St. Paul’s Church in
Bergen, Jersey City NJ
August 21, 2016
Year C, Proper 16:
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17
People of Hope
From
today’s psalm:
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
Yesterday
marked the fifty-first anniversary of the death of one of my heroes, Jonathan
Myrick Daniels. You may not know him, but you should.
Jonathan
Daniels, a white man born in New Hampshire in 1939, was an Episcopal seminarian
- he was studying to be a priest back in the 1960s when the Civil Rights
Movement in our country was reaching its peak.
Daniels,
along with a few of his seminary classmates, heard and answered the call of
Martin Luther King, Jr. to journey to the South and support the efforts to
march and protest, to do the nonviolent but quite dangerous work of dismantling
Jim Crow, of undoing the laws and practices that so sorely oppressed people of
color.
Lots
of northern whites answered Dr. King’s call. But, you know how it is, lots of
people get enthused about causes like this but then they march and protest for
a while and then they get tired or homesick or lose interest and they feel like
they’ve done their bit so they head home, beginning a lifetime of telling the
story of their role in the movement.
Not
Jonathan Daniels.
Although
he did return to school briefly to deal with academic matters, he essentially
moved to the South, living with a black family in Selma, Alabama, the heart of
what was the racist South.
On
August 14, 1965, Daniels and 28 other protesters were arrested for picketing in
front of whites-only stores. They were jailed in the nearby town of Hayneville.
Six
days later they were released and, while waiting for rides home, Daniels and a
white Roman Catholic priest and two black female activists went to buy cold
drinks at one of the few stores that served both black and white customers.
When
they got there, a white man who was an unpaid sheriff’s deputy stood at the door
holding a shotgun with a pistol in a holster.
He
threatened the four activists and aimed his gun at one of them, Ruby Sales, a
seventeen year-old young black woman. In a flash, Jonathan Daniels pushed Ruby
down, saving her life, but he was shot and killed on the spot – an Episcopal
martyr for civil rights.
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
In
an essay he wrote a few months before he was killed, Jonathan Daniels drew a
distinction between optimism and hope.
Listen
to this. He wrote:
“Christian
hope, grounded in the reality of Easter, must never degenerate into optimism.”
Now,
I bet that we often think that optimism and hope are basically the same thing –
we often use the words interchangeably, right?
But,
as British rabbi Jonathan Sacks has noted, “Optimism is a passive virtue, hope
an active one. It needs no courage, only a certain naivete, to be an optimist.
It takes a great deal of courage to have hope.”
Until
recently, we Americans have been known for our optimism. We’ve believed in the
power of positive thinking. We’ve always believed that our lives will be better
than our parents’ lives and our kids will do even better than us.
We’ve
believed that we can continue to consume like crazy, gobbling up as many resources
as we can, and that we can ignore the deep-rooted problems in our society, and
there will be no price to pay. Somehow, it’ll all work out just fine for us.
But,
recently our optimism has begun to crack as we’ve realized that there are
limits to our growth, that some of us aren’t living as well as our parents and
who knows what our kids will have to face in a country that has replaced
good-paying manufacturing jobs with working the line at Wendy’s - or nothing at
all.
Recently,
that optimism has begun to crack into the fear, anger, and resentment we’ve
heard so much of in this election season.
Recently,
that optimism has begun to crack as we swelter through the record-breaking heat
of another summer, as parts of Miami regularly flood at high tide, and as much
of Louisiana has been washed away.
Recently,
that optimism has begun to crack as we see the frustration of people of color
in our cities reach a breaking point, as gunshots ring out in our city nearly every
night, kids shooting kids, as seventeen year-old Leander Williams, carrying a
gun at a party in a church hall on Communipaw Avenue, is shot and killed,
joining a long line of young lives lost and wasted.
It’s
pretty easy, at least when things are going our way, to be an optimist but it
takes courage to have hope – it takes courage to actually go out there, to make
a difference, trusting in God.
We
Christians are meant to be people of hope.
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
Living
and working in places like Selma, Alabama, I’m sure that Jonathan Daniels
wasn’t overly optimistic that racism was going to be dismantled anytime soon –
and half a century after his death we’ve recently been reminded how far we
still have to go – but he was inspired by the rock-solid hope of Dr. King that
the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
We
Christians are meant to be people of hope.
And,
then there’s the poor, suffering woman in today’s gospel lesson, bent over,
we’re told, for 18 long years! Luke tells this story to show yet another
conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment, but I’m interested in
her.
Who
knows, maybe at the start of her
illness she was optimistic that she’d get better, but after 18 years of
suffering, I’m sure any optimism had long since cracked and disintegrated. Yet,
there she is, still dragging herself to the synagogue where I’m going to guess
that maybe some people still felt compassion for her, but by now most had long
since stopped caring, or even noticing her.
But,
despite 18 years of suffering, there she was, a courageous woman of hope, still
presenting herself to God, still trusting that God hadn’t forgotten her, that
God would never let her go.
And
then, one day, Jesus was at the synagogue, too.
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
As
Jonathan Daniels understood very well. Jesus himself is not particularly
optimistic. Throughout his ministry, he’s perfectly clear-eyed about what’s
going to happen to him and he warns his disciples that if they’re looking for
an easy, comfortable, safe life, well, they’ve got the wrong messiah.
Jesus
isn’t optimistic but he is the supreme person of hope, courageously abandoning
a simple and anonymous life back in the Nazareth carpentry shop, abandoning
that to walk the road that leads to the hard wood of the cross, sacrificing his
life, giving it all away, in the hope that his Father and our Father would
never let go of him.
And
then, the tomb was empty on Easter Day.
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
And
now, it’s our turn.
It’s
pretty easy, at least when things are going our way, to be an optimist, but it
takes courage to have hope – it takes courage to actually go out there into our
broken and sinful world, to make a difference, trusting in God all the way.
We
Christians are meant to be people of hope.
Each
in our own way, we’re called to join Jesus and the woman bent over for 18 years
and Jonathan Daniels and Martin Luther King and all the prophets and saints,
all the people of hope, the people of hope who knew that the road would be
stony indeed, the courageous people who placed their hope in God – loved and
strengthened by the God who never lets go of us.
“For
you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.”
Amen.
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