May 8, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Thoughts of Hope

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116
Luke 24:13–35

“As they came near the village to which they were going,
he walked ahead as if he were going on.”

Luke 24:28 (NRSV)

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln
Second Inaugural Address

I encourage you, if you have not yet done so, to slow down as you walk past the church building today on the sidewalk of Delaware Place. A beautiful banner hangs there, covering our construction fence and letting our neighbors know what we’re up to inside this building, in between the banging and digging and crashing of our new construction project. Pictures and accompanying comments tell the story: 400 students in Tutoring, 600 children in Sunday School and 700 adults involved in the Academy for Faith and Life, 6,000 hot meals served and 9,000 bag lunches distributed every year, and the list goes on . . .

This morning, as we baptize eleven beautiful new children, it is hard not to notice how richly blessed we are and how fortunate that we are building for the future of these young people whom we have promised to raise in the faith. This is our story as a community of faith, and we do well to remember it.

There is another narrative present in our lives this week, though, which is impossible to ignore, a narrative that reminds us in the midst of our blessings that fear and terror often await us and that the good news we share with the world will always be in conversation with threats of fear that seek to darken our world. Often we would like to live in a world full of bright hopes and no threats, but real life is more complicated than that.

This past week, an example of the complex nature of our world hit home with me: In the past decade, I graduated from college and divinity school and became a minister; during the same period of time, a grade school classmate of mine went to the Naval Academy and now flies combat helicopters for the United States Marine Corps. Nick has honorably served our country in several tours in the Middle East. He might have been in Abbottabad last Monday. On a different day in a different set of circumstances, he might have died. Every few months, my mother comes to Chicago to hear me preach a sermon. Every few months for the length of my ministry, Nick’s mother, who lives just down the block from mine, sends her son back to war. It would be nice just to think about my mom this Mother’s Day. I find it hard not to think about Nick’s.

I did not want to preach about the death of Osama bin Laden this week. But I found that I could not be honest with you or with myself and not talk about it. Some of you might not have wanted me to preach about it either. The traffic on our Facebook page and in our email inboxes this week and some of the viewer commentary on TV demonstrates that many of us are ready for this story to go away. Well, go away it will, I can promise you that. Just as with the media onslaught of stories about blowout preventers or rising uranium levels, the media will soon find something to talk about other than the death of bin Laden. This too shall pass. In the meantime, I have watched the story and the blogging and the questions about what it all means evolve this week. I know that like me, many of you spent Sunday and Monday with an uneasy feeling about spontaneous celebrations in the street, with chants of “USA!” and shouts of “God bless America.” Those celebrations quickly seemed inappropriate. So we moved on to questions about proof of the death and the disposal of the body, while a story developed about the role or lack thereof by the Pakistani government and what that meant for ongoing instability in that political relationship. Countless sidebar stories developed, one right on top of the other, and as this event of unclear meaning and importance evolved in front of our eyes, we returned to thoughts that had not been so vivid since September 11, 2001: Will there be retaliation for this? Will we be attacked again? How long is this war going to last? And more broadly speaking: Am I safe? Are the people I love safe? Is it safe to live in this world?

There are no easy answers to these questions and to the question of why there must be so much evil and strife in the world and why so much of our time and energy and resources must be dedicated to the struggle against it. I have no easy answers for you. But in the midst of such a complicated set of circumstances, something occurred to me this week: living in this complicated world, it takes no particular wisdom or insight to be despondent or anxious or fearful. There is quite enough of that. So instead, I want to tell a different story than what many of us may be hearing on the news this week, a story that has something to do with climbing out of a pit of doubt and despair and finding a sense of hope for the future.

Today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke begins with two despondent disciples on a seven-mile walk to a village called Emmaus. One is named Cleopas. The other isn’t given a particular name, almost as if Luke wants us to see ourselves making our way down that quiet road at Cleopas’s side. They are despondent with good reason: they mourn the death of Jesus, their teacher and their friend. He had been everything to them. He had found them in places in their lives where they felt unsure and unfocused and fearful about the future, and he had taught them a new way to live. When Jesus was around, many of the things they were used to worrying about seemed to melt away. They couldn’t remember exactly why they had started following him, it happened one day almost by accident, but as they traveled with him visiting the sick and listening to him preach, feeding the hungry and watching him challenge the status quo, life made so much more sense than it ever had before. Things weren’t easy, but the disciples had the sense they were a part of something important, and for some reason they just weren’t as afraid as they used to be.

As quickly as following him had begun, it came to an end. There was an arrest and a trial and a crucifixion, and all of Jesus’ followers, all of their friends, had scattered, and all of their old fears crept right back into their lives. Now he was gone.

Walking along the road, sad and quiet in conversation as they mourned, the two travelers were joined by a third. He seemed nice enough but was a little strange for how clueless he was about the death of Jesus. He had somehow missed the mob scene in Jerusalem three days before, and so they told him what had happened. It is at that point that the stranger interrupts them. You can almost see them arrive at a crossroads when he stops and smiles and shakes his head at them and begins to tell them what he knows about Jesus. He tells them the kinds of things that Jesus used to say, he opens God’s truth to them as they walk along the road, and they begin to be curious about this man who has joined them.

I had never noticed, until writer Cynthia Jarvis pointed it out to me this week, what happens as these three travelers near the end of their walk. The story goes, “As they came near the village to which they were going [the stranger] walked ahead as if he were going on.” Jarvis notes, “Jesus leaves them free to continue on without him. . . . His love is such that we are always free to turn our backs upon him, close the door of our hearts against him, bolt our minds shut in fear of what inviting him in might involve” (Jarvis, Feasting on the Word, p. 423).

But these two men on the road don’t let him go. They were just curious enough that they stopped the stranger from walking away. Not knowing exactly why, they pleaded with him, “Stay with us.” And he went with them to supper.

At the table that night, he took bread and blessed it and broke it—the same way he had the night of his arrest—and their eyes were opened and they recognized him. They recognized suddenly that they were not in the presence of death; they were in the midst of life. And remembering what it had been like to live with him in the midst of his ministry, those days of healing and teaching and talking about all those things that mattered so much, they said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us while he was talking to us on the road,” while he was reminding us of those days back in Galilee…

That feeling they had, which, looking back, they described as a time when their hearts were burning within them, that feeling is not mentioned at all when they are walking on the road in the first place. But it’s my hunch that they did feel it. As they walked along the road with the Christ they did not recognize, there was just enough of a divine nudge that when they arrived at Emmaus, they knew not to let him continue on down the road. They thought perhaps the time for dwelling on the death of Jesus had passed and it was time to figure out how to live into the future, even in the midst of a world where there was still much to fear.

By the middle of this past week, I began to feel like we might be in such a place ourselves. In the midst of the ongoing media blitz around the death of bin Laden and all of the risks associated, I actually saw some of our more thoughtful journalists reminding us of signs of hope in a world that desperately needs it.

The Horn of Africa is regularly cited in the news as a dangerous place. A hotbed of piracy and ties to terrorist organizations, it might be considered one of the most unsafe places on the planet.

But today, a day when we are inclined to think about mothers, it is worth noting that the riskiest aspect of living in the Horn of Africa is not piracy or terrorism; it continues to be the lack of adequate health care. In fact, in this place where women have a one-in-ten lifetime risk of dying in childbirth, “just about the most dangerous thing a Somali woman can do” is to be an expectant mother.

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a story about a woman who has done much to change that. Edna Adan is a tireless seventy-three-year-old woman whose passion is to save the lives of women who live at risk in her country. Retired from a senior post with the United Nations, Edna sold her Mercedes and gave her life savings of $300,000 to build a maternity hospital on a garbage dump in the Horn of Africa. When money ran short to finish and fund the hospital, American women from Connecticut and Minnesota started a fund to make up the gap. “The hospital is modern and sterile and hums with efficiency.” So far, they have delivered 10,000 babies, some of them “after the woman was rushed to the hospital gate in a wheelbarrow.” In the midst of last week’s uninterrupted bin Laden coverage, Kristof, in his article, “Greatest Mother’s Day gift is to help women in need,” wrote these words: “We in journalism often focus on villains, but Edna is one of my heroes” (New York Times, 5 May 2011).

That’s Edna’s story, and we can support her. But what about us, here, in this place. What are we to do? We often feel so helpless against the complex struggles of our world. I sometimes feel a pervasive sense in our culture that since we can’t put a final and decisive end to the threats that exist all around us, some people believe that the least we can do is have the common human decency to be miserable. I think that’s just wrong.

This week I remembered once reading that in the midst of World War II, C. S. Lewis, who was a professor at Oxford University, gave a sermon to students who were wondering how they could justify continuing their studies while their peers were dying on the front lines in Europe. Lewis noted that whether we live in wartime or in peacetime, “human beings always live on the precipice of calamity,” and so we should be dedicated to good and decent life pursuits no matter what our circumstance. As for the study of art or biology, mathematics or literature, Lewis said that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered” (C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”). In other words, wherever we find ourselves, we have an opportunity to get up each morning and be witnesses for hope and life and the future of God’s world, and we must take on that task, because if we do not, there will be no one to answer the language of death and hate and revenge that threatens all around us. We must, when we feel that divine nudge along the Emmaus roads of our lives, we must plead with Jesus to stay with us and never let him continue down the road while we stay back and dwell on death. When we find that our hearts are burning within us, we must be witnesses to God’s gift of life.

One of the great privileges of ministry and a moment at which my heart always burns within me is when I hold a child in my arms for baptism. And my favorite part is walking down this center aisle so that you, the congregation, can see the child’s face and be reminded that our responsibility is to raise these children so that they know that they are loved and valued children of God. You are here to remind them that they need not be afraid and that death never has the last word, for God has given us all the gift of life.

That’s why that banner out on our sidewalk matters—those statistics about our Sunday School and our Tutoring program and our Academy for Faith and Life; meals that are served and lives that are touched and enriched by the miracle of God’s grace—in every one of those acts, we are witnesses to God’s light in a world that can often seem very dark. And you can be a witness to that same message in your own life, every single day.

My mentor and friend, the late William Placher, gave a commencement address in 1970 during which he reflected on what it meant to live in hope after years of war in Vietnam. As he closed that address, he reflected that the world in which we live “is not one full of nothing but glorious opportunities. But perhaps,” he said, we can learn in a lifetime “that there are more things to admire in people than to despise; perhaps,” he said, “knowing that our efforts may never be enough to change the world, we will act more honorably than we expected we would.” Perhaps, knowing that these little children will in the course of their lives know the realities and the risks of living, we will still be brave enough to teach them that they are children of a God who created this world and called it good; perhaps, our hearts burning within us, we will remember the good news of Jesus Christ, lift one another out of places where there is death, and be witnesses to the beauty of life. Amen.