Defiantly Hopeful

Shelley Denison

Scripture: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

The world feels weird right now.

That's what I usually say these days because the word “weird” has some lightness to it. Some levity to stand in for what I'm actually thinking. Which is: right now, the world feels heavy, and unpredictable, and hopeless.

It seems like every day, multiple times a day, it's another thing. Another crisis. Another tragedy.

Another act of broad daylight corruption. Another reprehensibly cruel set of policies. Another person detained by ICE at their immigration hearing. Another natural disaster directly connected to an ever-warming planet. Another massive cut in funding to domestic welfare or international aid. Another visa program unexpectedly pulled, putting another few thousand people at risk of deportation. Another violent conflict that you only just learned about because it’s overshadowed in the news by all of the other violent conflicts. Another politician weirdly obsessed with what bathrooms people use. Another comment section filled with people who seem to be living in a completely different reality. Another law targeting trans kids. Another video of another body being pulled from the rubble of another bombed out building in Gaza. And another comment underneath saying that maybe they deserved it.

Another 3 killed in a mass shooting. Another 40 killed in an Israeli airstrike. Another 200 killed in an earthquake.

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt. I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

The Prophet Jeremiah lived during the final years of Judean independence, witnessing the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile of Judeans to Babylonian captivity.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan author, has talked about a common narrative journey shared by many of the Old Testament prophets, including Jeremiah. It starts with anger, even rage, at the collective suffering caused by greed, injustice, and oppression. And that anger shifts into a deep sadness, a grief over the growing distance between God and God’s people. But that’s not where the Prophets stay. Richard Rohr wrote that “they were also mystics who were captivated by the wholeness and beauty at the heart of reality at the same time as they were confronting injustice.”

I think the best illustration of this idea is in the book of Lamentations. Lamentations, which is only 5 chapters, is traditionally understood to have been written by Jeremiah in the immediate aftermath of the Jewish exile. His grief is visceral in the text. In one verse he says: “Look, O Lord, at how distressed I am; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me.” In another: “My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’”

Verse after verse we feel Jeremiah's despair like an open wound. But if we look at the structure of the text, we notice something interesting. We notice that it’s a poem.

Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are acrostic. They each contain 22 verses with the first Hebrew letter of each verse corresponding, in order, with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 3 does the same thing, repeating the pattern 3 times in 66 verses.

These chapters also use a specific poetic meter known as the Qinah, which is a repeating pattern of a line with three stressed syllables followed by a line with two stressed syllables. This meter is deliberately used as a way to create a sense of unbalanced rhythm.

And the reason why I think this is so interesting is because even when the world around him was falling apart and he was literally lamenting the exile and enslavement of his people, Jeremiah wrote a poem about it.

There is something I love about that. The stubborn faith that beauty and meaning are always worth finding and creating. The persistence. The hope.

And I think that what was true for Jeremiah then is true for us now: hope is a sacred defiance against a broken and unjust world.

In 2018, Nathan and I spent Christmas in Ukraine, where, as many of you know, Nathan was a missionary for two years (many years ago). We spent some time in a city called L’viv. While we were there, we went to the Lonsky Prison National Memorial Museum, a former political prison which was used throughout the 20th century by Polish, Nazi, and Soviet regimes. The Soviets held thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners here at the start of World War II, most without evidence or trials. But when the German-Soviet war began in June 1941, prison officials in L’viv were ordered to evacuate the prisoners to prisons further within the borders of the USSR. And as the German military quickly approached, it became evident that the officers would not have the time or means necessary to evacuate everyone, and the officers instead executed nearly 4,000 Ukrainian prisoners in less than a week.

The Lonsky Prison Museum has on display the original records from that week. The names, ages, and charges of the executed prisoners. And if you look at these documents, you’ll notice that beside each name, in pencil, is a checkmark. It was someone’s job to stand there with a clipboard and a pencil, the trappings of official business, and mark off each person’s name as they were executed. Each checkmark the evidence of depraved cruelty disguised with a thin veneer of bureaucratic legitimacy.

During that trip we also took a short flight to spend a couple of days in Krakow, Poland, where we went to Auschwitz. I spent a long time while writing this sermon trying to figure out how to string together the right combination of words to capture the emotional experience of seeing the train tracks, the gates, the barracks, the gas chambers, the suitcases, the shoes, all the children’s shoes, but there’s nothing I can say to describe it.

One Sunday we went to church in L’viv, and the church members there invited us to go Christmas caroling downtown with them that evening. One of the songs we sang is my favorite Christmas hymn, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. This hymn is based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He wrote this poem during the height of the American Civil War, a war which caused more casualties than every other war this country fought in until Vietnam combined. He wanted this poem to capture the juxtaposition between a hopeless world and a hopeful faith.

The last two stanzas of his poem read:

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

And I still consider one of the most spiritually significant experiences of my life to be standing in the former Soviet Union, with Auschwitz and the Lonsky Prison fresh in my mind, and singing the words “God is not dead nor doth He sleep.”

Hope is kept alive by doing hopeful things. Over and over in the Bible, hope translates as action. People moving toward God’s promise before they see it fulfilled. It means planting, building, praying, and showing up even when the outcome isn’t certain. As political activist Mariame Kaba puts it, “Hope is a discipline.”

To supplement this idea and hopefully inspire you with some ideas for developing a stronger sense of hope, I put together a booklet. It has questions to get you thinking about what gives you hope and what kinds of meaningful work and activism can help you feel more hopeful.

To hope is to take seriously God’s promise of redemption, and hope is cultivated through action. We hope defiantly against a world and a time in which hopelessness can feel like the only reasonable response. But the God we worship has never been a reasonable God. We hope in a God who commands dry bones to live, who makes a path through the sea, and who leaves the tomb empty. We hope in a God who continues to show up over and over and over again, so we will too. Amen.

The booklet Shelley put together: