hope

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES, AND THE PERSISTENCE OF HOPE

October 21, 2019 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

19th Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2019

Proper 24C: Jeremiah31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

“I have more understanding than my teachers. . . .

I am wiser than the elders. . . .”(Ps. 119)

I never hear these words without being transported back to my student days in a very stuffy seminary on the other coast, where such sentiments were firmly discouraged. We all sat in assigned seats in chapel, faculty in the highest row, students, ranked by class, below them. And whenever this Psalm came round in Morning or Evening Prayer, a little chuckle would rise from the lowest rows and be answered by a faint snort from on high.

But the truth is that wisdom and understanding are not the monopoly of any age group. I think, for example, of the young people in our own time who are pressing such issues as the environment and gun violence on their supposedly wiser elders. We may—I hope we do—gain new insight as we age; but sometimes we may lose insights we had caught earlier on. And, in any case, the world keeps changing around us so that the wisdom that fit the 1960s may no longer respond well to the teens of the present century.

I’m not sure what prompted the lectionary to give us this particular Psalm today. But the other readings we’ve heard do a good job of reminding us how our world keeps changing and how new wisdom is demanded of us again and again.

Take, to begin with, the reading from 2 Timothy. As some of you know, there is a good chance that this letter was not actually written by Paul, given that it reflects a situation in the church several decades after Paul’s lifetime. (It wasn’t unusual in antiquity for people to write works under the name of earlier figures as they sought to interpret what they might have said to changed situations.)

But, as I read this passage, I almost felt as if the author of 2 Timothy was speaking prophetically:

The time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

Could there be a clearer prediction of the turn that public discourse has taken in the era of the internet and the web? “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear. I don’t care how much scientific evidence you have for them.”

But it was also a pretty good description of early Christianity. Starting off with an astonishing new message about love—the love of God and the love of neighbor—it developed over just a few decades into a welter of sometimes quite bizarre transformations. The center had difficulty holding. The disciple of Paul who wrote this letter was trying to bring people’s attention back to more central things.

In other words, he was preparing for hard times. He felt a need to rein things back in. Sometimes he may have gone too far. He’s so anxious about people’s thirst for the new and strange and unpredictable that he practically winds up telling people (particularly women) to just sit down and be quiet, which is just another way of losing the focus on love. You can lose the focus on love by turning it weird, but you can also lose it by making it boring, dogmatic, cut-and-dried.

But what I take from this reading is that we have here one of our early Christian forebears face to face with a world that seemed to flying apart. And our author says to the new generation of leaders, “Don’t give up. Don’t surrender. Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. Convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching.”

In a world going crazy, we can profit from this admonition. The wisdom of persistence is something we have to take with us into the years to come.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that it’s all downhill from here, that the trends of the last four or five years are inalterable. It feels now as if our world is disintegrating. And we may be living with that, one way and another, for some years to come. But there is no such thing as an inalterable track for history, whether you think of it in modern terms as eternal progress or in ancient terms as endless decline. History goes up and down. Bad times give way to good, which give way at some point to bad.

We also heard the prophet Jeremiah today saying that things will get better. Who? Jeremiah? the tearful prophet? the prophet of bad things followed by worse? the prophet who predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and lived through it personally and saw everything go—the Temple, the kingship, the people’s hopes all shattered.

But today he’s in an oddly hopeful moment:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.

2 Timothy sees chaos on the horizon. Jeremiah, who’s been through chaos and lived to tell about it, sees hope.

It’s not a bad picture of human existence over the long haul. Things may seem to be stable and predictable, but then it turns out that they are threatening to spin out of control. We’re left with the wreckage of a lot of our hopes and dreams and don’t know where to turn, really, but then we may begin to spy some sign of hope.

But the real question for us isn’t so much “Will it get better or will it get worse?” The only answer to that is “Well, yes.” The real question is how do we live, whichever way it seems to be going? For that we need hope and courage and persistence and the willingness to take some risks and trust the ongoing power of God’s love—love for us and for the world.

And that’s where our gospel reading from Luke comes in. The passage is often referred to as “The Parable of the Unjust Judge.” But that’s wrong. The judge is just a stock figure in this story. Unjust judges were a dime a dozen in Jesus’ time. If you hear some one in the scriptures being praised as having judged justly, that’s high praise; that’s the exception. Admittedly this unjust judge is an extreme example. Many judges were just fudging things because they were afraid of the powerful people in town and didn’t want to cross them. But this one boasts about it: “I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone!” But he’s still a stock figure.

No. This is the Parable of the Persistent Widow. She’s the odd, unsettling figure here. Widows were supposed to be meek and mousy and helpless and not call attention to themselves. But she has figured out that she has power—the power to become an insufferable nuisance! It’s brilliant. But just think what it took. “Persistent” is hardly a strong enough term. She devotes her entire existence for however long it takes to force the judge to deal with her. She becomes completely single-minded and refuses to accept the possibility of defeat, even though she’s clearly sane enough to know that that’s still where it might all end. She lives by persistence—by hope and courage and a willingness to risk, trusting the ongoing power of God’s love.

You can see why she’s such an important figure for us as we wade once again into a time of new turbulence in human history. In fact, I hereby proclaim her the patron saint of all social protest movements. This turbulence is an integral part of human existence, not just some stray aberration that’s come crashing in on us from outer space. This is history. Human existence is always in the middle of a process of growth and decay and disaster and rebuilding. This is the universe we live in. This is the reality through which our ancestors passed during the long, stumbling journey of human evolution. This is still at the core of our history and it will continue to be for ages to come.

But it isn’t the goal. God’s goal is to plant, not to destroy. Even Jeremiah eventually found the strength to say that. And our experiences of loss and distress are ultimately a part of the longed-for replanting. That’s where we need to place ourselves here and now—for our nation, for the world, for ourselves and our communities. Perhaps each of us has only a small gift of persistence, but together we have a great one. We shall not be discouraged. The love of God is indeed the central power of our world, however much fights against it. The love of neighbor makes human life joyful and powerful. And when we look round at unjust judges and people who want to replace truth with myths and leaders who care only for themselves and a world suffering from our own past mistakes and greed, we will persist. We will make intolerable nuisances of ourselves. Because God is in this with us, however hard it may be to see what God is up to at the moment. God is in it to build up, not to tear down. And that is the wisdom all of us, young and old, truly need.

Mortality and Hope

September 9, 2019 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

Preached at the memorial service for Rita Kresha, Good Shepherd Berkeley, September 7, 2019

Readings: Isaiah 56:1-5; Psalm 23; ! John 3:1-2; Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-2; Matthew 9:20-22

Rita herself chose the readings we have just heard, and I can’t imagine a more perfect array of scriptures for this gathering, this service of loss and remembrance, of farewell and trust and hope.

I knew Rita for many years in the context of the church, principally this congregation of the Good Shepherd. And I knew her as someone who had an intense attachment to the church—and also an ongoing quarrel with it and its imperfections.

She cared deeply about the message of justice that we heard from Isaiah:

Thus says the Lord:

Maintain justice, and do what is right;

for soon my salvation will come,

and my deliverance be revealed.

She treasured every sign that the church might be moving closer to its true nature and was bitterly disappointed by every failure.

But her devotion was not simply to justice as an abstraction. It was a devotion rather to the love of God—the love that callsus to justice in its quest to be realized in this world. You’ll notice that Isaiah here picked out the outsidersas the great focus of God’s promise: the foreigner, the eunuch—every sort of person who might feel ill at ease in the church because the church is so often ill at ease with them. Isaiah’s central theme is God’s message of love and trust offered to everyone, however much they may feel pushed to the margins.

I think that message of love and trust was central for Rita. It was what kept her attached to the church even through times of quarreling with it. Or, more fundamentally, it kept her attached to the God the church tries, if haltingly at times, to worship and proclaim.

I suspect there were times in her life when Rita deeply needed to sense the presence of the Good Shepherd our Psalm speaks of. She needed encouragement to believe that struggle (and sometimes defeat) are not the whole of human life, that the love of God can and will still find us. And I could see moments when she did indeed find that presence here in our shared worship.

Perhaps, like many of us, she found some difficulty in acknowledging how deeply God loves us despite our sometimes erratic and unloving ways. God seems to have some trouble getting that idea across to us. Because we have so much trouble believing it. But it is the bedrock of all our faith, our trust, our hope. Even when we feel like the remotest of outsiders it is still there and it can be relied on. And it’s this that gives us the power to live more justly and more humanely.

This is exactly what the Wisdom of Solomon is saying, too. “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,” no matter how much it may seem that we have been abandoned or that the love of God has fallen short.

Our gospel reading tells the same story, pared down (in Matthew’s telling of it) to its barest elements. A woman who’s sick because of a hemorrhage that has lasted for twelve years—and ritually unclean because of it—comes up furtively behind Jesus, perhaps afraid to present herself and her problems to him face to face, afraid of being turned away. She just wants to touch the hem of his garment and get away. And Jesus turns to her, not to berate her, but tell her that her faith, her trust has made her well. It was her act of daring, however frightened she was, her act of hoping that God loved her, that brought about her new freedom.

And such a change should not surprise us. What is human life but change? And change of the most fundamental sort. A child of four cannot conceive what it is to be twenty. A person of twenty has only shadowy intimations of life at forty. At forty, we cannot know who we’ll have become at sixty or seventy. We are always entering a new world and always changing and being changed. Only God’s love for us remains the same.

In the same way, we cannot know what lies beyond death. But there is a hope—our indefinite, but strong hope in God. Because, as John says in the First Letter, we know ourselves to be children of God, graced again and again by God’s love and therefore we can move forward without fear. It is true, as John says, that “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” But the love of God for us assures us that, when all is revealed, “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

The Lady Julian, many centuries ago—in the time, indeed, of the Black Death—put the same thought in other terms: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” I think there were times in her life when Rita found it very difficult to believe either the first letter of John or the Lady Julian. But, in the end, trust won out.

It used to be that people might say of some one that she or he “had a good death.” It’s not a current phrase. It’s not a very clear one, for that matter; it could mean many different things. But Rita, as I have learned from those nearest her, found in her last months in this life, a peace—with herself, with those around her, with the Good Shepherd—that had sometimes eluded her in the past.

Death lost its menace for her. The fear of losing God at last gave way. Her hope grew strong. And she wakens now into the light of God’s love, held in God’s hand.

A BRUSH WITH (LITERARY) MAGIC

April 21, 2017 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

By sheer chance, three recent novels I’ve read over the last couple of months have shared a certain element of what one might call the supernatural or magical. All were by writers I had not read before and all were books picked up in my usual scattershot way: this one had an interesting review, that one had interesting blurbs, this other one had an interesting dust jacket. And I had quite different responses to them.

The first, in order of reading, was The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel, which I think could be described as an example of magic realism. (My prior acquaintance with that genre is limited to a single book, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My opinion on this topic is, accordingly, of little or no value.) In both books, the shifts between realism and magic realism were abrupt, and I found myself wondering what the authors were trying to accomplish. Garcia Marquez conveyed an enhanced sense of the identity of a place, compounded by letting mythic elements into the body of the work. But I’m perplexed as to what Martel was after. Over all, the book seems to be about people seeking to escape from their losses. They are real losses, grave losses, to be sure. But is flight, by itself, enough to hold a novel together? In the end, I felt not. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I were receptive to the kind of nature-mysticism that offers some closure at the end of the book; but my mystical promptings are of a more traditional sort.

The second book was This House Is Mine by Dörte Hansen, translated by Anne Stokes. I wouldn’t call it a work of magic realism; but, like that genre, it hints at a human reality less securely limited to brute fact than the purely realistic novel would tolerate. A reader who resists the idea that there is anything to our world beyond the physical (including the strange psychological carryings on of the brain) could read the occasional hints of other realities as coincidences. A reader comfortable with the occult would have a different take. The somewhat agnostic reader might be content simply to see the boundaries fogged a bit. None of this, however, has much to do with why I found this novel so much more satisfying or why I would be happy to read more by Ms. Hansen. Her characters, too, are severely damaged by their losses, but are not content merely to flee. In depicting the ways we struggle with past troubles and how our varying degrees of success and failure shape our domestic surroundings (and perhaps even communicate through them), she has written a deeply humane novel. And if it ends on a note of hope, I don’t share the widespread modern prejudice against that.

The third book was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Since it’s set in a kind of fantasy world of post-Roman Britain (there is a dragon and Sir Gawain plays a part in the action), it isn’t magic realism. It’s just the sort of world where one expects everyday life and magic to commingle. Indeed, the whole course of action seems driven by a strong but inexplicable sense that the two elderly protagonists, Axl and Beatrice, have that they must leave their village and search for their son. Here, too, are people who seem to have experienced a great loss, yet cannot quite admit it and hope only n the vaguest way for some positive resolution. In the end, they don’t appear to succeed, but this reader, at least, found himself reflecting in a new way on the mixture of blessing and curse found in our mysterious human powers of forgetting and remembering. This was a book that I suspect I will still be thinking about for some time to come.

In a way it’s meaningless to group these three books together. They formed only a casual assortment. But the differences among them were of more than passing interest. One of them opens onto a humane future of some kind. Another seems to want only to be absorbed into the “natural” world and wound up seeming, to me, entirely about retreat. Yet another left me pondering about how the “retreat” of historical amnesia can, when dissipated, actually open onto a world of renewed violence. In fiction as in life, ongoing human engagement with our lives and our world and the hope that makes that possible are the interesting things.

FROM JUDGEMENT TO BETHLEHEM

December 13, 2016 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

Bill Countryman

ADVENT SUNDAY, 2016

Sermon for St. James’ Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois

Year A: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

This time of year, I always feel as if I’m caught between two different calendars, grinding against each other like two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. One is the public calendar that’s hustling us from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s very goal-oriented. The tension of preparing for the great day builds and builds—until !boom! it’s all over in just a matter of hours. I confess I’ve come to hate that calendar for cramming way too much into one great climax and consigning the remaining 12 days of the feast to weariness and oblivion.

The church calendar version of this season carries us on a very different time scheme. Advent, too, is pointing us toward December 25th. But instead of plunging us into a goal-oriented scramble, it starts with a strange reverse flow of time. Advent begins far, far in the future with the End of All Things before drawing our minds and hearts back to an event now thousands of years to the past, the birth of Jesus. Luckily, Advent takes its time about this maneuver; otherwise, we’d all have whiplash. But why? Understanding this strange calendar of ours can give us some help and guidance for how to pray and live the four weeks ahead of us.

We begin, as I say, at the End of the World, at the Last Judgement. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us about it. It is unforeseen and unpredictable, he says; “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s unpredictable and it is sudden, he says, like the flood that swept people away in the time of Noah. It’s unpredictable; it’s sudden; and it is seemingly random. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It sounds like a summary of our worst fears. And all Jesus tells us here, in the face of it, is “Keep awake.” That’s where Advent starts—with the unknown, the daunting, the uncertain, and the advice to stay alert.

Some years it’s been hard to take all this too seriously. Life was sailing along on an even keel, and apocalypse seemed no more than a topic for the movies—scary, but potentially entertaining. Not so much this year, following an angry and disturbing electoral campaign and during the first weeks of a transition in government that seems to many dauntingly uncertain. And this is not even to mention Syria, the Brexit, global warming, and all the other upheavals in the world around us.

The Last Judgement suddenly sounds more relevant, doesn’t it?

But what, after all, is it intended to accomplish? Our usual reflex answer would probably be “punishment.” But that’s wrong. Contrary to the libelous claims made by generations of religious zealots, God actually takes no delight in punishing. If the Last Judgement occasions suffering, that is a byproduct of its true goal.

The true goal is a very simple thing, really: the ultimate unveiling of all hearts. What God already knows about us, we, too, shall learn in that opening of souls. We shall know it for ourselves and know it inescapably. And it will be unpredictable. It will be sudden. It may well seem, to our eyes, random. What distinguishes that man taken out of the field from the one who is left? this woman taken while grinding grain from the one who is left?

Still, it all seems quite daunting. What ancient bishop or monk, we might well ask, had the perverse sense of humor to put something like this into the calendar a scant four Sundays before Christmas? But there’s more to it. The Judgement is not an end in itself.

We heard about it from the prophet Isaiah this morning:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains. . . ;

all the nations shall stream to it.

It was not in some happy, peaceful, safe era that Isaiah uttered this prophecy of hope. It was in a time of multiple threats, a time of change and uncertainty—a time like ours.

And then Isaiah reveals God’s purpose in this hope filled future:

[God] shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

Isaiah and Jesus are not in conflict here. God’s goal, the goal of the New Jerusalem, even in judgement, is to see all nations beating our armaments into tools that will sustain human life and the world around us.

The Last Judgement, whenever and however it comes, comes to show us who we truly are. Parts of that revelation may be painful; parts of it may be occasions of joy and thanksgiving. But whatever the Judgement shows us, it is granted to us precisely so that we can wake up and become part of the cloud of witnesses, the saints of this world, who are building the Holy City for everyone, transforming our thirst for enmity and destruction into love—love for God and God’s world and one another. The Judgement by which we see ourselves as we are frees us to join in God’s great work of creation and restoration.

And, yet, as we know, we live now in the in-between time. The Judgement is not yet. We are still trying to figure out where we can get the strength, the hope, the love to live through the present time. And that is where we turn from the Judgement and the New Jerusalem to another much humbler time and place—Bethlehem. No, it wasn’t mentioned in the readings. Those cranky old bishops and monks were too clever for that. Don’t show your hand all at once. Build up the tension before you get to the heart of the story. But they knew what lies four weeks off. And they knew that we would know, too.

This is really all about Bethlehem.

BETHLEHEM

Here comes to birth

the One who birthed us all.

Here lies the Upholder of all,

too weak to raise his head,

God, choosing helplessness instead,

has left the throne of deep tranquillity

to live in human poverty—

Has come to earth.

We speak today about the Last Judgement and the New Jerusalem in order to say that this is a world God has risked entering into. God has not sat back in the throne room of the universe, looking on while we struggle with fear and hope, blessings and disasters, failure and success. God has chosen to experience all this with us, alongside us.

I suppose God had the same thought that occurred more recently to the songwriter Eric Bazilian: “What if God was one of us?” “Risky,” God must have thought, “but worth the danger and the sacrifice. That’s what I choose to do.”

Our times are difficult. We find ourselves caught in deep national conflict, in a changing world order, in a crisis of ecology, and in a time when religion has again become, as it has sometimes been in the past, a stimulus to violence. We also find ourselves uncertain of our direction. Perhaps that’s why we follow the public calendar of feasts so intently: we find the distraction comforting.

The sacred calendar is trying to help us find our footing. If we start with acknowledging who we are, both our failures and our hopes, our weaknesses and our gifts—in other words, with the Judgement—we shall also begin to see ways, large and small, in which we can contribute to the New Jerusalem and grow into our citizenship there—citizenship in the city of peace.

Yes, there’s much to be done in the next four weeks as we prepare to greet the infant of Bethlehem again. But the great truth we encounter there is that God has already come more than halfway to meet us: “has left the throne of deep tranquillity/to live in human poverty.” And the God who was willing to take that risk that will stand with us in our time of struggle here and now.