This summer at Second, our focus is scripture’s
promises for people of faith and doubt. The
assumption behind that theme is that all of us
are both, that we have faith, and we wrestle with
doubt. I’m not sure about you, but sometimes I can
experience both faith and doubt in a single hour. And
we are also, I think it fair to say, people of both hope
and despair. Often in roughly equal measure. We cling
to hope. We are overwhelmed with despair.
If this description feels familiar to you, then the
scripture you just heard might seem naïve or
unhelpful in its simplicity. The words of the prophet
Jeremiah publish a promise. The promise is this: God
is in charge. And because of that, a hopeful future
lies ahead. God has a plan. A plan for wholeness, for
peace, for shalom, for welfare. A plan for blessing a
future of hope.
Having heard the promise, we might wish we had
the opportunity for a rebuttal. Which news sites are
you reading, Jeremiah? How do these words land in
the heart of graduates who look to what is next with
anxious worry? How do they sound to those who
are grieving loss—a loved one, a relationship, a job,
a sense of confidence, a former strength now lost, a
dream whose time has passed? Where is the hope
for those who daily experience physical or emotional
pain? And what about all of us who have desperately
prayed that the future would be brighter for our
children and our grandchildren, and who now wonder
if our best days are in fact behind us? What is the
source of your hope, Jeremiah? What kind of world
are you living in?
That’s a good question, and the answer might surprise
you. What kind of world was Jeremiah living in?
Jeremiah’s active life, his prophetic career, coincided
with the greatest crisis in the history of his people.
He lived through a period of unmitigated disaster.
Absolute collapse of every kind. Destruction of the
temple in Jerusalem. The beginning of forced exile
in Babylon. Imagine these words, this promise,
spoken in that moment. I imagine that Jeremiah’s
original audience would also have appreciated
the opportunity for a rebuttal because from where
they stand, Nebuchadnezzar, the tyrant king of the
Babylonian Empire, is calling all the shots. He’s in
charge. And as for this God for whom Jeremiah claims
to speak, this God is absent at best and perhaps
derelict in his duties. And so, Jeremiah’s people
wonder if their days, their best days, are behind them.
Now I do think that Jeremiah’s people, like so many of
us, have a profound longing to feel hope, to feel hope
again. They wanted to believe. To the depths of their
souls, they wanted to believe that what the prophet
said was true. But there are so few signs of the kind of
bright future he describes. Nevertheless, the prophet
is insistent. Even now, he writes, though you cannot
see it and may not even be capable of believing it,
even now God is making plans.
This captivity, this hopelessness, this fear, this
despair—this is not the end. Jeremiah promises that
a new day will dawn. And our job, as people who
have experienced the power of God in the past, is to
stand on our tiptoes and live toward the promise we
cannot yet see.
Hope, if it is true hope, is not flimsy, is not weak, is
not naïve, and is never passive. The Apostle Paul says
that only three things will survive, will endure, will last:
faith, hope, and love. And so, hope is durable, durable
in a way that optimism could never be.
And that’s a good thing because hope must be
durable. Living in this world will test the resiliency of
our hope in ways we could not imagine. And when this
happens, when it happens to you, to those you love, it
is easier to give up. It is simpler to isolate ourselves. It
is natural to allow despair to overwhelm us, to listen
to voices that aim to convince us that hope is nothing
more than a childish dream. If you have ever found
yourself doomscrolling social media or worst-casescenario-ing (that’s a verb I created) everything at 4
o’clock in the morning, you know what I mean. I trust
I am not the only one. Have you ever noticed how
quickly despair expands, how it crowds out everything
else? It takes up all the space in the room or in our
minds. Have you ever observed how defeating despair
can be, how it freezes us in our tracks, convincing us
that it is foolish to believe a different future is possible?
And we might as well quit now.
In my ministry I have walked alongside deeply faithful
souls who have fallen victim to exile. They are pinned
to a past they cannot change or trapped by the
emptiness of what they always assumed mattered,
swimming in possessions or power but utterly drained
of purpose or passion. I’ve watched how faith fades.
Vision grows dim. How past hope succumbs to the
harshness of present reality. And perhaps this is
where you find yourself this morning. If so, I believe
that you have been led to this place because today’s
promise is for you.
First, let me be clear. The prophet Jeremiah was not a
particularly optimistic person. Afterall, his nickname,
well-earned, is the weeping prophet. Since first being
called by God as a child, he has endured the betrayal
of his people, the injustice of his nation, the failure of
his leaders, and the judgment of his God. There are
no stars in Jeremiah’s eyes as he sits down to write a
letter to the exiles. Afterall, Nebuchadnezzar is on the
throne. His people, Jeremiah’s people, are scattered
to the four winds, and all he has is this vision that will
not let him go. All he knows is that God has promised
a hopeful future. All he trusts is that it is still somehow
possible. He will not live to see the fulfillment of his
prophecy, and yet he cannot keep from sharing the
hope that he has been given. Jeremiah is not filled
with cheery optimism but by the defiant force of hope.
And so, he gives voice to the promise. And he issues a
bold charge: there is work for God’s people to do.
Jeremiah is insistent that the circumstances of our
lives and the state of the world do not dictate the
character of our hope. I want to say that again. The
circumstances of our lives and the state of our world
do not dictate the character of our hope. We are not
helpless in the face of all that seeks to immobilize or
demoralize us. We have agency.
The prophet says that when we seek with all our
heart, we will find God. When we call on God with
all our hearts, we will be heard. We will be brought
home. And we can choose to anchor our confidence
in the promise of God’s presence. We can look for
signs of the Spirit in trying times. We can practice
hope by providing hope to somebody else. Afterall,
like all virtues, hope is grown by practice. We can be
a beacon of hope in the life of someone else. That’s
what I saw all week long in the classrooms and
gathering spaces across this building. Hope. Hope
in the presence of volunteers who took a week of
vacation or teenagers who got up early on summer
break to be here each morning, smiles on their faces.
I saw it in the bright eyes of children who felt loved
here, just as they are, whose faith grew by leaps and
bounds. I heard hope in the voice of a grandmother
who sought me out on Friday morning to share that
her grandson had come home on Wednesday and
declared, “This was the best day of my life!”
According to the prophet Jeremiah, if you want to feel
hopeful, you must not retreat or withdraw. Serve. Pray.
Engage. Commit. Give. Invest your life in the life of
your community. Seek out the face of God in the faces
and voices and stories of others. The best way out of
despair is to do something for someone else.
A few summers ago, our family was in north Georgia
for a long hike with some old friends. One of those
friends is eighty-two years old, and Roger made his
way through mountain laurel and up muddy hills with
great, admirable finesse. Later, Roger was telling
me about his other hobby. He loves to chop fallen
trees into firewood. I’ve seen the man’s shed. He has
enough firewood saved for at least a dozen north
Georgia winters, and yet, he keeps chopping. Perhaps
that is optimism. His wife had told him that they would
never live long enough to use all that firewood. And
Roger said, “She’s probably right, but then again, I
know it will keep someone warm.” And that’s hope.
The superpower of trusting in a hopeful future is the
capacity for good that it unlocks in us. This summer,
our family has been slowly working our way through
the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We finished the third
movie, Return of the King, on Friday evening, and I
was curious to see how the movies line up with the
novels. And so, I pulled out Tolkien’s novels. The
storyline tracks well enough, but the constraints of a
feature film left some of the book’s most memorable
lines on the cutting room floor, I’m afraid. For example,
at the very end of the final book, my favorite character,
the hobbit Sam, wakes from a very long sleep to the
sound of a familiar voice, the great wizard Gandalf.
And here, though absent from the movie, the great
writer gives us the gift of these words:
“Sam lay back and stared with open mouth. For a
moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he
could not [speak]. At last, he gasped: ‘Gandalf! I
thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead
myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?’”
Jeremiah’s answer, despite all evidence to the
contrary, is yes. By God’s power, all that is broken
will be repaired. Through God’s grace, all that is
torn apart will be woven together again. Because
of God’s love, all that is wounded will be healed. In
God’s time, all that is wrong will be made right again.
Someday, someday, everything sad will come untrue.
And somehow, somehow, it will be all the greater for
having once been lost.
I tell you a mystery. The future is filled with hope. Let’s
start chopping wood.