A Dying Life, Lived in Hope

Psalm 118

Luke 24:1-12

On Easter Sunday, we hear the report from the gospels that God raised up the crucified Jesus.  We face here not an intellectual puzzle nor a conceptual tangle.  The tension created is not about whether we can get our minds around news that is unlikely, unprecedented, and difficult to believe.  The only interesting question is whether this story of resurrection can pull us across a threshold and into a new kind of life.

 

The problem for most of us is not so much the lack of hope as it is the fickleness and flimsiness of our hope.  If this story can become the occasion for God to change our hearts and lives, the change in us will involve a shift to a more durable and satisfying hope.

Some of you know that I turned 48 this past week.  And that Geico commercial where people slowly turn into their parents is a little painful for me.  My most recent passions – for houseplants and birds – do not convey the vibrant youthfulness I had hoped to project.  Elaine Buerge gave me a split-leaf philodendron.  And I care for it like another child in the family.  I am so enamored of the beautiful little birds in my backyard that I downloaded a birding app.  My family makes fun of me but this app is amazing.  It’s called Merlin (created by the ornithology department at Cornell).  I can take pictures of birds and it will identify them for me.  And based on my location, the app tells me which birds are migrating through my area right now.  I don’t want to brag, but there is an adorable little red house finch building a nest on my front porch right now.

Technology is amazing.  And the comforts made possible by advanced economies like ours is alluring.  It’s helpful for us to name this optimism so that we can ask ourselves whether it is too small, too flimsy and fickle to serve as hope that can guide and sustain us in life.

The story that the crucified Jesus has been raised prompts us to ask: what might we hope for ourselves?  And what might we hope for others, and for the world beyond ourselves?

Luke’s gospel invites us to see ourselves in the group of women that go to the tomb early on Sunday morning.  The women named here are the same women mentioned earlier in Luke’s story  (8:1-3) as having provided for Jesus’ Galilean ministry “out of their resources.”  When Jesus invited the crowds to become his students, to take up a new way of life, these Jewish women signed up. What was it about Jesus that inspired and fueled their hope?  What made them join this movement, even at significant cost of resources and time?

Apparently Jesus’ practices of healing the sick, extending forgiveness, and sharing meals with the poor captured something deep in the longing of these women.  When they met Jesus, something flickered to life in them.  He helped them dream of new possibilities for their lives and for the world around them. 

But on this Sunday, early in the morning, the women were grieving.  They had been crushed by events.  They had come to prepare the dead body of Jesus for burial.  They woke up that morning in a bind that might sound familiar to many of us: they nurtured deep in their lives a longing for new possibilities, and yet that longing had been shattered by the old realities of hatred and violence.  We ourselves live in this tension of frustrated longings.  Let me mention a few things that can happen to our practices of hope.

Sometimes what we hope for is simply unrealistic, given the kinds of creatures we are.  Hoping that we never get sick or experience death is a subtle temptation for us.  This secret dream is working beneath the surface of our lives more often than we realize.  Likewise, hoping never to feel pain, never to have an accident or mishap, never to experience health challenges, never to encounter failure or disappointment, never to be wrong, never having to change your mind – these too are familiar forms that our hope takes.  And yet these profoundly unrealistic forms of hope are what lead to much of our frustration in life.

Sometimes what we hope for is bent or misdirected.  We are prone to being wrong about what will bring us joy and satisfaction.  Take, for example, the problem of wealth and possessions.  In general, most people know that a high income, the perfect house, nice cars and clothes, exotic travel, expensive toys and gadgets won’t make them happy.  But in our culture, status is largely doled out in bluntly economic terms.  And so people pursue lucrative careers and nice things not because they believe these are direct pathways to happiness, but because our culture offers very few other ways to keep score.  It’s not always clear how to measure a life – what makes it meaningful, satisfying.  And so, because we creatures get easily confused and distracted, we throw up our hands and play by the rules we’re offered.

Sometimes what we hope for is too small.  We might dream of personal projects and never get around to dreaming and working for the flourishing of our local places.  We might be so busy acquiring a comfortable life for ourselves that we have little energy left for the needs of our place and our neighbors with whom we share it.  We may become so enamored with personal comfort that we lose sight of God’s love for the well-being of the earth and all its creatures. 

Sometimes our hope is bedeviled by our impatience. This is the first Spring for us in a new house.  I want a lush yard, colorful flowerbeds, and a fruitful garden.  But my yard is all crabgrass and henbit.  The flowerbeds are a disaster.  And the garden was just a plot of weeds.  Trying to improve these areas will take not just months, but years.  And it’s hard to be patient and do one small thing at a time.  Hope is a form of desire and longing, without having.  And it is difficult to live in this tension of desire that does not yet have what it wants; longing that cannot yet find its fullest measure of satisfaction.  Here hope must deepen into the realization that if a new future is going to emerge, it is going to emerge in bits and pieces, as God uses ordinary people like us to model what’s possible.

Sometimes we find ourselves almost unable to hope.  We get tired.  We get discouraged and disappointed.  We yield to despair and cynicism.  We become overwhelmed by the difficulty of our journey through life, and the pain that accompanies our efforts to move forward. 

In Luke’s story, two illumined “men” charge the women with remembering the words and actions of Jesus during his ministry.  The resurrection story is not some brand new thing unconnected from what came before it.  The fresh opening for new life and new hope will be found precisely by allowing our lives to be shaped by Jesus’ practices of mercy, forgiveness, healing, and table fellowship.  The way of life modeled by Jesus is the key to durable hope.  The hope that emerges from this new way of life is not animated by a fickle dream of fixing everyone and everything.  Instead, we are invited into a resolute, determined life that moves into a new age, a new realm only just now beginning to take shape. 

We learn from Jesus the art of imagining a reality that’s only half here.  Captured by a new vision of what’s possible, we become early adopters, taking up a way of life that is ahead of its time, at odds with the old stale assumptions of common sense.  When this story seems to us like nonsense, we can only pray that God will pull us into the wonder and amazement of hope.