Hope is Not a Four Letter Word
John 20:1-18
We love the Easter and Christmas stories, don’t we? I mean, most people who don’t have much religious training at all can tell you a great deal about Easter and Christmas. Perhaps it has something to do with those being the only Sundays they’re ever seen inside a church building. But probably more than that, it has to do with the wonder of these stories. They are both full of adventure, intrigue, plot twists and unexpected heroes and antagonists. Cecil B. DeMille wasn’t the first person to recognize that these stories capture people’s imagination. Last night Bill and I watched “The Ten Commandments.” While Christians are celebrating Easter this is usually the same time that Jews are celebrating Passover which is based on the Exodus story of Moses. It is another great story for both Jews and Christians because it is the story of the resurrection of a community from oppression and despair. In the larger culture, all of these traditions happening at the same time can be confusing. We have Easter lilies and seder celebrations, bunnies and dyed eggs. It is no wonder that when one child was asked what Easter meant he responded, “It is when Jesus came out of the tomb. If he sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter.”
We church people can be rather amused at the confusion of Hollywood blurring things “religious.” Part of that confusion is because we haven’t done a good job of grasping the meaning of our story and learning how to tell it effectively.
The story of Easter is our story – a story incorporated from our daily lives because if we don’t grasp the truth of what happened in the Easter story, others can twist the story into something awful. ABC News reported last week about a study published by University of Michigan Social Psychologist Brad Bushman. He found overwhelming evidence that when people believe God is on their side, their level of aggression rises. How could anyone get that from the life of Jesus? Yet, a casual glance at the headlines seems to indicate it is so. Osama Bin Laden claims God is on his side so it is acceptable to declare war on the infidels of the non-Muslim world while George Bush uses the same claim that God is on his side to justify a war in Iraq. God must be confused! Or maybe we have lost the essence of the story God is revealing.
It’s no wonder all these other claims on God can be made. For too many Christians, we’ve made Easter into something simplistic – the claim of a resuscitated body as evidence of God’s presence in the person of Jesus. When that simplistic interpretation is imposed we often miss this story as a cosmic story – a story about God’s faithful presence in the face of chaos, a story of liberation from the tyrannies that bind us, a story of hope. The claims of Easter are audacious. I’m not referring to simplistic stories. I’m talking about the real claims of Easter. It is an audacious claim to believe that even in the face of over-whelming evidence to the contrary, life is greater than death, light overcomes darkness, and hope triumphs over despondency. Your sitting in this room today is evidence of that claim. Some of us have stared down the pull of addiction on our lives and we are living with hope. Some of us have wrestled with our families, our employers and even our own conscience to claim the promises of Easter as our own. You are living examples of hope. Some of us have faced our own mortality through trauma, disease or as victims of intentional violence and still we are here singing hymns of faith, celebrating resurrection, living as people of hope. How audacious!
How do we hang on to such hope:
When evil has pricked your life
When a virus has robbed you of your future
When the powers that be tell you that you don’t deserve dignity
When your heart has been shattered by love lost
When you have no concrete answers and no absolutes
When the claims made on God’s allegiance by conflicting sides are so bizarre
Easter tells us that when we find ourselves in those very situations to rejoice and be glad – because it is in the very experience of doubt, fear, betrayal, loss and powerlessness that we discover the gift of hope. That is exactly what happened to Jesus during his Passion. Would we have even known to look for hope if something hadn’t damaged our lives?
Hope is what guides us. It is a precious gift that is not explainable to those who seem not to need it. How do you explain to someone that hope is what has given you the power to excel, the desire to flourish and the energy to continue moving forward against all odds?
Yet, with eyes of faith, we see hints built into creation all around us. Spring pushes back the icy fingers of winter with the promise of fragile new life pushing through frosty ground. The birth of a child is hope incarnate because an infant is helpless without care. With nourishment and nurture, a child grows into a capable human being. Forgiveness makes no sense in an eye-for-an-eye world for forgiveness can only bloom in a heart that knows hope – a heart that senses that what “is” is not the whole story and that what is happening “right now” does not always complete the equation and that healing is only possible not through force or coercion but through love.
You heard in the announcements this morning that the “Would Jesus Discriminate?” campaign is starting to gear up. Why would anyone think that asking a simple question could change public opinion, open people’s minds to new ideas or allow a conversation to happen that has been thwarted again and again? It is because we have glimpsed the audacious power of Easter. We are people of hope.
In the next few weeks you will be hearing more and more about our capital appeal campaign. We have set a goal of raising $500,000 over the next three years over and above what we are already raising for the work of our church. How can a congregation whose annual budget is about $300,000 even dream of adding such a huge sum to our efforts? It is because we have glimpsed the audacious power of Easter. We are people of hope.
Hope is not a four-letter word – OK it is a four-letter word, but it is not that kind of four-letter word! Hope is the audacious claim on our lives that grace is big enough to meet any need, to heal any wound, to overcome any obstacle.
The gift of hope is God’s whisper to our soul that blessing is better than hoarding, that life is worth the adventure, and that there isn’t anything, anything that you can do that will separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. There isn’t a thought so blasphemous, an act so wicked, or an intention so twisted that God’s grace isn’t big enough to heal. That is audacious! That is what hope does in us. That is the story of Easter.
Sources:
www.homileticsonline.com The Jesus Bulb, April 2007.
http://www.yourmoviepal.com/movies/daves-best-100-movies/Ten-Commandments-The-Movie.html movie poster image
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2983119&page=1 God is on Our Side, March 27, 2007.