Are You Ready?
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Sixth Sunday of Easter (A), May 14, 2023.
Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21
Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence (1 Peter 3:16)
This Sunday, we are called to a very specific task by Peter: that we always be ready to defend the hope that is within us.
The hope that is within us.
So, without further ado, I ask you this: are you ready? Are you ready to defend the hope that is in you?
If I were still a Baptist, and a Baptist preacher at that, I’d let that question sit for a minute –they can do that, you see, because they have a lot longer in the pulpit before people start getting antsy.
But really, are you ready?
As Christians, we should have a certain hope –a sure hope- one that depends not upon circumstance but upon our faith in a resurrected Lord. And we should, at all times and in all places, be ready to witness to that hope in word and in deed.
And so, I ask, are you ready?
Perhaps the first thing to do is to define this hope of which Peter speaks. Because hope is an oft-used word in our society, and yet not all hope is created equal.
We often use the word hope to express our desire that something happen in the way we wish it would –even if we don’t have much certainty that it will.
I hope this train leaves on time.
I hope that I get this job.
I hope it isn’t cancer.
All reasonable desires, of course, but not the Christian hope that I believe Peter speaks of. Desire is not necessarily hope.
Hope is often conflated with optimism. Also, not the same thing.
I don’t know if any of you read the New York Times “Modern Love” column, but there was a story several years ago that stuck with me. It was an article by Jenny Dolan about her diagnosis and her parents’ reaction.
Dolan writes, “Raised on Stephen Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People’ and ‘The Secret,’ I thought anything was possible. Becoming a child star, finding true love, even finishing Ulysses. Then, when I was 26, I couldn’t stop coughing.”
For years, doctors searched for an answer. Finally, after Dolan coughed up blood, a CT scan revealed that she had Cystic Fibrosis, an incurable lung disease.
At first, I didn’t make a big deal about my disease, she writes, because I didn’t want to scare my parents. As I learned more about it, though, I began to think they weren't scared enough. My parents were like balloons that wouldn’t pop.
“They’ll be a cure,” my mother told me over the phone.
“You don’t know that” I said.
“Yes, I do.”
To get my parents to face reality, I started quoting passages from a book about Cystic Fibrosis that said 85 percent of patients eventually acquire a bacteria and die.
“But maybe you’ll be the 15 percent who doesn’t get it,” my father said.
“Why worry about something that hasn’t happened yet?” my mother said.
“We just want you to have hope,” they said.
Their relentless hopefulness wasn’t inspiring. It was annoying, she continues. When I couldn’t get a job after graduate school, my mother said, “Why don’t you ask the universe for a job?”
“The universe gave me Cystic Fibrosis,” I said. [1]
Hope is not optimism. Hope is a different thing entirely. When things are at their darkest and most desperate, optimism on its own just will not do. It relies too much on our own resources, our own ability to save ourselves (which, ultimately, we just cannot do –and trust me, I’m as upset about this as anyone).
Optimism may look like hope or even speak of hope, but to speak of hope while refusing to meet squarely the reality of a situation –however hopeless it may seem –can be intolerable. Understandable, certainly, but intolerable just the same. Under these circumstances, optimism can rob us of the opportunity for something deeper and something far more powerful: a hope that connects us and sustains us –no matter what trials and tribulations we, or those we love, may face.
So, if not desire nor optimism, what is this hope of which Peter speaks?
Our Catechism –or Outline of the Faith- as found in the Book of Common Prayer beginning at page 845, defines the Christian hope in this way:
The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world (BCP 861).
Or put more simply: God has each of us, now and always.
And it reminds us that the sacraments –among those the bread and the wine that we share – sustain our present hope and anticipate its future fulfillment.
To look to Scripture is to see a similar definition of hope, one rooted in God’s promises and relationship with us.
And this hope is the food that we so desperately hunger for –the reason for all our false hopes, misguided hopes, misplaced hopes. Human beings desperately hope for and yet often do not hope with a certain assurance of God’s provision.
And yet Scripture meets our anxiety over what is unknown and our desperation for meaning beyond our present circumstances head on.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. This from the prophet Jeremiah (21:11).
Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. Ephesians. (1:18).
For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all people. First Timothy (4:10).
And one of my favorites: I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word, I hope. Psalm 130 (verse 5).
This is the hope of which Peter speaks, Peter who writes to a community going through tremendous trials –a people at risk of losing hope altogether. Not only does Peter assure them that their hope is rightly placed in Jesus, but he calls them to rejoice in this hope –even amid their present hardship. Because this hope to which they are called is a living hope –one that is true and always worth our defense.
And so, I ask, are you ready? Are you ready to defend the hope that is within you?
Barbara Kingsolver, in her novel Animal Dreams, writes:
The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
The Christian hope is not one of passive optimism, no matter how well-meaning. The Christian hope is and should be a motive force for right relationship and rightful action. We are meant to live under its roof.
For Jenny Dolan, the diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis was devastating; and the gap between that devastation and her parents’ optimism deeply grieved her. Their connection, their ability to find common ground in the love they shared, suffered.
Dolan thought constantly about how to pierce her parent’s shield of optimism. She writes:
One day, I broke: “Why is the present moment never good enough,’ I asked my mother. Why do things always have to be better? Why can’t you accept how things are now?”
Dolan reports, “Months later, in an act not of defeat but of love, my mother threw away her affirmation cards. They had said things like: “All is well in my world.” And, now they were trash, with the moldy fruit and remnants from a tuna can.
In the end, the facts remained the same. Dolan had cystic fibrosis, and the severity of the diagnosis, one commentator writes, “was no match for the optimism needed to deny her sadness. Finally, Jenny was able to confront the [pain] of her parents’ optimism, and it was only then that a new perspective could be heard. The shield of positive thinking fell. And something [more promising] —hope—came in its place.”
My friends, hope has a name. This we know. And that name is Jesus. Jesus whose life births hope, whose death secured hope, and in whose resurrection a sure and certain hope is claimed once and for all.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus leaves us with these words: I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you (John 14:18).
This promise is the grounding of our hope. It is what allows us to move through this world, one faithful step at a time, not in reliance on ourselves or on our present circumstances, but on God. And it is what deeply connects us, in love, to one another –fellow sojourners in our lives of faith –come what may.
Of course, this is not a hope that promises that our desires will be met, nor does it allow us the type of control our optimism might. But it is a certain hope, one worthy of defense. Because it rests in the knowledge that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (BCP 862).
So, what say you? Are you ready to defend the hope that is in you?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/style/modern-love-face-it-im-not-special.html.[2]