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Sunday, March 23, 2008
The Reason for Our Hope
Luke 24:13-21a
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, 14 and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15 While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16 but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17 And he said to them, "What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?" They stood still, looking sad. 18 Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?" 19 He asked them, "What things?" They replied, "The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20 and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.
I want to tell you a story that might seem a little unusual to begin an Easter sermon with. David Sheff is a writer and journalist whose articles have appeared in Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, Beautiful Boy, is an eloquent, painful, and ultimately hopeful account of their family’s journey with their son Nic who became a drug addict when he was a teenager.
Nic was an excellent student in the beginning of high school. He was thoughtful and considerate and was for a while a very good big brother for his younger brother and sister.
But then, he became addicted to the worst thing—methamphetamine. From the time he was 17 or so, Nic was in and out of rehab centers and would be clean and sober for a while and then relapse. He disappeared on several occasions and his family did not know whether he was dead or alive. A couple of times when he had disappeared he would show up stealthily and break-in to the home of his parents or even his grandparents and steal things that he could sell to buy drugs.
On one of those occasions he even broke into his 7 year-old brother’s piggy bank and stole the twelve dollars saved in the bank. His father and stepmother were at the end of their wits many times and cried and cried about their son. They entered an Al Anon program with other families and found comfort there. But Nic just would let them down again and again and again, and they learned not to trust him or believe him. He wound up in the hospital emergency room very near death and then after a couple of days in the hospital checked himself out to get back on the street. He was a walking skeleton.
Somewhere during that horrible time Nic’s father, the author of the book, went to the ER with a brain bleed and spent many months recovering from that—an incident likely caused by the family’s stressful struggle with Nic’s addiction.
The last rehab center Nic was in has seemed to make a difference. When his father and stepmother went there for the family weekend as part of Nic’s treatment, David Sheff wrote, “I have not held out hope for this new program, not because I don’t hope that it works and not because it cannot work but because I am terrified at my core to hope again.”
I am terrified to hope again. I had some hopes and they have been shattered so often and so thoroughly that I don’t know if I can hope again. Have you ever been close to that feeling of no hope?
The two friends of Jesus who were walking together on that Sunday afternoon—Easter Sunday we call it, they did not call it that yet—those friends could have said something like that. All their hope was gone. They had spent three years of life with this charismatic teacher and prophet and savior and they believed with all their hearts that this was the messiah. And now they had seen him cruelly executed like a political traitor—hung just outside the city walls to die. They had seen his body taken down and put in a borrowed grave, and all their hope was gone.
They were walking to a town a few miles away from Jerusalem when a stranger joined them and asked why they were so depressed. “Don’t you know what has happened these past couple of days in Jerusalem—Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet strong in word and deed, loved by all the people, has just been executed. And we had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”
There are those words again. We had hoped. They are perhaps some of the saddest words we could speak. We had hoped…
We had hoped that even after two previous miscarriages that this pregnancy would be the one. We had hoped that our family member would be able to lick the cancer. We had hoped that our business would succeed. We had hoped that our son would finally hit bottom and that the rehab program would work.
We had hoped… each of us can fill in our own next words, can’t we?
And that is why we need to be together this Easter Sunday because this day is the reason for our hope. We just need to remember the dark and difficult times so the good news of Easter— God has raised Christ and has conquered the enemies of darkness and death and hopelessness— so that good news can truly change our hearts.
That is why we so strongly encourage each other to be present during Holy Week for the Thursday evening communion service and the Good Friday crucifixion story, so that our hearts will be prepared to know the good news. That is why Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney once said that he didn’t think Easter meant anything much to people under 40 because it is necessary for most people to have experienced the dread and darkness of pain and illness and failure and depression and grief before any talk of resurrection and new life and hope makes any sense. I think that is no longer true. Garrison Keillor once said that when he heard his sixteen- year-old son practicing on his new guitar, he was surprised to hear the anguish and pain of blues music coming out of his teenager’s mouth and heart and that perhaps adolescents know what it is to feel pain and anguish. That is certainly true of the story about addiction that we began with.
The friends of Jesus were puzzled by this knowledgeable stranger who walked along the road with them and explained the scriptures to them. They found this all very surprising and unsettling. Those were common feelings among his friends when others felt they had seen the risen lord: some had doubts, some were afraid, some were awe struck, others believed what they saw with their own eyes and could not contain themselves.
Most of us share that mixture of feelings. If we are trained to mostly use reason, we certainly come with doubts and skepticism. It is not possible for people to feel the presence of another who is dead. Is it possible? If we truly use our reason, we have to say that something incredible must have happened for a defeated, depressed, beaten down group of followers to begin to feel the spirit of the one who had led them and taught them—feel that presence so profoundly that they went on to change the world and turn the world upside down with this news. It is a reasonable conclusion that something extraordinary happened to them and to Christ.
If we come on Easter with a mixture of reason and of openness to mystery in life, we are more able to hear: this is a mystery—not the resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse after three days but something stranger than that. Is there room in your world view for mystery? God brought about something unrepeatable and no other religion in the world talks about the humiliating execution of their founder and then springs up as a movement after that tragic death. Something happened to Jesus’ friends to turn them around from hopelessness into hope.
People come to church on Easter Sunday with that mixture of reason and mystery and with other longings as well. We come with a need for hope when we have grieved the loss of someone we love. The Easter message of resurrection and a promise of life after this life is a basic one and it is important for each of us when we see how brief and fragile this life is. We experienced that in our congregation this week when we held two funerals here in our building in the week before Easter.
But the great news of Easter is about even more—it is about the best life here and now, life after birth, a life of joy and meaning right now, a new beginning, a life of hope starting now.
Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa said it this way:
Nothing could have been deader than Jesus on the cross on that first Good Friday. And the hopes of his disciples appeared to die with his crucifixion…. And then Easter happened. Jesus rose from the dead. The incredible, the unexpected happened. Life triumphed over death, light over darkness, love over hatred, good over evil. That is what Easter means-hope prevails over despair.
It was that rebirth of hope that caused the first followers of Christ who said sadly, “we had hoped he would be the one” to see anew that Christ is the one. God has affirmed that and Christ is alive offering hope and light. And we have the chance to point others to that hope.
We started with the story of family’s journey with a devastating addiction but a family who never lost hope and found their faith affirmed. David Sheff tells us on your bulletin cover that he is cautious about the future for his son, but he is still able to hope.
And he wrote his book, I believe to offer that hope to others. That is our assignment as well as Easter people, to point to the hope that comes from God in Christ, to be ambassadors of hope.
Erma Bombeck was a syndicated columnist whom some of you remember from a few years ago. She writes in one of her books of a social worker who was working in a hospital with children who were very ill. The social worker asked the children to talk about “hope”. They could not. She asked them to imagine that hope is an animal and to then describe what hope, the animal, looks like. They were profound:
Hope is about two and a half feet tall and covered with fur and is fluffy and soft.
Hope is the color of sunshine and happiness.
When it talks, you’re the only one who can hear it.
Hope raises its voice sometime. It has to talk louder than fear.
Sometimes you can coax it to come to you, but most of the time you have to be patient and wait and then it will come to you.
If you don’t take good care of it….it can die.
Hope will come to you only when you need it.
Hope has offsprings like any other animal. They are called “Hopelets”. You don’t keep them. You share them with other people who need one.
The first Easter people found their hope again and shared that hope with others. We must do that as well.