Austin Almaguer Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church October 27, 2013 11:00 service Dallas, Texas The Spirit of Hope Joel 2:23-32 I sat there transfixed by Alice as she talked about her life. My apartment seemed to melt away from around my computer screen as I sat across from the elderly pianist in flat number six of the London apartment building. At 109, Alice Herz-Sommer is the oldest living Holocaust survivor in the world. She shares stories from her life with captivating honesty; proudly proclaiming that music saved her life. But this is no exaggeration, as she tenderly tells the story of her time in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during WWII. I learned from Alice that Theresienstadt was a special camp established by the Nazis as a propaganda tactic. Here Jewish celebrities, intellectuals and artists were brought temporarily before being transferred to Auschwitz. The prisoners of Theresienstadt were made to write and perform plays, musicals and symphonies while the Nazis filmed these performances in order to fool the world into believing the Jews were being treated well. Alice, an accomplished concert pianist, was spared from Auschwitz because of her incredible ability to play from memory entire libraries of classical music. So Alice performed over a hundred concerts in Theresienstadt as she played to save her life and the life of her son in a world of violence and death. 1 The darkness and despair Alice faced in the Holocaust is not so distant from the world of Joel. The prophet begins his work by telling of the devastation that has swept through Israel. Before even mentioning the threat of human empires like Persia and Phoenicia, the prophet describes the plague of locusts that ravaged the nation. The swarm of insects devoured all the crops and destroyed entire fields. You couldn t move without stepping on them; they were coming in through windows and cracks to eat everything in sight. For a people whose entire livelihood relied on what they could grow, the sight of dead crops and fields painted yellow and brown was almost too much to bear. Mothers looked helplessly into the eyes of starving children. As if matters couldn t get any worse, drought and wildfire came to ravage the countryside. The situation was so severe that the prophet says even the land mourned and the animals cried out to God. 2 Foreign armies threatened to invade as a deep despair filled both the human community and the natural world. 1 Alice Herz-Sommer, Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor And Pianist, Shares Music And Wisdom In New Film (17 Oct 2013), <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/alice-herz-sommer-lady-innumber-6-documentary-_n_4117013.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news>. 2 Joel 1:10, 20
This is a tragic picture to imagine, and to be honest, this was a difficult situation to read about as I wrote this sermon. It may not be swarms of locusts, but issues of hopelessness, endless suffering and pain have dominated Alison s and my conversations recently. You see, an issue that isn t talked about much in the lives of ministers is our constant encounters with suffering and death. Each week the pastoral staff of Wilshire visit all of our members undergoing treatment in hospitals, whether that s chemo or setting broken bones. We visit people recovering in rehab centers and those making the transition to hospice care. Our calling is not just to celebrate with the church on the joyous occasions of weddings and baby dedications, but to journey with people through the darkness of disease and death. For Alison, who is serving as a chaplain at Parkland hospital, her experience of all of this is magnified. Every day she ministers to women and men struggling with addiction, suffering after an accident, and consoling families in the wake of a death. Some days, we both come home feeling like we are carrying a heavy weight that is pulling us down. But I don t think we have some sort of special martyrdom; I think all of us here today know all too well what hopelessness feels like. We have been, currently are, or will be in situations that seem impossible to escape. We have lost loved ones, we have family undergoing treatment, we are struggling to find a job the list goes on. 2 As one problem gives birth to another, as one trouble is compounded by another, it s tough to see any way out. The silver lining, the light that s suppose to be at the end of the tunnel at times seems an impossible distance away and at other times disappears from view. We find ourselves struggling with those age-old questions, Where is God? Why has God abandoned me? We look at our lives much like the Israelites looked at their fields ravaged by despair and emptied of promise and hope. We join the weeping and cries of all creation longing for new life. But then, like a reporter with breaking news, Joel announces, O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God; for he has given the early rain for your vindication! 3 The story of hopelessness is interrupted with news of great joy. Hope has appeared where all seemed lost. God has made a way out of no way. And we are left with our heads spinning trying to figure out what happened. We were just in a place of great sorrow; how did we arrive at a place of such joy? Shouldn t there be more groaning and weeping? Then the LORD became jealous for his land and had pity on his people, the prophet tells us. God takes no delight in our sufferings. Like a parent with a sick newborn, God agonizes over our troubles and weeps over our misfortunes. Yes, the picture we get of God throughout the Hebrew Bible is a god filled with passion. This god 3 Joel 2:23
experiences jealousy and pity. We see God showing the kind of divine passion (and compassion) that brings deliverance instead of destruction. The Israelites see this deliverance appear as abundant rain quenches the drought, new grain fills hungry bellies and empty lands, and Israel s fortunes are completely reversed. But God has only just begun as we read, Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. 4 When God decides to pour out the Spirit, it is always significant. God isn t just saying there will be an extra serving of the divine presence for the people at dinner tonight. God isn t saying the people will walk around with a warm fuzzy feeling inside because the Spirit is with them. The truth we discover throughout the Bible is that whenever the Spirit of God comes upon people, extraordinary things happen. The Spirit of God comes to people who don t feel like they have it all together, people with messy families who never feel like they have all the right answers, and calls them to ministry. The Spirit comes to everyone who has ever given up on God or themselves or believing in miracles and creates fresh hope. The Spirit of God interrupts stories of hopelessness, shakes up places of despair and creates new life wherever it goes. This is not just a nice dream for me to preach about; this is a reality that we can live into. Our church is filled with people who have experienced the 4 Joel 2:28 3 power of God at work in their lives. If I took a moment to pass around a microphone, maybe you would have a story to share. A story of the time you told Joan you would never serve in the preschool department because you re just not good with kids and now find yourself unable to imagine life without teaching Sunday school. A story of answered prayer for healing when the diagnosis wasn t good or recovery seemed unlikely. Yet we also have stories from people who didn t get a miraculous healing but still find God at work making the broken pieces of their life whole again. We re not a community of perfect people. We re a community of squeaking wheels and rickety bikes held together by the love and power of the Holy Spirit. I felt this energy as I listened to Alice Herz-Sommer talk about her life. Her story, as one biographer put it, wasn t about surviving, it wasn t defined by being traumatized or about loss, but about learning how to live and have a true sense of your call in life. 5 As she played her concerts in Theresienstadt, Alice recognized her performances were not just entertainment but were beautiful moments that gave others encouragement. Even in the face of hopelessness, Alice knew the music she played could inspire hope. So she does not live a life defined by her experiences of tragedy; instead she believes her whole life has been about discovering beauty in the midst of life s 5 Alice Herz-Sommer: Thoughts on Her Mental Attitude and Grace (7 Sep 2013), <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtxm9e9hwra>.
ugliness. She says, I knew that even in this very difficult situation there are beautiful moments I have lived through many wars and have lost everything many times...yet, life is beautiful, and I have so much to learn and enjoy. I have no space nor time for pessimism and hate. 6 Throughout her life, Alice has learned to pay attention to the beauty that breaks forth, interrupting the ugly hopelessness. She remains, at 109, vibrant and filled with a sense of well being grown from her commitment to the music that inspires her. Her hope is not naïve, her faith is not ignorant but is rooted in thesense that we only discover meaning in our troubles long after the fact. The hope we discover, as one author wrote, comes like watching a movie. A movie, he says, consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn t it the same with life? Doesn t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end? 7 6 Alice Herz-Sommer, Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor And Pianist, Shares Music And Wisdom In New Film (17 Oct 2013), <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/alice-herz-sommer-lady-innumber-6-documentary-_n_4117013.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news>. 7 Frankl, Viktor. Man s Search For Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 143-144. 4 All of us face both struggles and triumphs in life, and in those moments it is often hard to see the meaning of the whole film. But the life of Alice and our reading from Joel remind us of the ways God works to create meaning from the chaos and connection from the fragments of our lives. That no matter how severe our situation, no matter how impossible our circumstance, God is not finished with us yet. The light at the end of the tunnel may seem far, but the light of Christ is with us as we go. This is the good news, because at the heart of the Christian message is belief that the Spirit of God that inspired the prophets and delivered the Israelites, the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, is at work in our community. This was Peter s sermon at Pentecost; quoting Joel, he told the crowd gathered that God was still at work. The Spirit had only just begun to change lives. God has not reserved the best miracles for a time long ago that we can only read about in the Bible. God is still in the business of healing and hope. And we ve only just begun to see what God can do. That s what excites me about being a Christian; it s what excites me about being a pastor. I have the best job ever. Each week I am blessed with the opportunity to tell people that God loves them. That it doesn t matter how ugly your past may be or how dark your future seems; God is coming to pour out the Spirit on you. God is at work to renew our hope and refresh
our sense of beauty. We need only to welcome that invitation. We only need to become people so gifted with the Holy Spirit that our lives become marked by the gifts of faith, hope and love. Today, you are blessed with the opportunity to be a bearer of God s peace to others. To tell people of all the wonderful things God has done for you. And Wilshire, can I tell you something? We ve only just begun. We ve only just begun to see what God is going to do in this church and in all the world. So today, won t you join me in hearing the good news of God s love? Will you join me in becoming driven and fired by the Spirit? And will you take the love of God and the love of others to the ends of the Earth? 8 Amen. 8 Limburg, James. Hosea-Micah in Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 68. 5