Traveling Light, Keeping Hope Alive

John 4.1-2, 16-17, 19-21

A sermon preached by Dave Shull,

second in a five-part Lenten Series, Traveling Light: Practicing Faith

February 20, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

The only way I know how to talk about hope is through stories.

Scared half to death, Nicodemus sneaks out in the middle of the night to visit Jesus (image in Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 122). He doesn’t think it would do his reputation any good for the neighbors to see a prominent Jewish leader fraternizing with a man who just announced the Temple was going to be destroyed. And Jesus proceeds to rock Nicodemus’ safe and reasonable faith.

‘Look, Nicodemus,’ Jesus says, ‘You have all your books that talk about God’s love. And those are fine. But you can’t really feel in your bones that God loves you just from reading about it. You can’t study about God’s love. You can only open yourself to it. And let God fall in love with you. That’s how God loves you, you know, Nicodemus. God has come to live with you, here and now, just to love you. How about it, Nicodemus? Will you let God fall in love with you?’

Nicodemus shows up one more time in John’s gospel. And his actions show this conversation with Jesus changes him. Now he knows God is in love with him. No longer does he sneak around at night, half-scared of what people will say or do. No. Confident of God’s love for him, Nicodemus shows up in the most risky place he could – by the side of Jesus when Jesus is crucified. John writes, ‘Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus at night, came now in broad daylight . . . and with Joseph of Arimathea, placed Jesus in the tomb’ (John 19.38-42).

Anyone who has come out from hiding into the healing light of day knows how Nicodemus felt. Maybe for the first time in a long time, he felt free. No prison could contain him any longer. We know when a closet, or an abusive relationship, or a secret shame has strangled life from us. And we know what happens when some miraculous love takes us in its arms and frees us for whole and lasting life. What happens is that a hope is born in us that no one can take away.

Another story about hope.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped lead his fellow South Africans into a new day many never dreamed would dawn. And even fewer had any hope that it would dawn without a full-scale civil war. Tutu saw this same reality. But his faith made him believe the evil racism of apartheid could be changed.

Once while Tutu was preaching, the dreaded South African Security Police broke into the cathedral. A witness describes what happened:

Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days.

After meeting their eyes with his steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power – ‘You are powerful,’ he said, ‘very powerful. But I serve a higher power greater than your political authority. I serve a God who cannot be mocked!’ Then, writes this eyewitness, ‘in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told these representatives of apartheid, ‘Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!’

From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, the eyewitness reported, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began dancing. (What is it about dancing, he asks, that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa (Jim Wallis, God’s Politics, HarperSanFrancisco, 2005, pp. 347-48).

In a time when daring to hope led to the imprisonment, torture, and execution of so many, Desmond Tutu lived the hope that dares to dream reality can be changed. His faith assured him no human power can keep God’s children in chains. God always stands on the side of justice-seekers who meet hate with a love that sings and dances because they know God has already won.

A final story.

A woman I’ll call Patricia had the most brutal history of any client I’d ever worked with. As a social worker on the south side of Chicago, I had met a lot of people who had suffered a lot of violent losses. But none had experienced Patricia had experienced. She had been sexually abused by a number of different people during most of the first 20 years of her life. A couple of her children had died from gang violence. Struggling to make ends meet with an alcoholic husband and with having to be the primary source of emotional, physical, and financial support for several of her grandchildren, there was no safety net for Patricia. She had no access to medical care, no access to medications she needed for her own mental illness, no access to sufficient funds for decent housing or food.

I couldn’t figure out how Patricia did it. How do you keep going when it doesn’t look like the future is going to be any different than the present, which isn’t any different than the past?

When I asked her where she found hope, her face lit up. ‘Well, Dave,’ she said, ‘my hope is in the Lord. Whenever I start to give up, I remember that story from the book of Daniel – the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the firey furnace. No fire could kill them because the Lord was with them. And that’s what keeps me going. I know no matter what fires I go through, the Lord is going to be with me.’

I remember one session when Patricia seemed particularly discouraged, and I was trying desperately to think of some way I could respond to the pain she had shared. Suddenly, Patricia started to sing.

I don’t feel no-way’s tired,

I’ve come too far from where I started from.

No one ever told me the road would be easy –

I don’t believe He’s brought me this far to leave me.

Nicodemus invites us to practice our faith by talking every day with Jesus, and letting him and the God he embodies fall in love with us.

Desmond Tutu invites us to practice our faith by seeing the broken part of creation God calls us to help heal, confident that faithful hearts working for justice can sing and dance against any human evil.

Patricia invites us to practice our faith by finding our story in the Bible and by walking through our firey furnaces, certain God is not going to leave us.

Nicodemus.

Desmond Tutu.

Patricia.

Three people who, against all odds, kept hope alive.

They couldn’t afford the luxury of only having ideas about God. Ideas about religion are never enough when what you love most is at risk. Ideas about religion are never enough.

These three people kept hope alive because they believed. Hope lived in them because they felt in their bones that God loved them and knew their names. Hope lived in them because they knew that God was with them as they sang and danced against human evil. Hope lived in them because they staked their lives on the promise that God would stay by their side no matter what. Amen.