concept, though. I like the idea that I can hold in my hand a little instrument and see on its screen my weekly calendar, my monthly calendar, my year ahead. Where will I be, and what will I be doing? All the answers could be mine if I could only figure out how to use it.

That Palm Pilot has gotten me to thinking about the “Big Screen”—not the tiny screen that tells me about my little life, but the big screen that John of Patmos reveals through his vision. Look at that great picture! We are dealing here not with a diminutive God, but a God who reigns over the entire cosmos. There is not a corner of creation from which God is or will ever be absent, no place where God will not be working out the purposes of salvation and redemption, peace, justice, and reconciliation.

“God is all powerful.” That is the claim John of Patmos makes. But be careful to note the nature of the power. “Jesus Christ is the faithful witness,” he says, which means that if you want to know what God is like, there is one place to look, and that is at Jesus Christ. What was the nature of his power? You see it most clearly, not when he sits upon a throne, but when he hangs upon the cross. Christ is the King who gives himself, his entire life, as a ransom for many. He shows us the power of suffering love. He shows us power that is different from the power that the world understands. It is the power of tenderness, patience, and solidarity with the outcast and the broken.

One day, Pilate, who certainly appeared to be in charge of things, asked Jesus if he were a king. “That is what you say,” Jesus answered. But then he added, “Yes, I am a king, but I am a king not from this world.” My power is different. My power is the power of love, the power of suffering love (John 18:33–37). Jesus Christ, “the faithful witness,” the one who reveals the true nature of God.

He is the one who is also the firstborn of the dead, indicating that there will be more who will be reborn, who will be lifted from all that is limiting and broken in this world. I think that there can be no more heartening thought than the thought of resurrection—that the limits of our bodies, of our earthly life, of our earthly systems, of even death itself, none of it will have the last word. God will have the last word.

Even the rulers of the world will one day discover that they too are answerable to a higher power.

Several years ago, I attended a conference at which a social ethicist spoke. In the course of his lecture, he talked of the moral tradition of the Judeo-Christian faith. During the question-and-answer period afterward, someone who obviously possessed a disdain for the Judeo-Christian tradition stood up and asked, “How could a moldy old book like the Bible have anything helpful to say to modern society?”

Without missing a beat, the distinguished lecturer answered, “In the Bible, every time the people neglected the needs of the widow and the orphan, every time they abused the strangers, the outsiders in their midst, sooner or later the society crumbled.” You could have heard a pin drop that day. The ethicist was simply reminding his audience that as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “God has bent the world toward justice.” We live against the ways of God to the peril of the civilization of which we are a part.

I think about our country on the eve on Thanksgiving. Many in America have struggled in recent years with losses in the stock market and with unemployment, and yet it is also true that the United States of America remains the richest nation the world has ever known—relatively richer, in fact, than even the Roman Empire. As we prepare to sit down at the table of bounty this week, we will want to remember that 35 million Americans live below the poverty level and that more than 4 million children subsist on what is described as the extreme poverty level, which means they are part of a family whose entire income is less that $6,500.(6) Can you imagine trying to keep a roof over your head or food in your children’s stomach if your income were $6,500?

This kind of thing won’t work, because God, the Alpha and the Omega, is in the driver’s seat. God has set the direction in which the world ought to go. It also won’t work because Jesus did not come to whisk us away from this world so that we could live in some paradise where the streets are paved with gold. He himself said that he had come to set the world right. He stood in the synagogue in Nazareth and said, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. I have come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:16–19).

That’s the plan. That always has been the plan, and that will always be the plan. In the meantime, we have challenges to meet, you and I, while we wait for the final fulfillment of God’s plan. We have to choose what screen we are going to live by—the big one or the little one. We have to choose whether the only people we are going to care about are ourselves and our families. Do only our own needs really matter to us, or are we going to take the long view and dedicate ourselves, our energies, and our lives to bearing witness to that which is beautiful and compelling and which is out there waiting for us in the future?

It is hard to make a big screen your witness today. It is hard to remain hopeful when everything seems to be moving in directions that are opposite from where God wants to take the world. Wars are raging. Injustice continues, unabated.

I read the other day about a captain of a boat that became shrouded in fog. He said to his crew, “I think we are done for. It’s all over.” He left the helm of the boat and went to lie down in his bunk. One of his crew members found him below and said, “Captain, we’ve decided that you might be done for, but we are not. We are going to keep on sailing, because we know that we can get through this passage somehow.”(7)

When you have seen that God is going to win, when you believe that with all your heart, then you can endure any setback. You keep going. You keep going forward in hope.

I don’t want to lay this on you, but a lot depends upon which team you choose: the team that gives up, or the team that tries. I think whether you are hopeful or not determines whether you have any fun in this life. Hopeful people laugh a lot and sing a lot and are less prone to take failures and successes too seriously, because they know that the final outcome depends not upon themselves, but upon someone beyond and greater than themselves.(8)

I love these glad lines written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
Going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
It has its inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are.(9)

Are we citizens of the kingdom of God? Indeed we are. Does it look as if we are? Hard to tell, unless you keep your eye on the light toward which God is drawing us and pulling us. Hard to tell, unless we keep our eyes on the brightness, the completeness, the peace, that is promised.

Some people read the passage that we read earlier and start looking for Jesus literally to descend among the clouds. You can have that expectation if you like, but I find the much deeper and richer meaning to be that God is present with us. The biblical image of clouds has always represented the presence of God.(10) Not only was God with us in Jesus Christ, in Bethlehem, in Galilee, but God is with us now. Christ is coming. He will live wherever we live out our calling to be loving and just “prophets of a future not our own,” to use Oscar Romero’s beautiful words.

I think of the line from one Billie Holiday’s great songs, entitled “Crazy, He Calls Me.” Here’s the line: “The difficult, I’ll do now. . . . The impossible might take a while.” Now we try, assuming all the while that God is doing what now seems impossible to us.

No one ever said the journey would be short or that we wouldn’t wish that we were there already. But we never give up, because God never gives up. We work for the day when, as poet Seamus Heaney puts it,

The longed for tidal wave of justice rises up,
and hope and history rhyme.(11)

I close with this. One night, not long ago, a group of good people, just like you, decided to set up a soup line out in Los Angeles. They drove into the city from their church and served bread and soup and a cup of cold water to hundreds and hundreds of people until they ran out of just about everything except salt and pepper. As they were packing up, a family with two small children came running toward them, out of breath. The father called out, “Are we too late?” The servers scraped up enough soup from the bottom of the pot to fill up two small bowls. It was barely enough.(12)

Here is the answer to the question “Are we too late?” No. It’s never too late, because the reign of God just keeps coming and coming, until the time, God knows when, the work of redemption will be complete.

Here’s the promise: God’s steadfast love endures forever, and God’s faithfulness to all generations. Let’s keep on, not just feeling hope in our hearts, but living that for which we hope. It is the hope factor that makes all the difference in the world.

Amen.

Notes
1. Diana L. Eck, Encountering God (Beacon Press, 1993).
2. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” The New Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 703.
3. Marva Dawn, Joy in Our Weakness (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), p. 13.
4. Ibid., p. 37.
5. William H. Willimon, Pulpit Resource, October–December 2000, p. 37.
6. Joseph C. Haugh, “The Jesus Code.” A sermon preached at Riverside Church, New York City, and printed in the newsletter of Protestants for the Common Good, 11 November 2003.
7. Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 320.
8. Ibid., p. 325.
9. Selected Poems of Ranier Maria Rilke (HarperCollins, 1981). Translated by Robert Bly and quoted in Soul of a Citizen.
10. Ibid., Dawn, p. 36.
11. As quoted by Loeb
12. “Lessons from Los Angeles,” Hospitality (the newsletter of the Open Door, Atlanta, Ga.) November–December 2003.