2nd Sunday of Epiphany St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Ahoskie, NC
January 15, 2023 Thomas E Wilson- Guest Celebrant
Even Disappointments Have Hope!
Last week, I was reading a New York Times Book Review by Carlos Lozada of a collection of articles in a book called Myth America :Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The topic is an exploration of the idea of American Exceptionalism. Every nation has a myth of exceptionalism, its fundamental ideals, on how they, or we, are different that any other nation. The book's thesis is posed that many people are questioning the fundamental truths about our nation's history; its myths, legends or lies
Legends are made-up stories promoting an agenda, by the use of historical or semi-historical characters. George Washington cutting down a cherry tree and telling the truth to his father is a legend, originally made up by Parson Weems in his The Life of George Washington published in 1800, the year after Washington died, to promote truth telling by elected officials and heroes. It is meant to share truthful hope in a story without any verifiable historical facts. The Bible contains many legends about heroes which were written centuries after they were dead. Many of them not supported by archeological evidence.
Myths are stories, based on pre-conscious memories, enlightenment or speculation, passed on from generation to generation, projecting far back in time, which try to explain reasons why and how we began to do certain things in the world around us. They are stories meant to tell a deeper truth, but have no facts. Much of the Bible is told in myths which explain the beginnings of behavior; for instance the Creation and Fall mythic structures.
Lies are stories and falsehoods told to gain an advantage by the liars, or for the grifter's personal, financial or political agendas. I don't need to waste time pointing out examples of out and out lying. Our daily Newspapers and the Bible spill a lot ink telling stories of liars who lie habitually.
Lozada in his review, titled “ I Looked Behind the Curtain of American History, and This Is What I Found, ran the quote
In American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” published in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington distills the tension in his final lines: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
The Bible Stories we look at in today's lectionary are about people who find hope even in disappointment.
The first reading is from the Book of Isaiah. Some scholars theorize that the Book of Isaiah has at least three different writers from the school of Isaiah. The first was the prophet who was called to be a Prophet in the Year King Uzziah died which is either 750 or 742 BC. The Isaiah of Jerusalem is in the middle of his disappointment that Uzziah dies but then he hears the Voice call: “Whom shall I send?” In the middle of his disappointment, Isaiah answers in that hope: “Behold, here am I!” He did his ministry then and there, working during the time of King Hezikiah where the high point of the reign was the ability of Jerusalem to withstand the siege by the Assyrian Empire under Senacarib in 701 BC. The writer of that period finds disappointment in the damage done to the Kingdom but hope in the ability to hold on.
Then, there is the a series of writings 120+ years later which take place after the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and then conquer Jerusalem, taking many Jewish people into exile in 582 BC. The writer of 2nd Isaiah writes of hope and comfort to those in the Babylonian exile. The Isaiah of the Exile writes of holding on to hope in the middle of the strange land; disappointment but still holding on to hope.
The writer of 3rd Isaiah writes 40 years later when the Medes and the Persians overthrow the Babylonian Empire and allow the exiles to return to the ravaged Jerusalem . The writer speaks of the disappointment by the returning exile in seeing the neglect and ruined damage to the city. This Isaiah speaks of the power greater than themselves which will be with them in the context of the new hope to rebuild.
The Psalmist for the Psalm for today, begins his song of disappointment followed by hope::
1 I waited patiently upon the Lord; *
he stooped to me and
heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay;
*
he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.
Paul, the writer of the letter to the Corinthians, was disappointed often in the church in Corinth but he writes not just about the disappointment but much more of the hope in putting trust in the Holy Spirit to remain united to God's spirit in the Risen Christ.
Jesus, baptized in the Gospel lesson, hears that “he is the beloved Child”; a phrase he held onto in the years of disappointments. He will meet Peter, the one who Jesus gave the name of “Cephas”. or “Peter” in the Greek, meaning “rock”. Well, Peter is one disappointment after the other, falling far short of Jesus hopes for him. And yet, this broken person is the one Jesus wants to lead the church; even disappointments have hope.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who we remember this weekend, faced one disappointment after another. In his April 16th 1963 letter from the Birmingham Jail: King lamented his disappointment in the white church, "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” Yet, in the five years left in his life, he never lost hope.
King came from an African American understanding of Christianity found in the study of the Bible where they found hope beyond the disappointments. The author of The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, Allen Dwight Callahan, suggests
African slaves and their descendants discerned something in the Bible that was neither at the center of their ancestral cultures nor in evidence in their hostile American home, a warrant for justice in this world. They found woven in the texts of the Bible a crimson thread of divine justice antithetical to the injustices they had come to know all too well.
I think of my parents, Bill and Marian Wilson, who started off their marriage by him going off to war- disappointment leavened by hope. That hope got them through the war and then, they had to deal after the war with four children they loved and had dreams for. It is one thing to dream about babies but there is the sobering, draining experience of dealing with babies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was one of those four and I was one who found so many ways to give disappointment but they never lost hope for me. Their parents did the same with them. We four children had children of our own. If I try hard enough, I can remember times when my bright and beautiful daughter disappointed me. But I have no problem at all remembering my love and hope for her which still continues.
I think of my ordained ministry of almost 40 years and the number of times I disappointed my parishioners, but they paid the cost of forgiving while I held on to the hope they continued to hold that God would redeem all things. There have been times when I would temporarily be disappointed in each of the churches I served, but the hope continued.
German Poet Heinrich Heine in 1856, after spending 8 years sick and bed bound, having so many reasons to be disappointed in God's running of the universe, said on his deathbed, holding on to hope when he joked, “God will forgive me. It's his job." He trusted God, the giver of hope, to do the divine love.
This is his trusting poem he wrote thinking about his death: (translated by Ruth Duffin)
Where?
Where shall I, of
wandering weary,
Find my resting-place at last?
Under drooping
southern palm-trees?
Under limes the Rhine sweeps past?
Will
it be in deserts lonely,
Dug by unfamiliar hands?
Shall I
slumber where the ocean
Crawls along the yellow sands?
It
matters not! Around me ever
There as here God's heaven lies,
And
by night, as death-lamps o'er me,
Lo, His stars sweep through the
skies!
Even Disappointments Don't Lose Hope!
Bill and Marian had so much hope
for those, the children born to them,
living into different world to come,
than one in which they had to cope.
As their own parents at their birth,
they had to learn that hope isn't lost:
hope only adjusts in paying that cost
of forgiving, to find real true worth.
If they hadn't risked to grow a love,
that entered beyond disappointment,
timely applying the healing ointment,
with gentleness of descending dove.
“You are our beloved children!”, said
often, so many times in the days ahead.
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