Hope

16 Pentecost: Hope

September 29, 2019 by Cam Miller

This is about hope.

It is about hope in hard times
when hope is hard work
even for people who are by nature optimistic.

It begins with a man
and a story
we might imagine
has absolutely nothing to do with us.
It was, after all,
nearly two-thousand seven-hundred year ago.

It is a story we have the chance to touch on
only every three years
when it comes around in the Sunday Lectionary.
But because many preachers do not focus
on the readings in the Hebrew text,
it is a story that may never get told
in some congregations.

It is the story of Jeremiah,
a prophet in Jerusalem.
He was not a wild-eyed fringe character
like Jesus.
He was not a poor marginalized migrant
like Amos.
Jeremiah was an insider.
He was from one of the ‘good’ families.
He was, as some might say today, “old money.”

According to the story,
God used Jeremiah
to speak to the power-elite of Jerusalem.
It was a time of dangerous international intrigue,
when it was not clear who the king’s real allies were,
or with whom the king’s loyalties were invested.
The Egyptian Pharaoh
was sweet-talking the king of Judah
and coaxing him and Jerusalem
into an alliance with the once powerful,
now faded Egypt.

Pharaoh told the king they had to stick together;
that Egypt and all the surrounding
small nations like Judah had to hold strong
in order to defend against
the big newcomer on the block: Babylon.
Support Egypt,
Pharaoh promised the Judean king,
and together they would defeat Babylon.
That appealed to Zedekiah, the king of Judah,
because he figured
he had a better chance
of holding onto his power
with Pharaoh ruling the region
than if the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar
took over his part of the world.

So, thinking of himself more than his country,
Zedekiah risked the lives
of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and the surrounding area of Judea,
in order to keep his throne
for himself and his sons.

Jeremiah watched and listened
to all that was going on in the upper echelons
of his society,
and then told King Zedekiah
it was a bad idea to dance with Pharaoh
against Nebuchadnezzar.
But Jeremiah didn’t just say it was a bad idea,
he said that “God” said it was a bad idea.
And he didn’t just say
that God said it was a bad idea,
he went around told everyone
that God said it was a bad idea.
Jeremiah had a big mouth and knew everyone
who was anyone in Judah.

Well, like all the kings of Judah,
Zedekiah had a stable of yes-men
clergy & prophets who argued against Jeremiah
and promised the king
that God would rescue Jerusalem,
and that God would use Pharaoh to do it.
But against all those voices,
Jeremiah kept telling anyone who would listen
that Zedekiah was making a big mistake
and his foolish clergy and prophets
were just telling the idiot-king
what he wanted to hear.
Then, when the Babylonian army arrived
and support from Pharaoh did not arrive,
people started listening to Jeremiah.
But it became even harder to listen to Jeremiah
because he was now predicting
the demise of Jerusalem
and the death of Zedekiah.
Even though no one really wanted to hear that,
the citizens of Jerusalem began to disappearing
like deserters from the Alamo.
People were sneaking out at night
to surrender to the Babylonian army
that was now surrounding the city.
The siege of Jerusalem
would last for 18 months and 27 days.
That is a long time to sweat.

So with the Babylonian army surrounding them
and Pharaoh’s army nowhere to be seen,
King Zedekiah could nor stand to listen any more to Jeremiah’s rants.
The king blamed the steady stream of
escaping citizens on Jeremiah.
So, someone conveniently accused Jeremiah
of trying to escape, which allowed the king
to arrest the prophet.

Still, it was complicated for King Zedekiah.
He couldn’t just imprison Jeremiah
because he was from one of the ‘good’ families,
and he was recognized as prophet after all.
So instead of prison,
Jeremiah was removed
to the courtyard of the guard,
and shackled – one step up
from a prison cell.

But Jeremiah, if not pleasant
was persistent.
He just kept declaring his message
even while shackled:
“Don’t believe government’s lies;
don’t listen to self-serving fantasies
from religious preachers;
don’t be fooled by the guise of patriotism;
trust what you see and hear;
get out now because the Babylonians will win
and everything and everyone left behind
will be destroyed.”

An unknown, low class prophet
from out of town,
someone like Amos for example,
could be managed by removal or execution.
But an annoying prophet
from one of the old-line families
who won’t shut up?
That is a headache Advil won’t fix.

Eventually,
and it is not clear whether by order of the king
or an exasperated captain of the guard
who couldn’t stand to listen anymore,
Jeremiah was thrown into an empty well.
He was left in a deep hole in the ground
from which no one could hear him,
and where he would eventually be forgotten
and starve to death.
They couldn’t execute Jeremiah
but they could allow him to die.

But alas, I have gotten well ahead of myself.

In Chapter 32 of Jeremiah,
the point in the story that we heard this morning,
Jeremiah is still shackled in the courtyard
ranting and raving about the doom of Jerusalem.
That is where his cousin finds him,
and the piece of the story we heard today.

Under ancient Israelite law,
spelled out in the Book of Leviticus,
there is a statute called, “the right of go-el.”
My Hebrew is even worse than my English,
so I don’t know if I am pronouncing it correctly.

Go-el, as a legal statute,
stipulates that if someone is forced to sell
a piece of property
that has been in the family,
then the first right of refusal must go
to the next of kin.
As it turned out, Jeremiah’s cousin
wanted to sell some property.
Of course he did.

Think about the housing bubble in Jerusalem:
With the Babylonian Empire camped at your door
waiting for you to weaken from a lack
of food and water,
there would be a glut in the real estate market.

So Jeremiah’s cousin can’t sell his property
until he offers it first to Jeremiah –
who, remember, is shackled in the courtyard.
To the cousin’s utter amazement,
Jeremiah agrees to buy it.
“Sure,” Jeremiah says,
“not only do I want to purchase the land
but I knew before you even asked,
that you would offer it to me.

So as the story unfolds,
Jeremiah’s cousin gathers a host of witnesses,
Jeremiah signs the deed,
and gives it to his chief disciple, Baruch.
In front of everyone,
Jeremiah charges Baruch
with protecting the deed
by hiding it in an earthen jar
to be uncovered in the future.
Talk about a bullish act of hope –
it was pugnacious, even aggressive hope.
Surrounded by certain doom,
the very prophet of doom
declares the future is worth investing in.

Jeremiah was investing in the future
with a dramatic, physical,
concrete and highly personal
act of trust.
It was trust in God,
trust in the future,
and trust in the inevitability
of justice and mercy.

Everything around them spoke of destruction.
Everything seemed futile.
It not only looked bad, it was bad.
In the face of sure and certain doom
Jeremiah embodied hope
by investing in the future.

And now, the rest of the story.
For about eighteen months
the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem,
weakening the will of the walled city
before a devastating onslaught.
Eventually the Babylonians
broke down the walls and invaded.
They sacked the city,
stole everything they could carry away –
including the giant bronze pillars of temple.
The temple itself they reduced to rubble.
They killed every officer and leader of the guard.
They mercilessly killed
all three of King Zedekiah’s sons
right in front of the king’s eyes.
And then, they cut out the king’s eyes out
so that the deaths of his sons
would be the last thing he saw.

Jeremiah survived the devastation
because the Babylonians mistakenly thought
his prophecies meant he was on their side.
But Jeremiah was not in favor
of the Babylonians;
he was in favor of trusting God
to have the last word.

Legend has it, that Jeremiah died in Egypt.
But we do not know for certain.

We do know, and this is an important part
of the story,
that an Ethiopian slave,
likely one of the eunuchs that guarded
the royal harem,
saved Jeremiah’s life.
He got Jeremiah released from the well
before the city fell to the invaders.
The slave somehow convinced King Zedekiah
to allow Jeremiah’s freedom.

So there is the great irony
we should be used to by now,
and always looking for, in a Biblical story:
The foreigner in their midst,
and their slave,
could recognize God spoke through Jeremiah
even when those who knew him best could not.

This strange and ancient story
is pregnant with great insights about us,
and about our moment in history,
and about what you and I could be doing
in the midst of our families and friends
who do not yet recognize what time it is.

Jeremiah, the prophet of doom,
committed a devastatingly bold act of hope
by investing in land
at the very moment he knew
it would be ravaged and occupied
in the short run.
He trusted God for the long run
and embodied hope in the short run.

That is the punch line.
Our days, yours and mine, are numbered.
We know that.
But what happens to us,
is the not the final word
or the last act of the story.

So if we are capable of seeing
beyond the little universe in our own head,
then we can see that our own heartbeat
is only the short-term.
If we can see that,
it opens us to seeing that the long-term
may be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.
“The long-term can be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.”

So if the future is not about us,
we can start looking past our own particular
fears and anxieties to see the unexpected.
In this present moment, the one you and I live in,
hope is hard to come by – even for those of us who are optimistic.

I have had so many conversations with folks
about our fears and anger, and the
the seemingly overwhelming nature
of our problems.
I hear from people,
and from within my own heart,
about how difficult it is
to muster hope for the future
because we are surrounded by
deep and pervasive crisis
in the environment,
among nations,
and within our own nation.
There seems to be a pervasive crisis
in every institution of society
whether education, medicine,
law, the economy, or religion.

We are like Judah and Jerusalem
under the reign of Zedekiah,
when tomorrow seems to end in shadows.
We cannot see beyond the darkness
and what we imagine beyond
what we can see
is too disconcerting to entertain.

As in Jeremiah’s day, false prophets surround us.
They smile and promise a gospel of prosperity
for anyone who believes
their theological propaganda.
They promise that faith
and the love of God
will solve all the problems of the world
and act as a talisman
against danger.

Our royalty –
the political, corporate, and religious elite –
would have us be quiet,
and stop naming the grotesque imbalances
within our economy.
They want to hush us
and claim that we only know counterfeit truths –
they castigate the eloquent voices of our youth
who are now irrepressible
and out of their control.

Our royalty and their prophets,
who are broadcast loudly
by their media corporations,
eat away at the foundations of our future
like termites beneath the floor.

To the efforts of our royalty to shut us up
we can be silenced
or we can engage in acts of hope.
We may not have loud voices,
but our lives speak loudly.

For us, the question we must ask
is what are the acts of hope
available to us in our particular moment?
As individuals,
as households,
as a spiritual community –
what acts of hope
can we engage in now,
today, tomorrow
and the next day?
What would it mean
for us to act like Jeremiah
who bought property
even at the darkest moment in his city?

Not surprisingly,
I don’t have an immediate answer for us
and I can’t answer for you anyway.
But given the choice,
why wouldn’t we engage in acts of hope
and refuse to be silenced?

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

May 26, 2019 by Cam Miller

Ptolemy World Map 1467

To my grandson.

My Dearest Declan,

Just this week for the first time, you escaped your play blanket on your own. Your mom and dad celebrated it by texting us all a picture (by the time you read this, you may not know what a text is but I’m sure there will be a way to find out, as in our time it was a Google search). They are excited and encouraging your every strong movement now, but soon they will be reining you in and holding you back. You will chaff as they once did, to become a free agent. But that is not why I am writing.

It is 2019 and we are feeling our way in the dark –groping our way into what will become your century not ours. I remember fifty years ago talking to my Great Aunt Elma who was born in 1880. To hold her hand, and feel her breath upon my cheek, and to touch her spotted skin was as if I were on a long-distance call to another place in the time tunnel. She had known Civil War veterans and freed Slaves, and people who had heard Abraham Lincoln debate Stephen A. Douglas. Now I am your ligament to the last century and, like Aunt Elma, I will become just another rusting link to another time and place.

So, my heart is in my throat as I write to you with a little voice inside, one who whispers what I most know and care about. I am stretching every joint and tendon to reach into your world with words that will move your blood.

Please listen then, for the pulse of wisdom that runs from my heart to yours; that runs in veins sutured together across time and space, carrying life and holiness and wisdom from the most ancient, ancient of days, to your present time.

That pulse is Hope.

Hope is a four-letter word we use without thought and yet it is the glue that keeps us poised to change the world. Or, when we live without it, to dissolve into the squalor of cynicism.

As powerful and essential as hope can be, it is maddening that we have so much difficulty putting our finger on what it is we should hope for. Our minds are divided: “double-mindedness” is the word I like to use.

We have half-a-mind to live as cynically as a sewer rat, and half-a-mind to reach for the thinnest of explanations that will allow us to believe in fairies.

Authentic hope lives in between.

In 2019, which is the trapdoor to the past from which I am writing you, cynicism is on the rise and doing well. There is so much bad news that it seems naïve and child-like to hope for a quick end to the entangled, endless wars of our day or to arrest the encroachments of climate change. I feel certain that both of these are growing tentacles into your world.

Only the one we call God, knows what the world of your adulthood will be like – the last half of what is right now a young century. But at this moment, people are so brutal and violent, the ravages of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals so devastating, and the threat of pestilence and disease so random that many people feel hope is absurd or simply do not know what to hope for.

On the other hand, memory can serve us well.

Back when I was holding my Aunt Elma’s hand, India and China were importing rice and struggling with cycles of starvation. Now they export rice and import jobs. While such success is a two-edged sword for the earth, it is a measure of how fast things once assumed to be hopeless can change.

But there is a war of worlds going on right now, and I wonder if the partisans of the various constituencies will know peace by the time you are old enough to read and understand this letter.

We have those who live in a world that was formed even before my Aunt Elma was born – a world undefined by machinery, assembly lines, and things we think of even now as old fashioned.

Let’s call that the “old world,” by which I mean people in cultures living today but living with expectations and values of the pre-modern world. They continue to respect and revere the past, tradition, and elements of a more ancient time and culture. They resist what most of us consider ordinary and denounce what we think of us good.

And yet, those living as the “old world” do so side-by-side with people living a more contemporary life. Let’s call that world “the modern” world. My generation is known as the Baby Boomers, and we were raised in the modern world by people, like my mom and dad, who were born during World War I. Our parents lived through a metamorphosis ushered in by speed and flight, and atoms and microchips.

We do not cherish the past or revere tradition in the ways that the “old world” does, and we have come to expect comfort, security, and the possibility of affluence. The institutions that defined the twentieth century are crumbling in the twenty-first century, and though it is disconcerting it is not all that surprising to us.

As you might have guessed, the old world and the modern world are at war with one another, pitting terrorism against state-sponsored violence in an endless cycle of misery.

And then there is the “new world.” Where both the “old world” and the “modern world” imagined order as the orchestrating element of everything, the “new world” imagines chaos as the guiding agent, and recognizes change as the nature of Nature.

The “new world” lives alongside both the “old world” and the “modern world,” but it sees life through the lens of technology and in streaming images, considers money and privacy as quaint, and insists upon borderless communication. In the “new world” values and beliefs are extremely personal rather than communal, and all of it thoroughly relative.

Domestically, in politics and culture wars, there is a nasty power struggle paralyzing any effort to make progress. That bitterness reflects what is happening internationally, and very little problem-solving or even repair seems to be getting done.

The people of these three worlds walk among each other, witnessing the very same earth and sky and sea but apprehending them differently, literally seeing them differently and warring in the process. How will they ever come to terms? How will they ever learn to agree or tolerate such differences?

My sweet Declan, the struggle of these three worlds and the carnage that this conflict is creating across the planet earth, and within our own nation, is the very ache that has caused me to write you so many years before you can understand a word of it. I suppose this is a note in a bottle dropped into the ocean of time between us.

It is the grasp to hope, and the reach to know what to hope for, that inspires me to write you.

Human beings almost always live out over our skis, lean too far over our handlebars, and imagine how it could be even before we know how to create it. We have buried deep inside us a powerful grain that enables hope: Imagination.

Our double-mindedness is healed by the knowledge and experience that what we can imagine we can achieve. While you are now experiencing the daily frustration of your reach to crawl that exceeds the grasp of your body, it is that very capacity to “reach” that offers hope.

Moses envisioned a day when the grandchildren of slaves that built the pyramids would become a nation unto themselves. He did not live to see it but it happened.

Jeremiah once dreamed that God would invite gentiles into the covenant with Israel. He did not live to see it but I am living proof that it happened.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of racial equality and economic justice for all. He did not live to see it and neither will I, yet it is still being created stone upon stone.

Technology that once seemed a ridiculous projection of bad science fiction is now in use, even commonplace.

My grandfather, your great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, was a country doctor in rural Michigan. He watched people die of pneumonia and tetanus while today we watch hearts and lungs and kidneys traded like spare parts.

What we can imagine we can achieve.

This is where we can hope; and it is where you become part of the hope even as I am part of the hope. We need to imagine ourselves into what the gospels would have us to become. We need to imagine ourselves into the kind of people that Jesus and so many of our spiritual ancestors have told us we can become.

We need to imagine ourselves becoming tender with love, generous with resources, vulnerable with service, and open to receiving wisdom from where we least expect it.

When we have become cautious and timid with our love because we have been betrayed or hurt, we need to employ our imagination. We need to imagine how we would act if we were to take the risk to love more courageously.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we are stingy with our money, jealous with our time, or self-centered about the use of our hands, then we need to make up a story about how the scrooge inside us will be transformed. We need to write ourselves a script that imagines a new future.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we have been timid about crossing socio-economic, ethnic, racial, or political boundaries to develop relationships of mutuality that defy our differences, then we need to imagine what it would take for us to be braver.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

If we find ourselves defensive and resistant to ideas that threaten our assumptions, then we need to imagine that we can become a new canvass upon which the ancient wisdom will be painted in new and vibrant images.

If we can imagine it we can achieve it.

Declan, I mentioned a man named Jesus, someone I hope you have learned about along the way. Moses, Jeremiah, and Isaiah too.

Like many prophets and agents of God’s love, Jesus was facing a violent end at the hands of a world order who feared people like him. He saw with sober clarity the horrendous suffering he faced, and still, even then, he imagined a new relationship with God that his friends and family could live into. He promised them a hope he would not enter, but that he could imagine.

I find that inspiring Declan, and a way of soothing my double-mindedness. I let those ancients and moderns alike, the ones I call prophets and agents of God’s love, lead me into futures I cannot not see.

So, my sweet boy, or man as you may be now, whatever the condition of your world, you can engage in the subversive act of imagining a new world.

You can engage in the revolutionary act of imagining a new order or new chaos.
You can engage in the healing art of imagining a new way of living and loving.
You can practice imagination with a purpose, the re-creation of the world as God has dreamed for it to become.

In the days ahead, on your long march to learn to walk and see and know and love and care and understand, I pledge to keep my own imagination alive so that when the time comes, I can teach you how to imagine.

With whatever time we may have to share the world together, we will use our imaginations to set in motion such incredible changes that God will smile, and we will continue to live with relentless hope.

Love,
Granddad

4 Advent C, 2018: Bite into Hope

December 23, 2018 by Cam Miller

Oh, Anne Sexton, I do love you so:

“…The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it…

There is hope…Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.” (Anne Sexton, “Snow”)

It’s all about hope.

Micah was a prophetic oracle
of both judgment and hope,
and he announced the coming destruction of Israel –
which would have seemed obvious
for those not in denial.

But then Micah locates hope for the future
in someone to come from Bethlehem –
which would have seemed a likely choice
to his contemporaries also.

The Matriarch Rachel,
died in Bethlehem and
her grave was a place of pilgrimage.

Bethlehem was the setting for the Book of Ruth,
itself an eloquent oracle of hope.
King David was born in Bethlehem.
So it was an auspicious location to posit the future of hope.

Then in Luke, two pregnant women connect
and a gusher of hope rushes out
like a heart pumping blood.

So, just to put a fine point on it,
Anne Sexton bites into a snow cone of hope.

Standing on the 4^thSunday of Advent,
Christmas Eve a day away,
many people with several days off of work,
families coming together for the first time in a long while,
special rituals, meals, gift-giving
and maybe even some quiet time,
hope seems palpable –
ready to bite into.
Just as in Micah’s day,
the bigger picture might not seem so hopeful at the moment,
but within that grainy image
there is a thumbnail vision
with a clear aura of hope around it.

There are always beacons of hope.

I think of the Bielski brothers
and the twelve-hundred elderly men and women,
and hundreds young children,
they helped survive the Jewish Holocaust in Poland.
With only about a hundred and fifty armed fighters,
the brothers found ways to live in the wilderness forest
of what is now Belarus,
for two years – which was long enough
to survive the Nazis.

In the end, in addition to those who lived
and died in freedom in the wilderness,
they saved more than twelve hundred fellow-Jews
from certain cremation in Auschwitz
and other extermination camps.

What made any of them have hope
they could make it into the wilderness,
let alone survive there, escaping Nazi pursuit
and creating sustainable community?
It should have seemed an impossible hope.

I think of a ninety-something year old grandmother I met,
who in 1980 witnessed several generations of her family
gunned down at the Sumpul River on the border
between Honduras and El Salvador.
Three to six-hundred unarmed refugees,
many children among them,
fleeing the Salvadoran civil war,
were murdered by government troops and militia.
Yet, in the new millennium,
she was an active participant in an agricultural
cooperative creating a new future,
and she was eloquent in her hopefulness
for the new generation that surrounded her.

I think about what happened in Bonn, Germany this fall,
after our current administration
opted out of the international emissions goals
set by the global community in Paris in 2015.
15 states,
455 cities,
1,747 businesses
and 325 colleges and universities
formed an alternative national delegation to represent
the United States, and committed
to the Paris emission standards anyway.
All those states and organizations represent
fifty-percent of the U.S. economy and much of the pollution.

Biting into hope is a choice we make,
or refuse to make.

There is always, always, war
famine
genocide
environmental degradation
human cruelty
and tragedy
to witness. Always.

If we give them the last word –
if the lasting image in our brain
is of the horrendous
and the painful
and the dark –
we will dissolve into lives of meaninglessness.

Despair and cynicism
enervate the human soul.
They cut the throat of our vitality
and make our lives limp with irrelevancy.
We are unable to see ourselves
or anything we do
as meaningful
in the face of all that is stacked against us.

But hope is a choice
to bite into something different.

Hope is a choice
to resist the dark and painful forces we recognize
are everywhere in the world alongside of us.
Hope is a choice
to DO something,
and to keep DOING something
that creates the possibility of joy…not only sorrow;
of kindness…not only cruelty;
of light…not only darkness;
of healing…not only injury;
of opportunity…not only demise.

These are things we choose,
not because we make them up
in a fantasy world within our mind,
but because hope lives
as a parallel universe
right alongside all that shadows it.

If we write-off hope of as wishful thinking
then we will be cutting off
an entire universe of possibilities.
To do that is a severe
and cruel deprivation
to the fullness of human life.

My friends, hope is a choice
just as cynicism is a choice.

The message on the 4^thSunday of Advent –
just like it is on Christmas day
and just like it is every day
in a Christian spiritual community, is: hope is a choice.
If we wish to be powerful in the world,
it is the choice we will continue to make.

It is not a choice that feels natural all the time.

Some days it is a choice that eludes us,
but the next day when we wake up
we have another choice to make.

Some days it is a hard and painful choice
to bite into hope
in spite of all we have known
or been through.
Other days it is a joy
and we can bite into that fruit
with abandon.

But ultimately, spiritually,
it doesn’t really matter
whether or not it feels good to make that choice,
it is the choice we need to make anyway.

So, standing here a day away from Christmas Eve
and doing everything we can to keep-in-waiting
as is our Advent discipline,
let’s remind ourselves
that hope is a choice,
and that it is a core element of our spiritual practice
to make that choice…
to bite into hope.

All Saints’ Day 2018: The Bellybutton of the Galaxy

November 4, 2018 by Cam Miller

In the year 2002, a young blue star
at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,
made a sharp and unexpected turn.

That star was among a group of stars moving so fast
only something massive
could have changed its orbit.
How fast was it moving?
One-third the speed of light.
How fast is that?
Well, the Earth moves at about 43,000 mph
and the speed of light is over 670,000,000 mph.
So that little blue star
was moving at about 225,000,000 mph,
give or take a few million.

What has the sheer gravitational force
to coerce a star moving that fast,
to abruptly change course?
Turns out, because it is speed and mass,
we can figure that out with computers.

It is a black hole:
a monstrously powerful black hole –
and it is the bellybutton of our galaxy.

How powerful is this black hole?
Don’t ask me how they know this,
but the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
has already swallowed four million suns
and condensed all of it into a tiny space.

Now there are between 200 and 400 BILLION stars
and other stuff floating around in the galaxy,
so swallowing 4 million stars is a very small beginning.

But digesting 4 million stars
gives that black hole enough gravitational pull
to bend the orbit of a star
hurling through space at 225,000,000 mph.

All this came from a NYT article titled,
“Trolling the Monster in the Heart of the Milky Way.”

I understand very little of astrophysics but I love to read about it,
just like I love to look into the night sky
and wonder.
What is clear though,
is that there is a hungry black hole
hiding behind space dust and stars we call Sagittarius.
One day the Earth, or remnants of it,
will get swallowed up too.

If the fact that Earth will someday disappear
renders human life meaningless to us,
it is because we have pulled
a gelatinous mask of ego
over our eyes
and are unable to see
beyond our own feelings.

When existence gets boiled down
to being all about us, then
hope and meaning
are soon swallowed up
by the black hole of ego.

But if instead, we can lift our heads
and our hearts
above death, grief, and sorrow
then we can touch hope
and reach out and grab meaning.
That is what Isaiah did.
He imagined God
preparing a gourmet feast for us
on the holy mountain.
Isaiah somehow touched hope
as he looked at the apocalypse
and destruction around him,
in which the ancient empires smashed into one another
in war on every side like comets in space.

My suspicion is that he was able to do that
because he was able to rise up
above his own grief,
and peer out over the field of current suffering
and make out the images of life
that would return in the future.

In other words, like an ever-widening camera lens,
he enlarged his field of vision,
moving outward in concentric circles
until he could behold a vision beyond
his own self-interest…
behold a vision beyond his own self-interest.

When he did that,
he was able to imagine how the present moment
could be redeemed, and how new life
could grow in places it never grew before.
Isaiah was a master at it –
able to name meaning
and touch hope even while standing in dark times
with those otherwise
broken by despair.

It was not wishful thinking or fantasy either,
but poetic imagination
that opened up the dark hole of the moment
to explore the possibilities
of what might, and could happen.

It is comical how, not so many years ago,
if you thought there could be life on other planets
out there in the universe,
you were considered a crackpot.

Now there are teams of highly trained scientists
looking and listening for it –
imagining and theorizing which sectors
of the vast expanse
might be looking back at us.

As our telescopes and computer models improved
they widened our perspective
and now the discovery of other life out there
seems an inevitability rather than a laughable eccentricity.

So Christian faith must move from human beings
as the center of the universe
and the apple of God’s eye,
to something smaller
and something more a part
of something bigger
than ourselves.

Meaning and hope reside,
not in how you and I are feeling about
what is happening in our own lives,
but in a bigger picture.
Imagining what that bigger picture is,
is an act of stewardship.

Oh, now you knew I was going to go there, didn’t you?

Fear not,
I have never directly asked for money or pledges
in a sermon (at least that I can remember) –
and try to avoid it in worship altogether.

But we do have some lovely charts
and a nice story to share
with our pie today.

While we will talk about the role of money
in determining our future,
we won’t be asking you for a pledge today.

Stewardship is not about money.
Money is a toolof stewardship, not stewardship.

Stewardship
is the word that describes
the quality of our foster care
for that which has been given to us
to care for and nurture.
Stewardship is ourrelationship
to the matrix of life and resources
we value and use,
but do not own.
The Earth of course;
our children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren;
our neighborhood, town, city, and land;
our wealth and power,
if indeed we do believe that we do not really own
such things, but have use of them
to further the work of God’s love.
That is a big “if.”

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith,
and we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Let me repeat that please,
because it is about as important a declaration
as anything I have ever declared.

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith, and
we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Meaning and hope
are not fostered or nurtured
by how we happen to be feeling about the world around us,
they are cared for by what we DO.

So allow me to remind us
of what we have promised to do
as stewards of Meaning and Hope.

There are many more eloquent ways to describe it
but the language of our baptismal covenant
is utilitarian and specific, so I will use it.

Here is what we say we will DO
in order to be good stewards of Meaning and Hope:

Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
Seek God in all people.
Serve God in all people.
Love our neighbors.
Love ourselves.
Be activists for justice and peace.
Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

I am going to repeat those again too.
They do not need any real explanation
because we all know how to do each one,
and we have all done each one
with varying degrees of success.
We have all neglected each on too,
with varying degrees of denial.

Here they are again:

Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
Seek God in all people.
Serve God in all people.
Love our neighbors.
Love ourselves.
Be activists for justice and peace.
Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

If we do those things,
even some of those things,
and we do them on a regular basis
to the best of our abilities,
then we will be good stewards of Meaning and Hope.

Doing those things
allows us to widen the lens
upon which we see life,
and move out beyond our own ego-driven
excitement or despair.
Meaning and Hopewill never be discovered
in the range of human emotions
that react like electricity
to the events all around us.
They are uncovered and touched
when we move outside ourselves,
to the outer rings of perspective
where desire and grief
or pleasure and pain
are but some of the millions of molecules
in the atmosphere.
You and I, as Christians,
as baptized people of faith,
are the stewards of Meaning and Hope.

By doing those things
we say we are going to do
in the Baptismal Covenant, we enhance
our relationship to Meaning and Hope
and we become its stewards.

So now we know what this place is, Trinity Place –
Trinity Church.
It is not programs.
It is not outreach.
It is not worship.
It is not classes.
It is not food and fellowship.
Those are tools.
It is a place from which you and I
get the perspective we need
to be better stewards of Meaning and Hope
so that we can share it
among those with whom we live, and work, and play.
Whatever activities or programs we do here
is spice and gravy
on top of the real meat and potatoes,
which is what we do ‘out there’
in our daily, routine, and ordinary lives.

The power of Trinity Place
is what it fosters for those of us who come here,
so that we are empowered to go into our lives
with strength and renewal
to practice the elements of our baptismal covenant.
We are supposed to get strength,
and courage,
and wisdom,
and nurture here
so that we can go out there
and do what it is we have been given to do.

The things we do here
should also strengthen and renew us
for our lives, which after all
we live in fullness ‘out there.’

So I am hoping
that we can affirm this place,
and one another,
as a powerful resource for our stewardship
of Meaning and Hope –
our stewardship of naming meaning
and touching hope.

They may sound like big ideas
that live in the clouds above our heads,
but the ability to name Meaning
and touch Hope
is the difference
between God and a black hole.

Can I get an “Amen?”

Proper 13, Year C, 2016

July 31, 2016 by Cam Miller

Aimless Love, Wishful Thinking, and Pursuit of Happiness

We are about to wade into very dangerous water
and all I can ask is that you don’t blame the river guide.
I tried to add a little levity by marrying
Ecclesiastes to Luke
with that poem by Billy Collins
(“Aimless Love” – Google it),
but humor can only soften it just so much.

In case you missed it
among all the images and metaphors,
the character narrating the poem
which is not always the poet remember,
loves to love;
yearns to love more and more;
loves aimlessly
whatever and wherever his fancy is stimulated to love.

The character narrating the poem
is contrasting this current unanchored love
that flits from thing to thing
like a sparrow picking bread off the sidewalk,
with the ghost of a different kind of love
that has within it
the jagged memory of a slammed door,
a puffed up huffiness,
a rancid rancor,
a hi-way of gifts tracing offenses with paybacks,
unkind words,
suspicion, and
silence on the other end of the telephone.

In other words,
the contrast is between shiftless fancy
and infatuation
with the reality that when two people love one another
within the earthen mud of a real relationship,
they hurt each other
and fail one another
and do not live up to their best selves
or the promises of their better angels.

True love is not cotton candy.
Specifically, authentic love
is just like every other thing in our lives:
full of seasons that pluck up and plant,
build up and destroy,
dance and mourn,
laugh and weep.
All else is vanity.

I want to dig deep here
for it is the burial ground of hope,
and the landfill of cast-off love,
and the plugged up drain that backs up the option for joy.

But let me open the envelope wider.

Love is easily mistaken for lust.
Hope is often confused with wishful thinking.
And joy too often made synonymous with happiness.

I want us to think about all three today
because when we get them wrong
it is inevitably because of vanity,
and the end result is our bewilderment
and even despair.

As already noted by Billy Collins,
aimless love is actually lust –
the hunger to fill that black hole at our center
that can never be filled.
Lust is bigger than sexual desire,
it is an insatiable hunger
that gnaws at us from the inside out
and that we so often imagine we can staunch
with something we hunger for.
But nothing, absolutely nothing
satiates that hunger.
It is a black hole that will not be filled, ever.

It is something we learn to live with,
grant a presence to,
and observe with an appropriate detachment.
When we trick ourselves into trying to fill it
with whatever thing we most want at the moment,
we fall into it
and get lost.
But true love learns to live with lust
and does not try to satiate it.

True love learns to traverse the seasons
without longing for the good old days
or dreaming about the Promised Land.

True love lives in the presence
of whatever season it is
and walks one step at a time through it.

True love is not aimless
but is intentional
as it walks forward
from wherever it stands in the moment
and is fully present to whoever and whatever
shares the moment with it.

Knowing the difference
between true love and aimless love
is the difference between vanity
and meaning, and
don’t we all long for lives of meaning –
lives underwritten by authentic love
rather than an aimless imposter?

Likewise, we need to know the difference
between hope and wishful thinking
if we want to avoid an early death of hope in our lives.
Hope finds an early grave
as wishful thinking inevitably turns to cynicism.

We often confuse hope with wishful thinking,
which is almost always based upon our own vanity.
When it turns out we hung our hat
on the wrong thing,
we get mad and turn cynical.
How many times have we not gotten our own way,
believing that what is in our best interest
is what should be the public interest?
Then when the thing we put our hope in
turns our to be just another dead end
or bad policy decision
or awful politician,
we fold our arms across our chest and
stomp our feet
and give up on hope.

But the problem is
our hope was wishful thinking
based upon our personal preference and self-interest;
rooted in our vanity.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

How many times have we placed
an inordinate amount of faith in a leader
an idea
a system
a program
or an organization
only to discover it wasn’t what we imagined,
or couldn’t deliver what we expected,
or fell far short of what it or they promised?

When that happens,
and happens often enough,
we recoil into a sheath of cynicism
in which we say to ourselves
that nothing works,
and no one has the answer,
and it will all end badly regardless
of what we do or don’t do.

It becomes a rolling ocean of Either/Or –
either what I expected and wanted comes to pass
OR “It’s no good and I told you so.”

We do not like being hurt
or disappointed
or let down
and we protect ourselves
by not allowing anything to hurt us like that ever again.
We turn off the hope-faucet
and live instead in the cocoon of cynicism.
What we neglect to realize
is that what hurts
is that it didn’t turn out the way WE wanted,
and OUR team didn’t win
and what WE expected was disappointed or spurned.
It really is, when we live in the kingdom of wishful thinking,
all about us.

But authentic hope does not live
with our self-interest coursing through its veins.
Authentic hope is painted on a canvass
we cannot fully see
no matter how much perspective we try to gain.
It is bigger than us,
bigger than us here and now
and beyond us even tomorrow.

That kind of hope is found in a gods-eye view
we are only given when the veil is lifted for a nanosecond
and we take it in.
We only get a few of those views across
an entire life-time,
so we have to hold onto them
and use them to comprehend how much bigger it is
than us – any of us.

“Father, not my will but your will”
and, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”
are statements of authentic hope
garnered from a peek at the bigger canvass
and without having seen the entire painting.

That kind of hope never leads to cynicism
and it has no bitterness whatsoever.
And isn’t that the hope we all want to taste?

And joy.
Ah joy.
So often confused with its scrawnier, lesser cousin:
happiness.
The root of “happy” is hap, meaning chance;
literally, a reaction to chance events
that we consider fortunate.
Happiness, as my friend Peter points out,
is reactive to what is happening.
So we know how to make ourselves happy.
It is a manufactured state of mind
in which we give ourselves a thrill
or a spike or a jolt
because we know how we will react to certain things.

Particular food or drink or drug
makes us happy.
Specific activities make us happy.
Seeing certain people makes us happy.
Getting something we wanted makes us happy.
If we are UNhappy
we know what to do to make ourselves happy
because happiness is reactive.

Joy is a gift.
We cannot make ourselves joyful no matter what we do.
Joy is not reactive;
it rises up from within
or is bestowed upon us from above or beyond.
Joy, from Old French (gaudere) means to “rejoice;”
it is evoked or given – caused to rise up within us.

No matter how much
we may have enjoyed something previously
we cannot DO anything to bring the joy back.
At best we will give ourselves momentary happiness
and if not, great disappointment.

All we can do for joy
is open ourselves to receive it when it arrives.

Becoming a person
who lives their life more open to joy
is better than all forms of happiness, is it not?

So love, hope, and joy
are often mistaken for lust, wishful thinking,
and happiness.
Love, hope, and joy
give substance and meaning to our lives

while aimless love,
wishful thinking,
and an obsession with happiness
lead only to vanity.

It seems to me
that what we do here,
in this place,
in our worship
and in our program
and in our relationships,
ought to give us a clear-eyed lens
with which to know the difference,
and both the nurture and courage
to live the difference.

16 Pentecost: Hope

6 Easter 2019: A Note in a Bottle

4 Advent C, 2018: Bite into Hope

All Saints’ Day 2018: The Bellybutton of the Galaxy

Proper 13, Year C, 2016

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