The Time of Mercy

Luke 13:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

23 March 2024

            What happens when we read, or listen to, a story like this one in the Gospel of Luke? 

            One of my favorite books to help understand how we read and interpret stories is David Jasper’s A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics.  “Hermeneutics” is the fancy, academic word for the study of how we interpret texts.

            Here’s how Jasper answers my question of what happens when we read a story like this one—“The text becomes a ‘world’ which we inhabit for a while, participating in its drama and its claims on us.”

            That’s much easier to see in a rich a full story, the kind that captures our minds and imaginations, where we fall in love with the characters.  Our ways of interacting with such stories have only become more immersive and even participatory.  One reason the most sophisticated and artistic of video games, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, are so popular is because they bring this idea to greater fulfillment—that a story becomes a world we inhabit.

            The few verses we read today in the Gospel of Luke aren’t that rich or captivating, but they still function by inviting us into a world to see what claims it makes upon us.

            This particular text first draws us in by tugging at our emotions.  We are told that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, has killed some Galileans.  And given this reference of mixing their blood with their sacrifices, it implies that they were killed while performing a religious ritual.

            What a heinous action!  Our sense of justice reacts with righteous anger at Pilate, and all the Pilates throughout history who have unjustly killed oppressed and occupied peoples.

            But, somewhat strangely, Jesus’ response isn’t righteous anger.  No, instead, he immediately shifts to another topic.  Maybe the people who called Jesus’ attention to this injustice wanted his self-righteous anger, to join them in feeling morally superior?  But, that’s not at all what happens.  Jesus doesn’t react to this news at all; he changes the subject.

            He changes the subject to one of the most central of human problems—understanding the nature of suffering and evil. 

            Now, I’ve been pastoring for decades and philosophizing even longer, and I can tell you that there is no topic that more often comes up in people’s discussions of faith than this one.  People want to know why bad things happen.  They get upset at all the unjust suffering of this world, demanding to know why things are this way and couldn’t they have been different.

            These have been fundamental questions in my own life.  When my Dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 41 years of age, when I was sixteen, I struggled with my faith and how to comprehend what had happened.  That’s ultimately one reason I immersed myself so deeply in philosophy and theology, wanting to better understand such things.  My favorite philosophy class as an undergraduate was called “Evil and Suffering.”

            Jesus does not, in these few verses, provide a comprehensive answer to that deepest of human existential questions.  But his changing the subject to this topic, draws the reader and the hearer further into the story, further into the world the story creates, because it now resonates with some of the deepest longings and needs of the human soul.

            What Jesus does say in these few short remarks is that bad things don’t just happen to bad people.  Debunking what is probably the worst theological position any human can take.  And it’s an idea that doesn’t go away.  Despite Jesus criticizing it here or the whole book of Job undermining the notion.  You still encounter people who think when something bad happens to someone it’s because they did something to deserve it.  Or the people who believe that they will be spared natural disasters or life’s calamities if they are simply the right kind of person. 

            The appeal to such a cut-and-dried, black-and-white universe is obvious.  It would seem more fair than the world we actually occupy.  More rational. 

            Part of the implication of Jesus’ response is that this world is not fully within our understanding.  There are mysteries we won’t understand.  Also, it’s not even clear that there is any deep underlying meaning to it all.  Maybe the only thing to understand is that humans are violent and random accidents occur, which means that people end up hurt, harmed, and dead. 

            Maybe Jesus wants us to grasp the randomness of a world that doesn’t follow any tidy rules?

            If we are now asking such questions, then we’ve entered into the world of the story and it’s beginning to lay its claims upon us.

            But, then, the gospel shifts again.  Jesus tells a parable.  We now enter a story within the story.  This new story is a parable about a fig tree.  And it is in no way clear what these verses have to do with the ones we’ve just read about the tower of Siloam and the murdered Galileans.

            Fig trees were and are common in Palestine.  They were staples of the local economy and used often in Hebrew writings as metaphors and symbols.  The others gospels record other parables Jesus told about fig trees. 

            In this one we encounter a fig tree that hasn’t produced figs in three years, and the owner wants to cut it down.  According to what I’ve read, three years is the normal amount of time for a fig tree to mature.  If it hasn’t born fruit, then it is likely infertile.  Rather than waste that space, and any time, effort, or resources, on an unyielding tree, let’s cut it down, and replace it.  Seems wise.  Good stewardship. 

            But the gardener resists that advice.  He wants to keep at it.  Keep trying to get the tree to produce.  He wants to spread some manure around it, to fertilize it, in the hopes that something will happen.

            The commentaries I read point out that the word for manure here is a vulgar term, irreverent in religious discourse.  So, you can use your imaginations to supply the more appropriate English word to use. 

            This vulgar word is also a reminder of humility.  A reminder of the humble and vulnerable, and even messy, nature of our reality.

            Is the gardener a fool?  Is he just wasting time?  What’s going to happen next year?  Will the tree produce or not?  And then, what will happen?

            Well, here’s the most interesting thing about this story, we don’t get the final act.  Jesus’ parable just ends without telling us what happens next.  We don’t know if the gardener or the owner was right.  We don’t know what happens to the tree.  Brandon Scott, the great commentator on the parables, says that this way of telling the story draws the hearer into supplying the missing details.

            The funny thing is how often this happens in Jesus’ story-telling.  In fact, James Breech in his study of the parables says that they always finish without a clear ending.  One of the key features of Jesus’ stories is their openness.  The story goes on; it isn’t over.

            So, why is this?  What’s happening?

            Scott says that the unresolved endings leave open future possibilities.  Michael Curry adds that it’s about future possibility that we neither control nor can manage.  James Breech writes that these open endings emancipate our imaginations.  Breech adds:

In place of closure, ending, or finality, at the end of these stories we have opening and complexity, a sudden revelation of the genuine ambiguity that occurs when the consequences of actions are seen in terms of the way they penetrate the lives of others.

            (That “lives of others” is our theme for Season of Lent.)

            Instead of clarity and closure, we experience ambiguity.  Jesus is inviting us into a mode of living that rests within the ambiguity and messiness of the world.  And, I think that’s what ties together the two parts of today’s Gospel reading!  The first part about unjust violence and our deep human need to understand evil and suffering.  Plus, the parable of the fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit.  Our spiritual task as followers of Jesus—this new way of being human he is modeling for us—means NOT having certainty, not having clarity, not have closure.  But, instead, learning to live fully within the messiness and ambiguity and openness to possibility that is the real world.

            Now, let’s go back to what happens when we read or hear a story.  Here’s David Jasper again, “Interpretation is not a process along a linear trajectory from ignorance to understanding . . . but an endless stimulation to further inquiry and conversation.”  We never arrive at a final answer or understanding.  Interpretation is an ongoing task.

            The theologian Ephraim Radner writes that what it means to be faithful to the biblical text is to understand that reading and interpreting it is an ongoing process.  It is in fact not faithful to reading the Bible to arrive at one final, clear, and conclusive answer for all time.  Radner says our goal is not one point to arrive at, but instead a whole realm, a world in which we can move around and explore, and in that process come to understand ourselves.

            Which also means playing with multiple interpretations.  John Caputo emphasizes this idea in his work, the playfulness of reading and interpretation.  And that the real goal is not one answer, the real goal is to multiply interpretations, to see the text from as many vantage points as we can. 

            Now to a certain type of religious mind this sounds awful, even heretical.  A sign of a fallen and sinful creation.  Surely there must be one final and certain answer.

            But I love how the Reformed scholar James K. A. Smith writes about it:

The sin of [the Tower of] Babel was its quest for unity—one interpretation, one reading, one people—which was an abandonment of creational diversity and plurality in favor of exclusion and violence . . . .  Plurality in interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation.

            I love that idea.  God created this world rich in perspectives and different voices.  So to be faithful to God is to open ourselves to listen to all that variety.  Smith concludes his book with calling us to a “field of multiplicitous meeting in the wild spaces of love where there is room for a plurality of God’s creatures to speak, sing, and dance in a multivalent chorus of tongues.”

            And because we cannot rest on one final, settled meaning—of the story, of the Bible, of the world, of ourselves—then we should be humbly reminded that we aren’t in this alone, but part of a great, wonderful web of creation.  We cannot begin to understand anything without being open to the ways that the lives of other people and the rest of creation shape us.

            Which then leads us back to the gardener spreading his manure on the tree.  I think Jesus is reminding us to be merciful.  To each other.  And to ourselves.  Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.

            I love how Brandon Scott, then, concludes his telling of this story, “We keep on manuring.  What else is there to do?”

Disappointment & Heartbreak

Luke 13:31-35

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

16 March 2024

            One of the great challenges now facing the Mainline church is the rise of the new Christian Nationalism.  Who Jesus is, what it means to be a Christian, and how we are supposed to care for the vulnerable are now issues being contested in the public square.

            We’ve seen this in the responses to Bishop Marian Budde after her sermon on mercy, the defunding of Lutheran Family Services, and the attacks to Catholic refugee ministries by the Catholic Vice President.  Which generated a strong rebuke from the Pope.

            Of course I grew up a Southern Baptist and was well acquainted with the Jerry Falwell-era Religious Right.  And as a gay rights activist who is also a pastor, I have spent much of my adult career contesting the dominance of the Religious Right in the public imagination and discourse.

            But what we are seeing now is something new, this new Christian Nationalism.  And to better understand it, I recently read the book Money, Lies, and God by the journalist Katherine Stewart, who has spent decades exploring and writing about the Religious Right.

            She concludes that:

Christian nationalism is not a religion.  It is not Christianity.  It is a political identity with a corresponding political ideology, and the ideology in question doesn’t have a lot to do with the way many if not most Americans understand Christianity.  You don’t have to be a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, and plenty of patriotic Christians want nothing to do with Christian nationalism.

            What alarms Stewart the most is that this movement, as she writes, “isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.”  Instead, “it wants to burn down the house.”  She reveals the various ways in which it is an antidemocratic movement “grounded in resentment and unreason” with authoritarian and fascistic tendencies.

            Her analysis is that the movement is based upon fear.  Fears of the ever-changing world and the ways the culture has shifted over time.  Also fears based upon economic inequality.  It’s a complex brew of resentments and grievances, with little to do with actual theology.

            Stewart writes, “The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy rather than what it proposes to create.  Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story.”

            She has her own label for the movement, instead of Christian nationalism, she calls it “reactionary nihilism.”

            And so a Gospel lesson like today’s is helpful to us in our current challenge.  Jesus is told of a threat to his life by Herod, who has already jailed and executed John the Baptist.  But, Jesus is not to be deterred.  No threat to his life will stop him from carrying out God’s mission of mercy and liberation.

            But notice Jesus’ attitude here.  Brendan Byrne points out what he calls a “tragic tone” in Jesus’ response.  And Michael Curry, the Episcopal bishop, describes Jesus’ mood further.  He writes, “Jesus speaks in tones of abject disappointment and utter heartbreak at the refusal of his own people to hear and heed the summons of God to draw near, to gather, and to come home.”

            Jesus doesn’t respond to the threat with fear or anger.  He responds with sadness and with pity.  Grieving that Herod and the people have chosen a path contrary to the goodness and blessing that God wants for them. 

            Let Jesus’ response be a model for you as you experience disappointment and heartbreak that the world is not turning out as you had expected and hoped that it would.

            Jesus doesn’t only grieve, however.  He responds and continues to take action.  He tells them to take word to Herod that he will not be stopped.  I’ve always loved that phrase, “Go and tell that fox for me.”  I’ve imagined using it myself a few times.

            Commentator Rodney Clapp sees even more in Jesus’ response to Herod and the threat.  Clapp writes that Herod and the other power players “want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering.”

            But Jesus directly challenges the notion that Herod or Rome or the religious establishment is really in charge.  God alone is sovereign over creation.

            Clapp writes, “Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of mother hen’s wings.”

            Let’s unpack this for a moment.  First is Jesus calling out their death-dealing.  Way back in Deuteronomy, when God’s covenant with Israel was first being implemented, we read about God telling the people that you can choose life or you can choose death.  And then detailing all the ethical choices that lead down either path.

            Jesus calls out the authorities for having chosen the way of death.  Their actions and decisions are harming people and destroying the goodness and abundance of God’s creation.

            They could have followed the covenant, the way of steadfast love, of righteousness and justice, of care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger.  God has consistently offered the path to something good and better, a path to life in all of its fullness and abundance. 

            So, you might expect God’s wrath and judgement then upon the death-dealing forces.  But in this particular lesson of Jesus, that’s not what we hear.  We hear instead God’s pity and compassion, that disappointment and heartbreak.

            These death-dealers, these powerful people who think they are in control, the masters of the universe, are really just frightened and lost chicks, not seeing and refusing to enjoy the protection and salvation on offer to them.

            As Katherine Stewart points out the fear and grievance that animates the new Christian nationalism, we see a parallel with what Jesus says here in Luke.  When we are motivated by fear and let our fears overcome our compassion, we are lost.  Instead of being powerful and in control, we become like little, helpless chickens, scurrying about.

            But God offers mercy.  God offers protection and salvation.  Like a good mother hen, God will take care of her children.  We need only see and respond.

            You’ve heard by baptismal liturgy a lot recently.  Enough times that hopefully some parts of it resonate with you.

            One particular paragraph I want to call your attention to today:

Little siblings, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life.  This isn’t the end.  It’s the beginning of God’s adventure with your life.  What God will make of you, we know not.  Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say.  This we do know and this we say.  God is with you.

            Those words are from Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s classic book of Christian ethics, Resident Aliens.  I first read that book in the nineties and marked that paragraph then as one I knew I’d use in baptism.  And now those words have been said over so many babies and children and even adults in my fifteen years at First Central.

            In that book, Hauerwas and Willimon laid down a challenge for the church.  Christendom, they said, had come to an end.  The long era in which politics and culture and the Mainline church were all on the same page.  And rather than bemoaning that loss, they celebrated it as a chance for the church to finally be the church.  To model an alternative way of being human and being community. 

            They declared that “Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church.”  An idea that has always deeply influenced my approach to ministry.

            For them, Christianity is a movement that we join.  Here’s one of their best statements of the matter:

Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.  Right living is more the challenge than right thinking.  The challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

            For them, “Christianity is mostly a matter of politics,” because it is about the formation of a new people, who live counter to much of the way society normally functions.

            In a much later book Stanley Hauerwas explained that he does see himself as a theocrat.  But very different from the way the new Christian nationalism would see itself.  Here’s Hauerwas’ explanation:

I am of course a theocrat.  “Jesus is Lord” is not my personal opinion; I take it to be a determinative political claim.  So I am ready to rule.  The difficulty is that following a crucified Lord entails embodying a politics that cannot resort to coercion and violence; it is a politics of persuasion all the way down.  It is a tiring business that is slow and time-consuming, but then we, that is Christians, believe that by redeeming time Christ has given us all the time we need to pursue peace.  Christ, though the Holy Spirit, bestows upon his disciples the long-suffering patience necessary to resist any politics whose impatience makes coercion and violence the only and inevitable response to conflict.

            So, it’s impossible to be an authoritarian or fascist if one is a genuine follower of Jesus.  Because we genuine followers of Jesus must be patient and persuasive pacifists.  God rules, but God rules through a cross.

            That’s the politics of the gospel, as we see here in Jesus’ response to the threat from Herod.

            In the face of foxy Herods and the death-dealing forces that want to be in control and exert power over others, we should be disappointed and heartbroken, like Jesus was.  And like Jesus we should respond and keep taking action.  We will not be deterred from our acts of mercy, compassion, and liberation.  And while we continue these God-given ministries, we must also practice patience, which can be so difficult.

            And so I conclude with one more bit of advice from Stanley Hauerwas:

The church must learn time and time again that its task is not to make the world [into] the kingdom [of God], but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community of peace.  Thus we are required to be patient and never lose hope.

To the Test

Luke 4:1-13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 March 2024

            “What we do as individuals and as a species in the coming decade may very well help to determine the ultimate destination of humanity as a whole for the rest of time!”  So declares Alvin Graylin in his book Our Next Reality on how artificial intelligence is going to reshape the world.  He even says that the next few decades “will likely be the most critical years in human history.”

            Now, one never knows exactly how to take a claim like this.  We humans have a tendency to always see the immediate time we are living in as the critical period.  I’m sure that’s how it felt when our grandparents were confronting fascism.  And I know it’s how folks talked about our fears of nuclear war in my childhood.  Climate change also makes our current age seem critical.

            But even if Alvin Graylin overstates the claim, other voices I listen to, more sober ones not involved in the tech industry, are beginning to make similar claims.  Just this week on his podcast, Ezra Klein, for instance, talked about the AI revolution likely coming now in 2-3 years.  He said, “I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare.”

            If the next few years will be so critical to humanity, why?  What will make it so critical?  Here’s Alvin Graylin again—“The coming decades will bring about a dramatic change in what it will mean to be human, as well as our relationship with each other and the way society functions.”  Ah, yeah, that sounds pretty important.

            In other words, we are living through a time of testing, a time that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

            Which is also what Jesus was doing.  Raising questions about what it means to be human. 

            Here’s Jesus scholar James Breech—“What Jesus conveys is an expanded sense of what it means to be a self.  There is a transformation onto a new level of being, where identity is constituted not by law but by awareness of another’s claims.”

            Our Lenten them is “The Lives of Others” (which is only tangentially a reference to the great German film by that name).  We’ll be exploring how Jesus invites us into a new mode of human being in which we live with open-ended stories that teach us how others permeate our lives.  The chancel decorations, for example, are a representation of the idea that the story never ends.  I’ll be unpacking all of those ideas in more detail over the next few Sundays.

            James Breech says that Jesus, both in the stories he told and in the story about him which we read in the Gospels, teaches us that there are no clearcut endings.  Breech writes, “in real life there never is a point at which the meaning of our experience becomes clear.”  So we can’t operate with certainty, human life is always in flux. 

            Which we can find unsettling, of course.  But into that discomfort comes Jesus who demonstrates that we really find our sense of self, how we truly understand our humanity and who we are in the ways our lives interact with others. 

            The new level of being human that Jesus invites us to is this expanded self where other’s claims upon us are what constitute who we are.

            And we see that here in the temptation story, which is the standard Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.  The commentaries I read point out that this story is less about the temptations themselves and more about how Jesus responds.

            In each of these temptations Jesus is confronted with a decision about what kind of person he is going to be.  Each time Satan offers him a choice that’s really about what a good human life is.  And what God wants for us.

For instance, should Jesus focus upon alleviating immediate human suffering and turn stones into bread?  Notice that this isn’t a bad thing.  The temptations aren’t necessarily enticements to something bad.  They even show how our choices that include some goodness can distract us from who God desires us to be.

Should he gain earthly power so that he might fix all the problems of the world?  Should he compel God to act dramatically on his behalf, wowing people with spectacles?  This would be the Marvel Superhero version of the Jesus story.

No, God doesn’t want Jesus to operate in any of these ways.  Even though each of these paths seems easier.  What God wants is for Jesus to operate through the long, hard work of love.  In which we treat everyone with respect and mercy.  And, as we can see today, that work is on-going.  And as that work gets more difficult, we become tempted to take the easy routes of earthly power, grand spectacles, or fixing the immediate problems instead of the deeper issues.

The temptation story invites us to consider what type of persons are we going to be?

            So, maybe humanity will soon face a crisis of what it means to be human, brought on by artificial intelligence.  But we’ve already lived through a crisis that required us to face these very questions.

            This coming week marks the fifth anniversary of when everything shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Five years.  Really.  That moment is now moving into the historical past.  And we are still trying to understand what happened and its after effects upon us.

            This last week, the New York Times produced a sobering piece by David Wallace-Wells entitled “How Covid Remade America.”  In detail he described the multitude of ways that the pandemic has changed us.  He wrote, “We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.”

            And he does not think it changed us for the better.  He summarizes, “America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world.”

            Here are some of the lasting effects he lists:

• It turned us into hyper-individualists. By locking us into our private spaces and viewing everyone else as a potential threat, we became solipsistic and our moral horizons shrank.
• This generated a new age of social Darwinism, in which surviving was viewed as a sign of merit. He writes, what “might have become an object lesson in human frailty and interdependence. Instead, we pointed fingers at one another, scapegoating so as to avoid acknowledging that the threat was beyond our control.”
• Another result he sees is that our faith in public health has been broken. And right now we are watching it being dismantled.
• He says it shattered our cities and disordered society. That year homicides jumped thirty percent.  Alcoholism increased.  As did homelessness.  And pedestrian deaths in traffic accidents. 
• It also destabilized and redrew our politics.
• He writes that world powers became more mercenary, turning inward to care for their own and reducing their commitments to helping people across the globe.
• He even thinks that the backlash to progressive ideas of race and gender flow from the Right’s anger at the behavioral restrictions imposed in 2020. Because that created a fight over what is virtuous behavior and what counts as merit in our society.
• He lists all sorts of other practical effects I haven’t gone into, such as effects on the workplace, education, etc.

After coming through the pandemic, you think we might be celebratory and triumphant, instead, he writes:

the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

            Of course, it didn’t need to be this way.  Our social response to the pandemic could have been a moment of increased solidarity, and it truly was at the very beginning.  We could have come together to face our problems.  Celebrated our scientific and medical achievements.  Grown individually and as a society.  Learned better how to help each other, maybe even made radical changes to a more just and compassionate social order.  It could have been a moment of positive transformation to something better.  Something more like what Jesus modeled and God dreams for us.

            And I do think we viewed it that way here at First Central.  Part of our success in navigating that difficult time and the years of coming back together was because we viewed it as an opportunity for genuine spiritual and personal growth and the strengthening of community. 

            Humanity lived through a time of testing, when we were repeatedly faced with choices about what it means to be a human being and what type of person we are going to be.  Sadly, when we look around us five years later, we see how poorly humans as a whole failed the test.

            This week I looked again at a book that had been very helpful to our ministry here back in 2022—Doing Theology in Pandemics, edited by Zachary Moon.  One of the strongest pieces in that collection was by the great theologian Rita Nakashima Brock.  She wrote about how the pandemic was apocalyptic in the Biblical sense of unveiling truths.

            Brock wrote, “The habits, rituals, and meaning systems of life have been thrown into considerable chaos . . . as we have sought to hold some order and purpose to life, we may have felt our humanity, or our confidence in the humanity of others, slipping way.”

            She believes we all experienced moral injury.  Moral injury is a term that first appeared in treating the trauma of combat veterans.  The injury arises when we cannot integrate our experiences into our meaning-making systems.  The more empathetic, idealistic, service-oriented you are, the more vulnerable you are to moral injury.  She writes, “When chaos strikes and they cannot see how to do the right thing or doing the right thing is no longer possible, they can be devastated by relentless failure.”

            Side note.  Last Sunday the columnist David Brooks used the term moral injury to describe what he is feeling right now as he watches the nation he loves become more cruel.  That observation really resonated with me.

            According to Rita Nakashima Brock, what we experienced during the pandemic and what we learned about each other and our institutions, unmoored us from our previous understandings and left us feeling helpless about what to do.  She summarized her thoughts, “We experienced collective moral injury that upended our habits, our rituals, our national myths and illusions, and our ability to trust each other.”

            She was hopeful that from that experience we actually had “the best possibility in our lifetimes for deep social and political change.”  David Wallace-Wells’s piece in the Times suggests we missed the opportunity and failed the test.

            And, if you believe the AI folks, another test of our humanity is upon us.

            But, of course, the tests of our humanity arrive every day.  Are we kind to strangers we encounter?  Caught in traffic, does our rage overcome us?  Do we put down our phones and spend more time in genuine human connection?

            In her commentary on the story of Jesus’ temptation, Kimberly Van Driel writes, “The devil presents wants as needs, falsehoods as truths, distrust as faith.”

            These temptations confront us every day.

            But, there’s good news!  We can change!  We can decide to do something different.  To become something new.  As my colleague Jim Newby declares, “The most amazing thing about the human personality is that it can be changed, transformed, altered, and redirected.”

            Even better is that God promises to be with us through the transformation.

            So, what’s your response?  What kind of human being do you want to be? 

            Are you ready to trust in God and follow Jesus?  Are you ready to be transformed into a new mode of human being? 

            Because that’s what Lent and the journey to Holy Week and Easter invite us to, every year.  The opportunity to experience spiritual and personal transformation.  And it begins with examining ourselves, honestly.  Confessing our sins, admitting our failures, becoming aware of our brokenness.

            But don’t worry.  Jesus shows us the path to new life.  He invites us into a story that never ends, in which to achieve our full humanity, we must invest ourselves in the lives of others. 

Hope Brightens the World

2 Corinthians 3:12, 17-4:2

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

2 March 2024

            “Our problem is . . . a pandemic of fear,” so writes the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han.  His description of our times is stark:

We are facing multiple crises.  Anxiously, we confront a bleak future.  There is no hope.  We muddle through from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to another, from one problem to the next.  Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers.  It becomes survival.

            According to Han, this pandemic of fear prevents us from acting, narrows our horizons, and robs us of a future.  Fear, he writes, is a spectre, haunting humanity.

            We have a sense that these fears are caused by structural regimes that we have little control over, so we turn inward and focus on the self, sometimes isolating ourselves.  Loneliness and even more fear result from this isolation. 

            And our competitive economic environment also generates fears.  He describes the “fear of failing; fear of not living up to one’s expectations; fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind.”  One thinks of the ubiquity of the concept of FOMO—the fear of missing out.  Han writes that these fears are good for productivity, but not so much for our humanity.

            What’s the solution?

            He writes, “Only hope can give us back that life that is more than mere survival.  It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon that reinvigorates and inspires life.  Hope presents us with a future.”

            St. Paul proclaims “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.”

            According to Paul scholar Michael Gorman, hope for Paul is “grounded in the character and promises of God—God’s faithfulness and integrity.”  And because of this, we can look to the future, no matter what is happening in the current moment, even if we are suffering.  And that God-grounded hope “produces confidence, courage, and patient endurance.”

            According to Paul, our hope looks forward to when we will fully shine with God’s glory.  And because of that hope, we can engage in ministry and speak the truth.

            On this Transfiguration Sunday, as we conclude our Epiphany season worship series on the Common Good, I thought we should focus on hope.

            And I thought Byung-Chul Han’s meditation on hope would be worthy of our attention, for some of the fresh ideas he brings to the topic.

            Last fall the Spanish paper El Pais named Han one of the top ten most influential currently working intellectuals in the world.  Fred Nielsen sent that article to me one day.  I had not yet read anything of Han’s, but I had been seeing his name pop up various places, particularly with the publication in America of his latest book The Spirit of Hope.

            Han has been writing short, widely-read books for a while now on the current state of human anxiety and burnout in this time of great change and crises.  His 2015 book The Burnout Society describes how our world is “filled with exhausted people, who exploit themselves at work and optimize their free time by immersing themselves in their cellphones.”

            Han criticizes how we have surrendered to a social narrative about work and consumption instead of doing what we really want to do or what is best for us.  And so much of our work is on superficial things.  He also says that we might have multiple connections with other people but are losing genuine communications in real presence with each other.

            Instead, he encourages that we live more simply, spend more time in each other’s presence, carve out spaces where we disconnect from technology, and make sure we spend time having fun or doing nothing productive at all.

            Han is developing a following for speaking to the concerns of our age.

            His latest book, The Spirit of Hope, encourages hope as a counter-mood to the fears and anxieties that dominate our lives.

            Unlike fear, which narrows our horizons and ability to act, hope has a vastness to it.  Han writes, “Hope effects a widening of the soul so that it embraces the great things.”  When we hope, we can see beyond on current moment and its constraints.  We can imagine new possibilities and make ourselves ready for what new things may come. 

            Han also writes that hope is a form of attention.  If you were here throughout the autumn when I was preaching on the spirituality of awe, then you know that every Sunday attention as a practice came up.  I’ve long preached about the spiritual and ethical importance of being attentive to the world. 

            Here’s what Han has to say about attention and its relationship to hope—“There is also something contemplative about hope.  It leans forward and listens attentively.  The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.”

            He distinguishes hoping from both optimism and wishing.  Optimism has no room for doubt, despair, or anguish.  It overlooks these essential parts of the human condition and ultimately is a passive attitude.  Whereas hope is “searching movement” that leads to action.

            Wishing, he writes, “involves a feeling of lack” but hope is different.  It “possesses a fullness and luminosity.”  Wishes, he says, are never forceful, but hopes are.

            Hope arises from despair, from a deep attention to our human condition.  It is a spiritual mood that breaks out of the constraints of the moment and sees a future of newness and possibilities.

            Hope becomes much like the yes to life that I preached about last week when I was talking about the resurrection power that we Christians can lay claim to.  Han writes, “Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future.”

            Hope is a force, a momentum that moves us forward and with that comes an enthusiasm.  Han says enthusiasm and motivation are “hope’s fundamental traits.”  And because of this hope “brightens the world.”

            Han even says that there is a festiveness to hope.  An attitude of celebration and joy instead of being constrained by anxiety and fear.  It makes me think of the importance of having fun, throwing a party, going dancing, laughing with others.  These enjoyments and delights are essential for our spiritual, emotional, and ethical well-being.

            And because hope has all these traits—its attentiveness, its tender receptivity, its searching movement, its vastness, enthusiasm, motivation, and festiveness, then we are able to act.  Han very simply and directly states, “Humans can act because they can hope.”

            Which returns us to what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians—“since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.”

            The crises and changes of our time cause us anxiety and fear.  Makes sense.  But we cannot become trapped by those anxieties and fears.  We cannot allow our horizons to narrow, our souls to shrink into passivity.  We can claim the yes to life and cultivate the attitude of hope, that looks forward with newness and possibility and embraces great things.  And with that hope we can be people of courage, living in to God’s mission and speaking the truth.