A sermon given December 16, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Come into this gathering of kindred spirits,

and find here a place to rest from the busyness of this season.

Let us kindle here the flame of hope

that in a world where there is war and devastation,

there might be peace and justice and love.

Let us kindle here a flame of hope,

that in our lives we will be inspired to bring our light into the world.

Come, now, and let us worship here together.

Last week in coffee hour I asked a congregant how he was doing. He said he was doing fine, and then he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I’m OK—given the times we’re in.” He said for the past couple months he feels like he has been living with a low-grade depression. The holiday season feels a little different this year.

I can relate to his feeling this season, and it seems to echo a good deal of what I’ve been hearing from a number of folks these past few weeks—we’re fine… but. There is an overlay of sadness this year. There is also an overlay of anxiety about the future. We live with the daily images of the bombing and bloodshed in Afghanistan. We see the response here at home—the good of people coming together and helping others, the frightening images of rights taken away because we are in war mode. We see images of a smiling and boastful Osama bin Laden. And we live with the fear of what might be happening next. Just a couple days ago came the news that Oregon has the highest unemployment rate in the country right now—that one in 14 people is without work.

Even in normal years, this season is a paradox for me. There’s the wonderful music, the lights on houses, the smell of pine and homemade cookies. There is the joy of the connecting with people we are not in touch with the rest of the year. But there is also the business, and the expectations that seem to come with the season in our culture. There’s that expectation for some that it needs to be the best Christmas ever. We have the expectations that come with family, and some of those we’d probably like to avoid. And there can be the loneliness that comes when we are alone by ourselves or alone with the people we’re with. In the midst of all the festivity, it may be we don’t feel all that festive.

We look to this season as a time of hope.

Hope is fundamental to being human. It is fundamental to how we see ourselves in the world. To how we look to the future. Hope is connected to our awareness of the passing of time. When we look out into the future, we don’t know what it will be. We live with the awareness that we are all going to die, that we will not be around forever. But we also live with the awareness that we are not the end. We live with the awareness that others will follow us.

Where hope comes from I’m not sure. But I do know that it is important. “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life,” said the Swiss theologian Emil Bruner. It is important how we see our lives and what we want them to be. When we are in despair, it is the thing that gets us through the most difficult of times. When all else is gone, we want hope to still be there.

Rick Snyder is a psychologist at the University of Kansas. He has developed what he calls a hope scale to measure just how hopeful people are. He has discovered that the hope scale is a more accurate predictor of college success than measures like the SAT or ACT. He says it’s not that high-hope people are smarter; it’s the way their minds work. Present them with an obstacle and they immediately start planning what they want to do about it and what path might prove most productive. Low-hope people look at the same obstacle and think, “Oh boy, here comes another failure.”

Snyder says being hopeful is a way of thinking about goals in your life, believing that you can define those goals, and having the motivation to meet those goals. Hope, he says, is almost entirely learned from building on success in manipulating one’s immediate environment, beginning in earliest infancy. And the absence of such success, whether the result of abuse, neglect, or the physical loss of a caring adult, is also learned. You believe you can set goals and carry them out to the degree you have successfully set goals and carried them out in the past. He is convinced that hope can be taught and learned. In fact, he has begun research into teaching the characteristics of hopefulness as a way of treating anxiety and depression.

I’m intrigued by his study and what he has to say. I agree that it seems for some, the world is awful and it is against them. The glass, as they say, is half empty. All the defenses are in place to make sure they are not hurt.

And there are those who seem to always know that the world is there to embrace them. And they live that way. No matter what comes their way, they dig in and decide they will overcome it.

The movie Amelie, currently playing in town, is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. Amelie is a young woman in Paris. She grows up isolated and alone and is forced to create a wonderful world inside of her head. As an adult, she delights at the world. She makes it her mission to bring people together, to make them stop and see things in new ways. She lives life with a delightful sense of playfulness.

How we view life does make a difference. Think of the stories from the Holocaust. The people who survived the death camps often were the ones who were the most determined to live. They were the ones who were able to know what their captors could and could not take from them. They were able to see what freedom they did have and to live out of that.

Where does that kind of drive come from? I don’t know. Sometimes it is not until we are faced with hard news that we find out where we are. We are slapped with the diagnosis of the illness or we suddenly lose a loved one. All of a sudden, an important relationship is breaking up and we don’t know what we’re going to do. We become disillusioned at work. All of a sudden we come to the awareness that life is not going quite the way we had hoped it would.

It is in times like this that we are most need hope. It is in these times when we don’t quite know what else we can do. It is hope that allows us to see the future. Through the pain of the moment we can see that there is something to hold on to. We can imagine a path, even if it is not clear where it will lead. It will at least get us to the next place where we need to be.

I’m also a little skeptical about the extent to which we can learn hopefulness. Truth is, we may not know how we’ll respond until we are in a desperate place. We make choices about how we respond, but it is also true that if we lose hope, we lose hope, it can be hard to find.

As a minister, I’m always amazed to see how we do at such times. I’m amazed at the way we have of looking to the future. I’m amazed that even when our lives have taken a very hard turn, that we are able to find meaning in what is going on.

I think of sitting with a young mother once who just lost her baby in the middle of the pregnancy. She looked up at me, tears streaming down her face, saying, “Right now this hurts so much, but I know there will be meaning in all of this.”

I think of the man who learns that he is going to die in just a few weeks after living with cancer for years. He says, “I am at peace with this. My life has been good. I’m not afraid.” There is something that rises up in the spirit, and I’m always amazed when I see this happen.

There’s a limit to how much we can prepare for such a time. But what we can do is to live in the moment and to appreciate all that the moment has to offer to us. To be able to see the beauty that is before us, even when we might want to push everything away. In any moment we need to be aware of what we are thankful for and also to know where our hope is.

Writer Barbara Kingsolver says, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but to live right in it, right under its roof.”

We are called to find hope when we find ourselves under its roof. It is when it hits close to home that we are most in need. What can happen at such a time is that we see things in a different light. What we once took for granted we see with new eyes, and we may have an appreciation we didn’t have before.

Hope is a very personal thing. But there is also a very important communal dimension. It is when we are most down that we need to be reminded that we are not alone. We need to be reminded that others are with us in our struggles. Others can help us get to that place of hope.

Some years ago a teacher was assigned to visit children in a large city hospital. One day she received a call requesting that she visit a particular child. She took the boy’s name and room number and was told by the teacher on the other end of the line, “We’re studying nouns and adverbs in his class now. I’d be grateful if you could help him with his homework so he doesn’t fall behind the others.”

It wasn’t until the visiting teacher reached the boy’s room that she realized it was located in the hospital’s burn unit. No one had prepared her to find a young boy horribly burned and in great pain. And yet, having entered the room, she felt that she couldn’t just turn around and walk out, so she awkwardly stammered, “I’m the hospital teacher, and your teacher sent me to help you with nouns and adverbs. I’ll be coming to see you each day so we can work together.”

The next morning the teacher returned and the nurse on the burn unit asked her, “What did you say to that boy?” Before the teacher could finish a profusion of apologies, the nurse interrupted her: “You don’t understand. We’ve been very worried about him, but ever since you were here yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He’s fighting back, responding to treatment ... It’s as though he’s decided to live.”

She walked into the boy’s room and his face lit up. She asked him how he was doing and he told her that he had completely given up hope until he saw that teacher. With joyful tears he said: “They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?”

We are asked to pay attention to what is happening around us and be present to that—to be present to the despair of the world, and also the beauty that is around us. We are asked to be there for and with others. From all of this comes hope.

We must be able to cultivate a sense of hope in the world and live out of that place. It is not that we deny bad things that are happening. It is in the very act of recognizing all that is our life that we see it for what it is. We see the world in its wonder and despair. We imagine what it will be one day, even when we are no longer here. We make a path and find hope along the way.

I recently read a story about some people who care a great deal about some endangered whooping cranes. Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America, standing at five feet tall and having a seven-foot wingspan. There are just 400 whooping cranes left in the world. There is just one migrating flock of about 170 birds that summer in Canada and winter on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Scientists say it is crucial to establish another migrating flock in case disease or natural disaster should wipe out the other.

Researchers have been raising the young cranes in Wisconsin and decided it was time to teach them to fly south. The birds don’t actually know what a human looks like. People around them have been wearing baggy white costumes. When it came to the trip south to Florida, they needed guides, so the humans in the project used ultra-light planes to guide them. They were again dressed up in white costumes as they flew the planes so the birds would not get acquainted with humans.

It was thought that the trip would take just a few days, but that was not the way it happened. Turns out they were grounded 23 times by bad weather. One bird was electrocuted on a power line in Indiana. Another bird, thought to be the smartest in the bunch, refused to fly with the rest of the flock. Special arrangements needed to be made for that one.

The idea is that the birds will learn the route south and in the next years, more birds will be taught the route and eventually they will be able to make the trip on their own.

The trip was a lot harder than planned, but a few days ago, they made it, humans and all. The image of costumed ultra light pilots brings a smile to my face. They are on a mission.

Emily Dickinson was right: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

None of us know what the future will bring. In these uncertain times, we are all the more aware of that. What we do know is that it is important to join with others, it is important to know we are not alone. It is important to imagine the world we want to live in, and then to move out of that vision into the future. We need to have a purpose. We need to know we are headed somewhere.

Living with hope comes with a willingness to be open to life. That means all the meanness of life, but also all of the beauty. It is good that there are people willing to dress up in big white floppy costumes and risk their lives and fly with endangered whooping cranes imagining one day when the whooping cranes will no longer be endangered and flying to their winter home all on their own.

It is good that we do all the things we do, each of us in our own way, to nurture a sense of hope in the world.  It is important when we teach children. It is important when we reach out to a person in need. And as we reach out and kindle that hope in others, it seems that we are nourished in the end ourselves.

For me, I mainly need to pay attention.

The week before last I was back in Wisconsin to see my Aunt Helen. She is very dear to me, and she has been in a nursing home for the past three months. Her health is up and down, but currently she can’t stand on either one of her knees and so she has to be in the nursing home to get the help she needs. She hopes to get home before too long, but it is also a reality that she may not be able to go home.

I went back to visit because I wanted to see her. She is a person full of life and it was difficult to see her be so frustrated and not to be able to go home. As I left the place, I was feeling pretty sad. I didn’t know what the future held for her. I wanted to be able to take her from there, but knew that I could not.

As I was going out, I saw a man who looked familiar. It was Fuzzy Peterson. I’ve known Fuzzy as long as I can remember. I don’t know what his real legal name is—he’s just always been Fuzzy. When I was little he fell into the creek by our house one night as he came back from ice fishing and after having quite a few too many beers. One of my brothers happened to be going by the creek and heard something and pulled him out. It was a tale he would tell for years and years to come.

Anyway, I was leaving the nursing home where Aunt Helen is staying, and I had heard Fuzzy was there as well. He now has Alzheimer’s, I’m told, and doesn’t know anybody. I was walking out and there he was; he looked just like I remember him looking when I was little. The same scruffy, round, face. His eyes perked up just like he knew me, he got a big smile on his face and he winked—just like he did when I was little.

And for a moment I was reminded that it will all work out, however it works out. Aunt Helen is going to be OK. Fuzzy Peterson is going to be OK. I’m going to be OK.

How do we cultivate hope? I’m not sure I have many answers. In my life I learn so much from all of you. I see people struggling with all kinds of things, very hard things, and still looking forward with a grounding in hope.

I’m usually reminded when cold rain splashes on my face. When I the Heavenly Hosts come down the aisle for the Christmas pageant.  I learn when I see the very real responses to all that is happening in our world. That in the responses I see, I know that we are connected to others in pain and also to others in their joy. That as we see ourselves in them, and them in us, we are together, and that is the place where we will start. 

Hope is not a logical thing. I’m not sure how much we can make it happen.

But is this not the reason that we are together here? To come to be inspired, to celebrate what is most important in life? To come together to vision a world we want for ourselves and our children, and to try then make that vision manifest in the world?

In this time of Hanukkah we celebrate like those who have gone before us that the light continues to burn even when there was not enough oil. We come to be reminded that even when our own light goes out, it can be rekindled with the spark from another person.

In the child in the manger we see our future, we see the hope of the world. That even when all of us are gone, there will be those who will go after us. We can see the future and know that the world, in all its beauty and despair, will be here, and that they, just like us, will struggle, and live, and learn.

We need hope, and the world need us and needs our hope. When there is nothing else, this is what we have. And it is enough. It will be all that we need.  Amen.

PRAYER

Great spirit, kindle in us a spirit of hope. Hold us as we live in this world of division. Help us to be agents of peace. Help us to be agents of love and justice. Help us to know hope in our lives. May we bring that hope in service to the common good. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know joy this season, good people. May you live in hope, now and in all of your days.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.