Last week, was tough. This week’s not much better. Iran and the US President have de-escalated their hostilities, but the challenges between nations aren’t over. Australia is still burning up, Indonesia and Puerto Rico are still reeling from natural disasters. And those are just a few of the challenges we’re facing these days.
I sat in a group of young adult this last week and asked them to use one word or short phrase to describe how they are feeling right now. “Anxious,” “hopeless,” “powerless” were among the most common words.
Last Sunday, I was supposed to preach in such a way that I inspired people to consider ways they might give financial gifts (though their wills) that could help sustain the congregation’s mission for years to come as we seek the wellbeing of this place and people. Not an unimportant message.
But life got in the way. Instead I felt the need to talk about hope, optimism, and also the ways in which hope and optimism can be legacy gifts that sustain our future.
“The future depends,” I said toward the end of the sermon, “on how we act here and now to help create a community where each of us can learn to practice a dogged, determined optimism, and by doing so, find creative and courageous ways to sustain hope no matter what may come our way.”
I hope the sermon, preached, posted, and recorded here, can help inspire the kind of optimism that works for the common good.
“What We Need Right Now.” An Epiphany Sermon on Matthew 2.1-12 and 2 Corinthians 8.1-4. January 5, 2020. Given a technology glitch, the sermon was not recorded.
1.
I want to talk today about hope, optimism, and the role each of us has in leaving a legacy that can help create a better life for everyone.
I realize that theme might sound naive given the week the world’s just had: horrific fires in Australia, devastating flooding in Indonesia, and now massive anxiety over the President’s unilateral decision to assassinate the Iranian top general, Qassem Suleimani. Despite world leaders urging a de-escalation of rhetoric between the US and Iran, the hostilities show no sign of cooling. Many fear we are not only on the brink of yet another war in the Middle East, but the possibility of massive, global destabilization, even World War Three.
For a lot of us, hope’s running awfully thin right now. Few of us feel optimistic. Most of us are worried, angry, and feeling powerless. Even those who think the President’s actions are justified are aware of the serious danger we all now face. We are all teetering on the edge of an unpredictable and likely, a very uncomfortable future.
So, if hope is scarce and optimists are few and far between, what good is it for us to consider ways we might leave a legacy that helps create a better life for us all?
We must.
If we don’t keep hope alive, if we don’t consider the legacy our optimism can offer, then we deprive ourselves and the world of what it desperately needs when fear and uncertainty threaten to take us captive.
If we don’t keep hope alive, if we don’t practice a dogged, determined optimism, even when it feels foolish, then we’ll all fall into despair and the passivity that flows from it, we’ll fall victim to the belief that the struggle isn’t worthwhile; we’ll believe, mistakenly, that the forces allied against the good are too powerful to defeat.
The human race has faced such difficulties before.
Some of our race fell into despair, but others rallied their hope; they rose up together and found creative ways to practice a rugged optimism; they left a legacy of courage that is now ours to seize, ours to improvise on in our own time of need, ours to pass on to yet another generation.
The question is: will we?
2.
I grew up in Colorado. In the winters, my mother would entertain us on those cold winters when we couldn’t play outside after dinner. She gathered my brother and me around the wood burning stove in our common room and read us stories like Winnie the Pooh, the Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Engine that Could, The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel.
These stories taught me how to hope; they taught me how to practice optimism. My mother’s reading of them was for me a legacy that I, in turn, have passed on to my children and grandchildren.
Winnie the Pooh taught me that if I ever get lost like Piglet did in the Hundred Acre Wood and become afraid, I don’t have to lose hope; friends like Pooh and Tigger, Rabbit and Roo will come and find me.
The Little Engine that Could taught me that if something feels impossible, if I’m tempted to give up, I can remember the little red engine: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Chances are, someday I’ll look back and say, “I knew I could.”
And Hansel and Gretel taught me that even if people who are supposed to care of me don’t, if the woods around me get thick and dark, if mean people plan to hurt me and those I love, I can practice courage and creativity and find a way out of my trouble.
3.
The Bible does the same thing: it aims to gather us around the fire of hope. The Bible aims to keep hope alive; it wants to inspire us to a gutsy optimism no matter what comes our way, and invites us to consider the legacy we can leave and help create a better life for all.
Take the first story we read today. The Magi come from the East and offer gifts to the Christ Child. These wise men are outsiders, strangers, foreigners, historical enemies of those in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. They come from either Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan. If there is an “us,” they are definitely a “them.”
But their presence, and the fact that they come bearing gifts, is a sign of something new happening in the world. Wherever the Christ Child is, there is to be a breaking down of walls, the healing of hostilities, a reconciling of differences, a new humanity. No more insider versus outsider. God is not for some; God is for all. The Magi are a sign of the hope that ordinary people can find the courage to tear down barriers, even when kings and tyrants erect them.
The Magi inspire us to optimism, to travel great distances, to climb great mountains and cross great deserts, to face great dangers, and to give of ourselves so that our legacy will help create a better future for our planet.
The second reading is a story within a story within a story. The Apostle Paul writes to a new congregation in the Greek city of Corinth; a congregation made up of people from all walks of life, people who otherwise wouldn’t mix: Greeks and Romans, northern Europeans and folks from Africa, rich and poor, citizens and slaves. Like the Magi before them, they were inspired by the Christian hope that in Christ, God is creating a new humanity—breaking down walls, healing hostilities, reconciling differences, doing something new.
Paul writes to them in order to leverage their optimism on behalf of the beleaguered Christians in the Holy Land. It’s a long story, too long for me to tell here. But the point is, to inspire them to help, he tells them the story of a Macedonian congregation who “during a severe ordeal and out of their extreme poverty,” nevertheless overflowed with hope and generosity.
It’s a story that’s in our Bibles because it has inspired generation after generation of Christians to practice a gutsy optimism, giving of themselves, and living the hope, no matter how desperate things may get, that God is breaking down the walls that separate us, healing the hostilities that wound us, and creating a legacy of generosity that helps make the world a better place for everyone.
4.
In a few moments, Brad (first service)/Cheryl (second service), will tell us about a project here at DCC that’s about all this. The Legacy Group (names of the team) have worked for the last three years to create ways for DCC members and friends to keep hope alive, practice a determined optimism, and consider ways we can all leave a legacy that helps create a better world.
Brad/Cheryl will tell us about people in our congregation who, like the Magi with their gifts, have already made financial commitments that help ensure the future sustainability of this congregation; the future may be challenging, but because of congregations like ours and people like you, it will never be bleak. We will help keep hope alive; we will practice optimism no matter what comes our way; we will create a legacy that helps make life better for everyone.
Brad/Cheryl will also invite us to consider ways each of us can participate in the year and years ahead so that we at Davis Community Church can practice optimism whenever pessimism abounds, whenever despair renders people passive, and disillusionment causes people around us to believe they’re powerless.
Our world needs hope, but we also need optimists who can keep it alive.
We keep hope alive when we make intentional commitments to create a legacy that makes a better future possible.
5.
Rebecca Solnit, the writer I seem to return to whenever my optimism wavers in the face of global troubles, comments beautifully on this theme of hope, optimism, and legacy:
“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; hope should shove you out the door; it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action, [and] action is impossible without hope.”
The future depends on God. But God depends on us. “We are,” as our Communion liturgy says, “God’s hands now. God has no body now but ours.”
The future is in our hands. We not only need hope, we need optimists who refuse to give in to despair; optimists who practice hope regardless of what comes their way; dogged, determined optimists who believe that in Christ, God is creating a new humanity, and who, because of their audacious faith, help create a new and better world; they create a legacy that helps make the world a little better for everyone.
The future depends on how we act here and now to help create a community where each of us can learn to practice a dogged, determined optimism, and by doing so, find creative and courageous ways to sustain hope no matter what may come our way.
“The future [may be] dark,” writes Solnit, “with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”
“Womb” or “grave”?
Womb or tomb, optimism or despair?
What we choose makes all the difference in the world. What we choose will make all the difference to the world.
I choose womb, but I need a community that can help me sustain my optimism. I need you. You need me. We need each other. Together, we will keep hope alive, practice a gusty optimism, and create a legacy for the coming generations.