06/30/2024
“Therefore, I Have Hope”
A sermon homage to my theology mentor, Doug Ottati, on my last Sunday at Forest Hill Presbyterian Church.
Hopeful Realism.
My theology mentor, Doug Ottati, wrote a book by that name and it was his “Hakuna Matata” so to speak.
If you are a fan of Disney’s The Lion King, you’ll know the “problem free, philosophy” that is Timon’s ballad: Hakuna Matata.
Hopeful realism doesn’t quite carry as much of an easy to sing along footloose and carefree attitude. It certainly doesn’t mean that you are likely to live life completely worry free.
And yet as far as life philosophies go, I have found Doug’s phrase to be the essential key to living a spiritually fruitful and biblically faithful life.
Knowing Doug well, his juxtaposition of these two potentially divergent ways of engaging the world is intentional. Paradoxically, they belong together. You are poorer if you try to have one without tempering it with the other.
If you overstress the hopeful side of life, always looking for the “silver lining,” living in perpetual optimism, you’ll find yourself in a “Chicken Soup for the Soul” mentality, the “live, laugh, love” motif that sugar coats any bad news and stuffs the shadow side of life deep within until it explodes. Being constantly sunny is a lot of pressure. To look at another, more recent Disney movie, it’s being recognized by many mental health professionals how important it is that the character “Joy” from “Inside Out 2” has a fantastic rant about this stress of living in perpetual joy. People start to think you are delusional. Joy is exactly right. It is stressful to try to live on only the optimistic side of life.
But if you want to be realistic, you will ultimately have a whole load of disappointments. Humans are notably disappointing creatures. We fail – a lot – even with good intentions. Institutions become corrupt. Evil exists and persists. Realists are often seen as dour curmudgeons because they have negative things to say about themselves, others, and the world. To look at life as it really, truly is, takes some courage to face up to the facts, and even more courage to point out the lies that seem to hold the whole mess together.
To be both hopeful and realistic is to live in the tension of life. Another way that Doug framed his message was to say that “Life is hard; but grace abounds.”
I find that few pastors turn to the book of Lamentations as a preaching text. And probably even fewer would see in its dismal tones some good news to preach on the event of one’s last Sunday. If you read it in its entirety, it paints an awful picture about personal depression, societal crumbling, nostalgia for the way things used to be, and humiliating defeat by powerful enemies. Fun times! But if you are paying attention, it is a line from Lamentations that is the text of one of Christianity’s most beloved AND most hopeful hymns, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”
This big, huge, nevertheless, in the middle of chapter 3 is the stuff of really really good theology. It says that even though all hell has broken loose, and all hope seems to be lost, that trust in God is still the most valuable commodity we possess. The lectionary reading would have us skip to the good part without considering the rest, but I think that is to try to turn it toward the “no worries” kind of message without digging deeper. The deeply melancholic poet of Lamentations is pondering what it means to be afflicted and homeless. This is not merely lack of ownership, the author is without a home or a homeland. Nations have gone to rot. Exile has been their story. And yet, I WILL REMEMBER AND HAVE HOPE.
What can that possibly be about? I will remember and have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies have no end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness.
How? Just how can this possibly be a thing?
I’ve known people who gave up on God for far less than this.
It’s about knowing that God is really real. It’s about trusting that God has a plan of the kind of scope we may or may not realize in our own surprisingly short lifetimes. It’s believing that the love of God is astonishingly steadfast, and that God wishes mercy for us, not destruction.
I really like the end of this passage as it is written in “The Message” version of scripture which is a contemporary language paraphrase.
Here’s how it reads for verses 28-33:
When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions: Wait for hope to appear. Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face. The “worst” is never the worst.
Why? Because the Master won’t ever walk out and fail to return. If he works severely, he also works tenderly. His stockpiles of loyal love are immense. He takes no pleasure in making life hard, in throwing roadblocks in the way.
Or as the NRSV says verses 31-33:
31 For the Lord will not reject forever.
32 Although he causes grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
33 for he does not willingly afflict
or grieve anyone.
In this, my friends, you can place complete confidence. God’s love is mightier than any ordeal you will ever face. God’s mercies are more prevalent that you can imagine. God’s faithfulness is greater than the sun, moon, and stars, and it is renewed every single morning. The way we “feel” God in our lives is both severe and tender, causing grief and offering compassion. And yet, God does not with intent grieve anyone. Life is hard. Grace abounds.
I want to leave you with this message because it is increasingly difficult to be the church for a whole variety of reasons.
Institutional preservation has become more important than sharing God’s love. Money has gotten in the way of being able to make decisions based on caring for our neighbors. We seem to think it’s more important to take care of buildings and bottom lines than to take care of people. And while I want that line to sting a bit as being “about you,” I also want you to realize that this is about a much, much larger picture. You are not alone in being taught to fear that resources are scarce, when the message of Lamentations is that God’s love is the most abundant, and most important gift that we have.
Divisions in our culture have drawn lines in the sand about who we think we can love, and who we write off as woefully beyond redemption. Hopeful realism reminds us that there are people we can hardly think about as one of “God’s children,” and yet hope persists that God is drawing all people, and I mean ALL people into the broad circle of humanity where everyone belongs. This philosophy is a tough one, I’m afraid. It challenges our borders and boundaries, declaring that the steadfast love of God NEVER ceases.
And for those pesky national and international, social and cultural atrocities that are the 24-7 news cycle now, and not just a few chapters of an obscure book of scripture, God is working through those too. And they are far less important than we imagine. We think they have the potential to destroy us. And there is no doubt that political greed and corruption has caused terrible, terrible harm. But ultimately, hope is the value we cling to when the real world seems to want to take us down. We hope in God. We hope in the future because we have seen God at work in our past.
Life is hard. But grace abounds.
Hopeful realism.
Tucked within this book of tragic laments, is the key to spiritual fruitfulness and biblical faithfulness. When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. And remember. Remember who God is.
I do not know what your future holds. I don’t even know what my future holds. In times like these, I also reach for the Thomas Merton prayer that says, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
Trust in God to guide you. Trust in God to love you. Allow that trust to help you face your perils, and truly you will never be alone. Amen.
