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| Faith in Action Bay Area Vigil at San Francisco City Hall |
This morning I want to speak to you about hope. St. Paul tells us that faith, hope, and love
are the preeminent gifts of the Spirit and that the greatest of these is love.[1] This is true, but we must not forget
hope. Indeed, Paul himself speaks of God
as the God of hope as well as the God of love, and prays that we may abound in
hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.[2]
Walter Brueggemann, the great biblical theologian, said,
“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”[3] Hope is rooted in memory and is the antidote
to despair. This is a prominent refrain
throughout our scripture traditions.
“Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your
God redeemed you” is the basis for the covenant between God and Israel, its
commitment to social justice, and sabbath observance.[4] When tempted to despair, the psalmist sings,
“I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of
old.”[5] The prophets admonish Israel for forgetting
the covenant, and ground their hope for the future in recalling the history of
God’s saving actions and God’s faithfulness even when we forget.[6]
Both the Passover meal, recalling God’s liberation of the
Jews from slavery in Egypt, and the Eucharistic meal that we celebrate,
recalling Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, make this saving history
available to us as an empowering reality in the present. “Do this in remembrance of me.” The Greek word for “remember," anamnesis,
has the connotation of making a past action present. We remember so as to become agents of God’s
liberating action now.
Scripture, and history more generally, provides us with a
usable past so as to imagine a future with hope.
Memory is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. As St. Paul reminds us, “whatever was written
in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by
the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.”[7]
Rebecca Solnit, perhaps our greatest living commentator on
hope, reminds us,
that though hope is about the future,
grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but
defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age
now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story,
one that has room for the best and for the worst, for atrocities and
liberations, for grief and jubilation. A
memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and whole cast of
participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed
energy called hope.
This is precisely the kind of memory that scripture
preserves. It is a story told from the
perspective of history’s victims, a view from the underside, that provides us
with an unexpurgated perspective on the ongoing struggle for social justice and
peace. The Jews are bit players in
history, a slave people, who discover their dignity and strive to form a more just
and egalitarian community as an alternative to empire. Jesus is executed as a political subversive
by the Roman empire, precisely because of his championing of this prophetic
Jewish vision. The church continues,
alongside the synagogue, to preserve this subversive memory in service to the
God of hope.
This history is not one of straightforward linear progress,
but neither is it simply one damn thing after another. Solnit recognizes that
It
is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was,
is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and
destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with
specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not
a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to
the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of
complexities and uncertainties, with openings.[8]
There is no deus
ex machina operating behind the curtain of history. We are not puppets on a string. The universe is not determined, but neither
is it random. It is creative. The power of the Holy Spirit given to us is
the capacity to respond to the openings that God continually makes available to
us. What we do does matter, though not
always in ways we anticipate and often long after we have left the scene. But at the very least, we can become part of
the memory of future generations that engenders hope, and empowers action in
response to new openings that we were unable to see.
It is in this
sense that Christ is always still coming.
The end of history is nowhere in sight, and its fulfillment in the
communion of all things in God, the old dream of the peaceable kingdom, is not
yet realized. The church remains a site
of the incarnation, the coming of God-with-us to form a people in the image of
Christ, the image of, and hope for, universal salvation. Christ is still coming, and we are the
people that God has been waiting for.
And so, we find
ourselves each Advent, with John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan
river. He is gathering a people to
prepare for action to renew the promise of God’s kingdom; ritually re-enacting
liberation from slavery and entrance into the freedom that God promises, moving
from the wilderness, through the waters of baptism, into the Promised
Land. This is an act of memory,
recalling who we are and what we have done with God’s help. The people of God are waking from their
nightmare, and Christ is coming to create an opening into God’s dream of the
future. Hope begins with memory, but it
ends in action. Get ready.
Advent is the
time to wake-up, remember our story, and reclaim our power. As Solnit reminds
us,
Together we
are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of
victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can
change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking
back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the
future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our
victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry
into the night that is the future.[9]
My litany
includes people from St. James, St. Mary the Virgin, St. Aidan’s, Holy
Innocents, Grace Cathedral, St. John’s Presbyterian, Calvary Presbyterian,
First Unitarian-Universalist Congregation, First Mennonite Church of San
Francisco, Congregation Sherith Israel, Grace Fellowship Church, St. Mary’s
Cathedral, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, St. Paul of the Shipwreck, St. John of
God, St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Congregation Or Shalom, the Kitchen Jewish
Community, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, St. Mary and St. Martha Lutheran Church,
Senior Disability Action, and Lincoln High School, who gathered more than 100
strong at City Hall on Wednesday.
We gathered there
to petition the Mayor to meet with us, having received no response from two
previous requests in the past month, to discuss how to ensure that the most
rent-burdened, low-income seniors in San Francisco can age in place with
dignity; more than 30,000 of whom pay more than 30% of their income in rent and
include members of our own congregation.
We were there for Martha Barrios, age 65,
who works two shifts as a house cleaner to pay $2,000 a month in rent. We were
there for Irma Soberanis, age 75, who makes $1,690 a month caring for the
elderly and pays $850 a month in rent. We were there for Javi Vasquez, age 58,
a retired baker who is disabled and blind, yet lost his apartment through an
Ellis Act eviction and would be homeless if he had not won the housing lottery
to get a subsidized unit.
We remembered the
Torah’s admonition to care for the widow, and Jesus’ warning against the greed
of those who devour widow’s houses.[10] We were there praying for what our ancestors
dreamed in Psalm 72: a community in
which leaders exercise God’s justice, defending the needy and rescuing the
poor, delivering them when they cry out in distress and preserving their
lives. We were looking for an opening,
doing what was possible trusting that God would do the impossible. And in
that collective action we discovered a sense of community, and meaning, and
power, and joy that far exceeds what we could ask for or imagine. On Friday, the Mayor agreed to meet with us
next month. Hope begins with memory but it
ends in action.
We are the
fragile, green shoot emerging from the dead tree stump that Isaiah foretold.[11]
We are the people upon whom God breathes a holy, fiery spirit to live into
God’s future when others forget hope.[12] In the stories we tell and the actions we
take, we keep finding an opening into that future. Christ is coming, and we are the door through
whom Christ will come – again and again and again.
“May the God of
hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in
hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”[13] Amen.
[1] I
Corinthians 13:13.
[2]
Romans 15:13.
[3]
Quoted in Rebecca
Solnit, “‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in
dark times,” The Guardian (July 15, 2016).
[5]
Psalm 77:11.
[6]
Isaiah 46:8-13; Ezekiel 16:59-63.
[7]
Romans 15:4.
[8]
Solnit, op cit.
[9]
Ibid.
[10] Deuteronomy
26:12; Mark 12:40.
[11]
Isaiah 11:1.
[12]
Matthew 3:11.
[13]
Romans 15:13.
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