IN THE MEANTIME October 12, 2008, The Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Exodus 32:1-14 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: Hope breathes life into a world that falls short of our dreams. "O God of hopeful seekers and restless souls, be present with us as we rest at this wayside along life's journey. Refresh our souls that we may press on courageously, knowing that we are not alone, but that we travel into each day in your company. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen" My wife and I drive out to our cottage on Lake Michigan a couple times a year. It s a long run 834 miles to be precise. That s a lot of driving, though after the GW Bridge it s generally an open-road cruise. 834 miles is too long for one day, so we almost always stop halfway. Halfway is somewhere between Sharon, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio. If you know that part of the world, you know that s just about the buckle of the old industrial rust belt. The towns are ragged, the motels are generic, and we have yet to find a restaurant you d want to go back to. It most definitely isn t that lakeside retreat that we re bound for. For us, it s the quintessential place on the way. In the story of Israel on the Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land that Anthony just read, Israel has stopped for the night at the ancient equivalent of the Fairfield Inn in Hubbard, Ohio. They re half-way, more or less. On the way, but not there yet. Ahead of them lies a place none of them have ever seen. The Promised Land is an old family dream; it s just a rumor passed down the years about a land flowing with milk and honey, a land to call their own, a place where they would be free, a place where all things would be as they ought to be. - 1 -
But at this point in the story they're not there yet. They re in Hubbard, Ohio, halfway there, and they're tired and afraid. Frankly, it's been a perfectly awful road trip: lousy food, not enough water, and when Moses just disappears up on that mountain talking to God for way too long, these travelers lose their nerve. They lose their hope in a destination they have never seen. They shed their trust in a God that can never be seen. They want something they can see; they want a tangible, visible god, and they want it now. "How about a nice little molten calf?" somebody suggests. An odd God to be sure, but molten calves were all the rage in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. So off with everybody's earrings your wives' earrings, your daughters' earrings and (take note, parents of teen-age boys) off with your sons' earrings. Everybody gives the gold to Aaron, who was supposed to be Moses right-hand man, but who now makes them a nice little visible idol like just all the other ethnic groups have. What happens when Moses comes down from the mountain is a story unto itself. First off, everybody bows down to the molten calf and says, "Look at the god who brought us out of Egypt." Next, there s a comedic little repartee between Moses and God. God says to Moses: "Look at what YOUR people are doing. And then Moses says to God, "Why are you so angry with YOUR people?" God is ready to leave them in the desert to dry up like raisins, but Moses intercedes on behalf of stiff-necked Israel, and God changes God's mind. This business about God changing God's mind is troubling to moderns, but the God of these ancient chronicles is no passionless, aloof First Principle, no Divine Clock Maker who disappears after setting things in motion. This God is not Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover." This is an unapologetically passionate and compassionate God, a God moved by and involved with humanity. God changing God's mind, baffling as it is, is actually a radical affirmation of the intimacy and passion of God. But I digress.... Here s Israel: stopped at the Fairfield Inn in Hubbard, Ohio for the night halfway to their dream, but not there yet. Here s Israel on the way to the place where everything is supposed to be as it ought to be, but not there yet. Here s Israel surrounded by the Sinai wasteland and dreaming of green land, but not there yet. - 2 -
Going someplace, but not there yet In a profoundly emblematic sense this is the place all of us are most of the time. What I mean is this: you and I are hopefully going someplace in life; we have dreams, we have destinations, but at any given point in the journey, we re always on the way. We re never totally there yet. This job s OK, but not quite the dream job. Three more semesters of graduate school and then the degree. The apartment s fine, but the kitchen needs to be redone. The church is in great shape, but we could be even more active, attendance could be better, there s so much more mission outreach we could do. My personal faith is growing, but I still have so many questions; there s so much I don't get yet. +++ It seems that God has planted in the human spirit this uniquely human ability to imagine, to dream of the ideal that we have never actually known. We alone among God s creatures have been entrusted with eyes for the perfect. Oddly and wonderfully, we are endowed with an inescapable capacity to imagine the ultimate that might be. And once we envision it, we ache for it, we long for it, and if we have courage we press toward it like Israel pressed toward that Promised Land they had never seen. Yet the reality is that our day-to-day lives are always lived short of this ideal we imagine. In a sense, all life is lived in the meantime, somewhere between memory and hope on the way, but not there yet. This in the meantime, this in between can be a hard place to live. It offers us what I would name a creative tension. It s the tension between living in, accepting, even enjoying, the reality of where we actually are right now, on the way, not quite the dream, short of the Promised Land. But at the same time, we still hold stubbornly to the hope, the dream, of the place for which we are bound, and most importantly, we still press on toward our Promised Land. - 3 -
Time and again, we are tempted to snap this tension. That s exactly what Israel did at the foot of the mountain in the 32nd chapter of Genesis when they abandoned hope in a God they could not see and demanded one that they could see and touch right now. In a little book called Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, a Roman Catholic devotional writer named David Steindl-Rast speculates that whenever we allow this tension to snap, we effectively allow hope to die. We let hope die, he says, in one of two ways. Either we become "compulsive settlers," afraid of the journey, ready to settle right here for what we've got and let the dream die. A compulsive settler on the way to the cottage on Lake Michigan would despair of the long journey and decide that the Fairfield Inn in Hubbard, Ohio must be as good as it gets and just settle in there. The other temptation, he says, is to become "aimless wanderers," people who love the journey, but have given up the hope that there s really anywhere better to go. An aimless wanderer would decide that there is no cottage by Lake Michigan; it s a myth, but you might as well wander around and enjoy the trip even though it s not really going anywhere. This virtue named hope is not at all the same thing as mere optimism. Optimism is the confidence that things will work out the way I want them to. Optimism is the confidence that my dreams will become reality in the way I dream them. Optimism assumes that my vision will be the one realized. Of course, such optimism is easily dashed. As we ve been reminded these last weeks, things often have a way of not always working out the way just we wanted them to. Hope is another matter altogether. Hope is the confidence that things will work out, but not necessarily the way I want them to work out. Hope trusts that there is a purpose that transcends my plans and desires. Hope trusts that there is a God whose providence is somehow woven into this life. Hope trusts that things may come to great good, though maybe not at all in the way I imagined, even perhaps in a way better that I could have imagined. Princeton theologian Joseph Pieper wrote extensively on the topic of hope. Pieper noted that hope is closely related in our minds to youthfulness. It is true not only in the sense that we expect young people to be full of hope, but he goes on to - 4 -
observe, older people if they have the virtue of hopefulness radiate an unexpected youthfulness. Hope anticipates the possibility, if not the probability, of surprise. Hope trusts that even though things may not work out my way, they will, in time, in time, unfold in some way that, by the grace of God, will be a blessing. Hope is open to surprise. Hope is open to the good hidden in that which we never planned on. Some 20 years ago, the New York Times ran a long story about Abyssinian Baptist Church up in Central Harlem and its pastor, Calvin Butts, III. Abyssinian Baptist Church is one of the greatest African-American churches in this country. It rises above 138th Street in Gothic splendor, and from its spire you can see just about anything that you d want. Back then you d actually look out from that spire and see everything that you d not want to see: burned-out buildings, shabby pawn shops, boarded-up store fronts, roach-infested corner groceries behind protective steel mesh, vacant lots doubling as illegal dumps, prostitutes and crack dealers, nights punctuated by gunfire and sirens. You'd think that churches even big ones like Abyssinian would have packed it all up and gone somewhere else. But not Abyssinian. Abyssinian organized a locally owned bank; they set up latchkey programs for high-rise children; they put together neighborhood redevelopment agencies; they conducted successful boycotts against price-gougers; they set up Bible studies in housing projects. In that New York Times story, someone said to Calving Butts, the minister, "Yeah, sure, you're doing great stuff, but it's hard to see what difference it's making; so what enables you folks to keep going?" The pastor answered, "Here's what. We've read the Bible and we know how it ends. We aren't at the end yet," he said, "but we know how it ends, and that's what makes the difference." - 5 -
So here we are as a world, as a nation, as a city, as a church, as individuals living in the meantime, living in the land that always lies just shy of the perfect Promised Land. In this meantime, in this land in between, we live in hope, we live in joy, but we do not settle in. Nor do we wander aimlessly. There is a destination. The place for which we are bound is real. So we resolutely press on, down the read to our Promised Lands. We can do this because, as the man said, we know how it ends, and that's what makes the difference". In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. (I am indebted to Ted Wardlaw, President of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, for his telling of the New York Times story about Calvin Butts.) - 6 -