Memory for the Future

For the past few weeks I have been putting together this year’s Advent devotional entitled Signs of Hope. Many of you received an email from me inviting you to be part of this project... in some instances over time, the invitation turned to be a little more like a plea for help and a little bribing and begging, but when the real deadline arrived, not the pretend deadline I put in the letter to trick everyone into turning their submission in early, we had the perfect number of entries. You can imagine the great temptation I faced, especially this week as I was visiting with family and friends and away from my computer. I had a WHOLE booklet dedicated to hope written by church members and the task of preparing a sermon for the first sunday of Advent, the day we traditionally celebrate hope. All I really needed to do this morning is stand up and read from the book. It would make a great sermon. Well, that was my plan B if thanksgiving festivities got out of hand. Putting this booklet together, reading your thoughts on hope and having quite a few conversations about hope made me wonder further, to have hope or not to have hope... that seemed to be the looming question. Some of us have known hope well, have felt it palpably pulsing in our veins, and can articulate it easily, while to others of us, hope has seemed a stranger, a gaping hole, an emptiness of something which has been promised but not truly given.

Hope is not just a word used within the hallowed walls of churches and theological communities. It is a concept which has even peaked the interest of science and in particular, neurobiology. Scientists and doctors argue that numerous studies have shown that having an anticipatory consciousness, the ability to imagine and anticipate and even hope for the future, is deeply imbedded in our neurobiology. “Imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past.”

Our memories and the way we understand the past directly impacts our ability to anticipate and imagine the future. One neurobiologist calls this, a “memory for the future.” Those who anticipate the future in the spirit of hope, even coming from difficult circumstances like living with HIV and AIDS, live healthier physical lives. Daily practices of hope result in better, brighter futures. Communities of faith have known this well for centuries, and now science is finally catching up.

Despite these scientific breakthroughs, I must confess when I read Isaiah and Psalm 122 this week, poetic words about a future time when all will join together on the mountain of the lord, praising God unceasingly, my thoughts wandered to the darker side of hope. I thought about hearing these words which speak of peace, of the abolition of war and violence, as a parent who has just lost a son or daughter in Afghanistan or the Sudan or Anacostia. Do these hope-filled words mean anything to one slain under fire or dismembered by a roadside bomb or hidden land-mine? To those who have been lost to the HIV and AIDS epidemic? To family members who have been left behind? In some moments, these passages make hope seem so far- reaching that it doesn’t belong in the present tense or even as possibility of what I might know in my lifetime.

I think about the tension of hope being here and now versus hope being a distant promise when I consider my brother who suffers from a debilitating mental illness which has brought great sadness to our family. For a long time, I have held hope at an arm’s distance. Hope was fine for a distant mountain and I had faith that God would make it possible, but not now, not today, or even in the near future. I could not begin to pray for his healing and renewal in the present tense because I was too afraid that an undesirable answer to prayer would be too much for me to bear. Hope would require me to open my heart, both to the wonderful possibility of his healing as well as the sorrow of his illness remaining the same. I knew that even entertaining hope for his healing would test my faith in God and God’s love for my brother. Therefore, I remained silent. Having any hope for the here and now seemed too difficult for me to risk.

Every year on the first Sunday of new school year, my university’s chapel choir sings a setting of Psalm 122, entitled “I was glad.” Over the seven years that I spent going to school and singing in this choir, I came to expect this song every opening Sunday. It was a kind of renewal for me, a reminder of to whom I belonged. After a long summer, venturing far from my home surviving the mud crawling at basic training or the grueling pace of internships in DC, this reunion with my church community in the chapel choir and our proclaiming these words together was an annual infusion of life and faith. “I was glad, glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord.” The first phrase always required full sound and voice, all of us singing our hearts out. In that space which represented love of God and neighbor, the sacred connections of community, my heart would swell and tears would threaten to spill over onto my music.

As much as that song came to represent so much of what I loved during my school years, the first occasion I had to sing this song was far from a happy, hopeful time. Not even a week had passed since my parents had driven me to North Carolina, unpacked the rental van full of my important possessions all variations of the color pink, and driven away, leaving me alone in my freshman dorm. As excited as I was about the possibilities which were at my fingertips, gladness was far from my heart. As the choir belted out, “I was glad” I wanted instead to sing “I was sad.” My tears did not spring forth out of fullness, but from just the opposite, from my deep loss. I had no song in my heart that day, but those who surrounded me in the choir, as much as each one sang for herself, she also sang a little bit for me too. It felt as if this collective effort of praise was carrying me through my own weariness. Because they shared their song, including me in a proclamation of faith though I could hardly part my lips to sing with them, I was reminded of the hope which was present despite the darkness which had closed in on me.

In South Africa, the place that I best witnessed hope was during a funeral. In the township, the busiest place, Saturday after Saturday, was the local cemetery. Each week, thousands would gather around newly dug graves, and they would sing and give praise to God for an entire morning, dancing and clapping around the holes in the ground. Watching this scene and participating in it was the most hopeful thing I ever did. Despite the number of deaths, the seeming finitude, the children orphaned, the wails and tears that were shed, hope managed to emanate from the grave. In the face of death, the message of their songs, of hope in God’s promise of life everlasting through Jesus Christ, rang out louder than the evidence of what seemed to be. The promise of renewal was more significant than the reality of the coffin.

The curious part of this kind of hope is that it is made possible each week through the strength of the hope present in others in the community, those who have come to witness the funeral and proclaim promises of life. Through their song, a message of hope transmits to all who hear, even those who have no song to sing, no hope at all. The community’s singing is a reminder of the life which remains, the hope that still exists, even at this site which symbolizes that which has been lost. When these funeral goers have the courage to sing about promises of life in the midst of death, they reverberate hope into the community often depleted by illness and death. They pave the way for a memory of the future.

It is ironic that I learned how to hope in a graveyard. As I reflected on our gospel lesson though, I realized I should not be surprised. Jesus says, “The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” In the most unexpected place, where no real hope seemed possible, my own hope was born. It was the hour I did not expect. And, this is the truth which connects the gap between the hope of here-and-now and the eschatological promise of one day. We may not know the particulars, when or where or even how, but we have been promised and then reminded in the meal which we celebrate today, that our Lord Jesus is never tired of coming to our world. We must be ready and watchful, living the kind of lives which pry open our hearts and prepare us for encounters of hope which defy our reason and challenge us to trust what God has been promising us all along-- that he is here and continues to come.

As you meditate on hope during this Advent season, remember that you both pray and hope not as individuals but as a community which spans in every possible direction, young and old, the past and the future, and the here and now. Wherever you are, however you feel about hope, about faith, even about God, rest in this knowledge, the song of hope goes on. It has been sung from the beginning and will be sung until the end. It is a part of all of us, every facet of creation which has been formed and cradled by God. Some days you may be the one to lead the song and other days your song will be choked by tears, but every day, whether you feel it or know it, this song of hope will carry you.

I was glad, glad when they said unto me, we will go to the house of the Lord. Amen

This sermon was preached by Rev. Mel Baars at the Presbyterian Church of Chestertown on November 28, 2010