The Ground of Our Hope

 

The Ground of Our Hope

June 7, 2022

 

This is a sermon I wrote for a preaching gig but decided not to give, not because it isn’t good or important but because I found something else I was more excited to preach about.

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

I don’t know about you, but I know that I and a lot of other people are simply appalled and even angered by the state of the world today. The list of things wrong with this world and with us humans would be very long if I were to list everything I know of that deserves mention, and I’m sure there are many things wrong today that I don’t know of. Each of you may have particular issues in today’s world that especially disturb you. If so, good. I have lots of such things, and I can organize them under three categories of concerns that I borrow from the World Council of Churches. They are justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. It certainly seems to me and to a lot of other people that there are enormous issues facing us in all three of these categories.

Under justice I would put first of all American racism. We’ve made significant progress in combating our country’s legacy of hate-filled and hate-fueled racism, but we still have an awfully long way to go. Black Americans have been the main targets of our racism since the first of them came here enslaved to white people in 1619. However, they aren’t the only ones we have hated because of what we call their race. Asian, Latinx, and Native American people have been targets of our racism too, most significantly perhaps Native Americans, against whom we did nothing less than commit genocide. Today we have laws against racial discrimination, and few of us, in this part of the country at least, are overtly racist. Yet the effects of America’s original sin of racism are still active among us. If you doubt that, go look up the disparity between Blacks and whites with regard to prison sentences. The numbers are truly appalling. We have lots of other justice issues in this country as well. I won’t take the time to go over more of them here. I’m sure you already know about most of them.

There are immense justice issues in other parts of the world too. China may well be planning or even committing genocide against its Uyghur minority. Burma is doing the same thing to its Rohingya minority. President Putin of Russia, a place particularly close to me from an earlier era of my life, has virtually eliminated the freedoms of speech and the press that Russia enjoyed from the end of the Soviet Union and rule by the Communist Party in late 1991 until Putin’s more recent crackdown on them. There are of course far too many other justice issues in the world for me even to begin to list them all here.

The same is true of the world’s issues around peace and the closely related issue of violence. Russia’s invasion of and war against Ukraine is the best known breach of peace today. It is an unprovoked war of aggression. It is a moral outrage, and the way the Russians are conducting the war just makes it worse. I hope and pray that someday some in the Russian military and perhaps even Putin himself will face prosecution for war crimes, not that I have much hope that that will actually happen. Then there are the violent breaches of the peace from guns in our own country. The heartbreaking and soul-crushing murder of nineteen young schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and the murder of ten grocery store shoppers in Buffalo, New York, because of their race are recent and well-known instances of such violence. Tragically, there are other killings with guns in our country every day, and we don’t even hear about most of them.

I’ll mention just the big issue under the heading of the integrity of creation—climate change also known as global warming. We are on the verge of making much of the only planet we have utterly uninhabitable. That’s because we lack the courage and the will to do what would  be needed to stop our human contribution to that deadly phenomenon. Certain forces with vested economic interests in the way things are today have convinced far too many of us that global warming is a hoax, and the spread of that pernicious lie has definitely hindered our efforts to respond to the climate crisis in constructive ways. So yes, it’s easy to see our world as nearly nothing other than a disaster.

And then we read in Proverbs about a female character named Wisdom. There is a lot of literature about Lady Wisdom by women theologians, but I won’t lead you into the complicated issues they have raised about her. Suffice it to say that Proverbs gives us a woman named Wisdom as having been at God’s side helping God in the massive work of creation. She says that as she was doing that she was “rejoicing in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” Proverbs 8:30. When I reread that line recently it brought me up short. Rejoicing over and delighting in humanity? Are you kidding me? I just l listed here some of the horrors we humans are creating today, but human life has never been perfect. There have always been atrocities going on somewhere. We humans prove ourselves again and again to be selfish, greedy, violent, sexually irresponsible, and a whole bunch of other bad things all the time. We always have. Frankly, humanity rarely seems to be anything to rejoice over or delight in. Yet I’m a Christian, and I assume that you are Christians too. We Christians are supposed to be people of hope, aren’t we? We believe in resurrection, don’t we? But where in God’s name are we supposed to find reason for hope given the deplorable state of the world we live in?

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, I believe we can begin to discern an answer to that question in our other scripture reading this morning, Psalm 8. This psalm begins with praise to God: “O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” It then gives at least a passing reference to God as Creator of all that is: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established….” The psalm then acknowledges that God didn’t just create a universe. God created us too!

There’s a lot to unpack in Psalm 8. I’ll just say that it gives us at least three vitally important points:

 

1.      God is Creator of everything that exists, including us human beings.

2.      God is mindful of us and cares for us.

3.      God has made us God’s stewards of the earth, that part of God’s creation where we live.

 

In these three points lies the basis of the only hope we can have for the future of this world. Let me explain.

The universe doesn’t just exist. It has a Creator, a source that brought it into being. It has a ground of its being, namely, God. We don’t just exist either. That same Creator God who created the universe created us too. And not only that. God cares about us. It’s easy enough sometimes to forget that wonderful truth, but God really does care about us and for us. Human beings aren’t God’s slaves. God doesn’t control everything that happens in our world. Part of that truth is that God has delegated care of God’s good earth to us and makes us responsible for how we care for our part of God’s creation. That of course includes how we care for one another.

So how does all that create hope? It creates hope because it tells us that no matter how big a mess we’ve made of God’s world, the world still matters to God. God still is mindful of and cares for us and for all creation. With knowledge of and trust in God’s care for us and our world we can have the strength and the courage to work with everything we have available to us to clean up the mess we’ve made of things. To make the world a realm of justice for all people. To rid the world of violence. To create a world of true peace, a peace grounded in and arising from the justice for all people we have to establish on earth. To finally do what we should have been doing for years, no, decades, to stop destroying the earth with our greenhouse gases and other forms of environmental degradation.

And one more thing: We can undertake  that sacred work of building the realm of God on earth with two miraculous bits of knowledge. The first is that God will be with us caring for us, inspiring our good work, and forgiving our failures. The second is that while we cannot avoid God’s call to do the work of redeeming the world, we needn’t be concerned that none of us will live to see the full completion of that work. It is ultimately God’s work that we are to be doing. God will do some of that work through us, but God will continue to call others to that work long after all of us are gone. Sometimes we get discouraged and want to give up. But, folks, please believe this divine truth: God will never give up on God’s earth or on us.

Therein lies our hope. Therein lies the possibility that good will eventually triumph over evil. The possibility that God and God’s people will prevail in the nonviolent struggle for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. So let’s get to work, shall we? Let’s continue whatever work we have already done. Let’s undertake the work we need to do but haven’t done. We won’t see the full fruit of that work, but we can know as we do it that we are doing God’s work. We can not just hope but trust that God and God’s people will one day prevail in that struggle. May it be so. Amen.