Hope Amid The Rubble.
The transcript from my last sermon in Marquand, March 7, 2023.
Click above to access the video recording of this sermon, also found in the previous post.
We did not have to be, but we are.
For out of love, you desired us
Out of joy, you created us
And out of gentleness, you guide us.
So abide with us here, abide with us today.
Good morning Marquand Chapel!
Friends, I need to confess… I am TIRED.
We are 67 days into the new year and I confidently say that I. Am. Wiped. Is anyone else feeling the same way?
67 days have passed, and yet it has felt like three decades have passed. I recently got a haircut, and while I am making peace with the salt and pepper that will inevitably season my scalp, I am by no means ready to be so easily called out by my barber. BUT alas, here we are: a new heaven and a new Earth. What a glorious and beautiful passage for this morning.
As I was looking through the lectionary for today, a vivid, and bittersweet memory came to mind. For those of us who’ve been around the bend a few times, you may remember this. If not – let me set the stage:
It was December 2019, I was a third year MDIV, and it was the Advent Service – the theme was “A New Heaven and A New Earth”. Imagine the chapel with me, colors of blue, orange, purple, lights painted these walls, music was thundering, enveloping, and together, we spoke of the past and looked towards the future, hopeful that the world as we knew it, would be turned upside down.
And then… well, it did.
Little did we know, that the world would tumble, thrash, stretch, plummet, and in many ways, break.
Before we could even comprehend it, we were exiled from one another. And we tried, we tried, we tried, to hold on to anything that felt familiar, to zoom calls and virtual celebrations, we built digital orchards and practiced one-click goodbyes, we learned to speak with our eyes and savored presence wherever we could find it--
Six feet never felt so close.
We pieced together what we could, and tried, tried, and tried again. But as the days turned into weeks, weeks into months, this global pandemic enveloped us in this shadow of death, and I saw something happen:
Things fell apart.
Worn down by so much grief, anger, rage, and pain, witnessing the crumbling of the world, we learned to live amid the debris. And even more so, we learned to live and IGNORE the debris.
We ignored the fatigue, we pretended that our feet didn’t hurt from walking on rubble, that the stones didn’t cut our skin, that our muscles weren’t sore trying to keep the proverbial sky from falling, and we called it survival.
We kept moving and producing, we learned to sprint in marathons, with no breaks, no pauses, and we called it resilience.
But mike — MIKE, WE NEEDED TO KEEP MOVING. And I get it! I DO.
The wounds were too deep, and we NEEDED to move on. Life didn’t stop. Why should we? Because if we stopped, if we allowed ourselves the space to truly sit with the reality we were in…
Then the groans would be too deep, the tears would be too great, the pain and sadness would find no place to hold it all — the cup had runneth over.
Things fell apart; and the center could no longer hold.
We couldn’t hold it together. And here we were, living amid the ruins of what once was.
I can’t help but wonder that this too is what the Israelites felt, that after their own exile and devastation, that they too found themselves amidst the ruins.
“Your sacred cities have become a wasteland… Jerusalem a desolation...our holy and glorious temple, where our ancestors praised you has been burned with fire, and ALL that we treasured lies in ruins.”
And I imagine that in the ruins, amid everything, they CRIED. They lamented. They GRIEVED.
What would happen if we allowed ourselves to do the same?
If instead of barreling our way back, we allowed ourselves to be still —
To be still, and hold the fragments of what once was,
To be still, and let those groans out,
To be still, and let the cup overflow with our tears?
WHAT IF I told you that to grieve, To mourn, to see the broken things, was not only a deeply human thing to do, but a holy thing? A holy act of love and hope?
To mourn what was lost, to lament the ruins, doesn’t mean that we are ruined – but rather, it means that we have leaned into the fullest of our humanity – we have loved FULLY AND DEEPLY.
Now I’m a big fan of video games, and if any of you have played God of War: Ragnarok, this is a small spoiler alert; but in it, Kratos, the main character, really struggles with his (then alive) wife preparing him for her eventual death. He couldn’t imagine what his life, his world, would be without her. But Faye, takes Kratos and tells him, “To grieve deeply is to have loved fully.”
And if we have loved so fully, with every fiber of our being, then it also means that we opened ourselves up to be vulnerable to EVERYTHING – ALL THAT COULD COME AND ALL THAT COULD BE.
If we’ve done it before, then I believe, we can do it again. This, my friends, I believe is the genesis of hope.
Hope not so much as a belief, but a practice in vulnerability, a practice in looking beyond the ruins, beyond what we could ever imagine, and so we look ahead, with a small sense of uncertainty.
And beloveds, here this is where God meets us. Here is where God reveals Godself to us, to help us imagine the impossible. And then some.
“SEE, I WILL CREATE”, God tells us.
Not I might, or maybe, or “eh, I’ll think about it”, no, God interrupts our creaturely ambiguity with divine certainty. Staring us straight in the face, God gives the kind of promise only God can:
I will create new heavens and a new earth,
Be glad and rejoice in what I will create,
I will create Jerusalem, I will rejoice,
I WILL. I WILL. I WILL.
This is a God of sheer will, a God will not, will not let us forget that not only is She present, but he is working.
This is the God who is not finished yet. This is the God has not forgotten the lowly, just as he never forgot Israel, she has not forgotten about Cashay Henderson, Judy Heumann, Monterey Park, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, God has not forgotten.
“For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people,” God reminds us that indeed the BEST, is yet to come.
But until then – while God continues to work, what is our response, beloveds? What do we do now?
Because the truth is, we are still living in ruins. The truth is, the rubble has not left us. Though we have tried to ignore it, to brush it aside, we are still in it. and you know, what that is OH KAY.
Because I think, we can do something different.
I think maybe, we can learn to move a little slower, take a little more time with what we’ve lost, allow ourselves to break, just a little bit more.
Because I think in that, we can leave a little more room for something new to come about.
Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not going to be easy – I know we’re fragile, and at any moment, we may just burst. But as Dr. Jennings reminds us, hope is not only a practice, but it is a discipline. And so I offer this to you:
I am a big comic fan – and have always felt a lot of love for the Lantern Corps, specifically the Green and Blue. The oath of the Blue Lantern Corps goes like this:
In fearful day, in raging night,
with strong hearts full,
our souls ignite.
When all is lost in the war of light,
look to the stars, for hope shines bright!!
Hope, hope is the candle we light as an act of love.
Hope is what comes out of our grieving.
It is what arrives when we are faced with the impossible,
it is what we do to remind ourselves that God is still here and not finished yet.
Hope are the bricks we place for God to do God’s thing.
Will we look for hope today? Will we practice it?
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. For they will be a people blessed by the Lord. ”
God…I hope so.