Hope
Is The Negation Of Negation
Lectionary
Texts: Nehemiah, Psalm, 1 Corinthians, Luke
January
24, 2019
Marsh
Chapel
Robert
Allan Hill
We
are living through a negative time.
Before
dawn, aroused by a dream, you awake, it may be. In the mind clutter of the dream you stand
in community listening for a holy word, it may be. Or you walk mesmerized by the beauty of a
beach or a mountain vista, it may be.
Or, otherwise, you sense the tug of a common good, a common desire, it
may be. In the mind clutter of the
dream, too, you may wait to hear something, it may be. Before dawn, in the moonlight. Drowsiness returns, and you return to the
arms of Morpheus, God of sleep. But the
time to rise comes along soon enough, and you take stock again, and you realize
what time it is, again.
We
are living through a negative time.
For
some, the negation is a chosen, intentional negation of inherited forms of
public speech, of national discourse, of governmental responsibility, of
encroaching overweening statism, of political correctness, of international
order and regular borders—a time to pluck up, a time to pluck up what is
planted. Or so one supposes.
For
others, many others, the negation is a consequence of all this and more, and
amounts to a frightening, even terrifying daily rending of the garment of
national life, of the rending of the garment of civil society, of the rending
of the garment of compassionate care for the young, the poor, the sick and the
old, of the steady destruction of treaties, alliances and agreements welling up
from a steady disdain for treaties, alliances and agreements, a rending of the
garments of courtesies developed over longtime to shelter ourselves from our
worst selves, the standard (if sometimes
honored in the breach) shared, common rejection of misogyny, racism, sexism,
xenophobia, greed, pride, sloth, and falsehood.
And in their place another kind of clothing, a laughing joy in and willingness to slaughter
the truth by fulsome mendacity in the small and in the large.
Whether
with some you celebrate such, or whether with many you abhor it, now over the
last few years, it is clear, we are living through a time of negation.
You
arise in the morning, in a wonderment, a dark wonder. Will someone be given the nuclear car-keys
with which to incinerate another land?
Will the government return again to potential ‘fire and fury’ against a
foreign people? Will the lax tax on the
rich bankrupt government protections of the poor? Will the clearly emerging authoritarianism
become patent and fulsome on the strength of a manufactured crisis at a border,
or far away, or most possibly in cyber gear?
You
brush your teeth, pour your coffee, turn on the news, and, amid a wonderment, a
dark wonder, you do wonder: Did I ever
think I would live to see the day that my beloved country to which I have
pledged allegiance since kindergarten, for which I acquired a selective service
card, to which I have paid taxes now grudgingly now willingly over many
decades, on whose account I have voted every years since the years of the
silent majority and that Methodist minister’s son from North Dakota, land where
my father has died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, be held hostage, like a 13
year old girl in Wisconsin, like her the whole country bound, gagged, hidden
under the single bed and held hostage to the megalomania of an imperial,
increasingly authoritarian, government, to a complicit citizenry which cannot
yet fully reckon, neither to reject nor recant the 2016 tragedy, to a Senate
whose every murmur now carries the middle name Faust, for its deal with the
devil in aid of paternalistic judges and capitalism gone wild, and a willful
blindness to the roaring, rising tide of exclusion, falsehood, selfishness,
incivility, unkindness and greed.
Each
morning brings a darker wonder and you wonder how this can ever have anything
other than the bleakest outcome. We are
living through a negative time. In our
time, we are hostages to negativity, living through a most perilously negative
time, with no exit readily or easily in sight.
Some of us may realize that we will be dead, even long dead, before the
blood is fully spilled and washed, before the dawn comes, before a return to
the country’s rightful mind. We are
living through a time of negation.
For a
post-Christian culture and society, the next question, then, is not what it is
right now and right here in Christian worship, the question of the possibility
of preaching, not what it is right now and right here in the spirit of
Christian community, not what it is in this venerable pulpit and other siblings
to it across the land. As a whole, as a
culture, we are no longer rooted in or grounded by hope, if we ever fully were,
no longer grounded by the promise of the Gospel, if we ever were, so, for society
as a whole, the basic question of this moment, the preaching moment, is not,
for the culture, a big or even serious question at all. The symbols of faith have grown cold in a
culture, in a land that is God-forsaken, or, better put, simply, forsaken. So, our problem, or mine in this moment, the
prospect of preaching, the problem of the possibility of preaching, the problem
of how to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, the problem of how to preach a word of faith in a pastoral voice
toward a common hope, the problem of hope itself, in its realest, truest form,
faith working through love-- is not that of our culture. The radio program ‘wait wait don’t tell me’
is not waiting for the telling of a true hope.
It is not perseverating about whether there can or will be any preaching
worthy of the name in our time, let alone who on earth will deign to try to do
it, Sunday by Sunday. No, only the
bitter biblical herb of ‘hope deferred that maketh the heart sick’ has any
natural or easy purchase in our non-religious age. Yes, we are living through a negative time.
In
our time, hope, if it has any hope in it, is itself—negation. A cheery, light, pseudo inner life, a false
gaiety, a ‘que sera, sera’, is not hope.
It is false hope. Some listening
today will find the depiction of negation offered this morning as too
negative. You may be people my age and
older. Some though listening today will
find the depiction of negation as not negative enough. You may be people my children’s age, now some
35% of whom identify, or non-identify, as ‘nones’ those of no religion at all,
but one whose watch much of the mess of these years will have to be cleaned up. No.
Hope that is seen is not hope.
That is in the Bible. Who hopes
for what he sees? That too is in the
Bible. We hope for what we do not see
(the key for once is in the adverb, NOT).
That is in the Bible too. In our
time, hope, if it has any hope in it, is itself pure negation.
(Pause).
And
in that negation, it may be, is the lone location just now for preaching. Hope is the negation—of negation. Hope is
the negation—of negation.
Hope
is the negation of prideful over-confidence in our national or personal
histories. One lasting good in a
negative time is that it leaves little space for high horses ridden and deadly
assumptions hugged. Authoritarianism can
evolve, right here, just now, all the glories of the freedom trail
notwithstanding (repeat).
So D Bonhoeffer: God would have
us know that we must live as (men and women) who manage our lives without
(God). The God who is with us is the God
who forsakes us. Before God and with God
we live without God.
Hope
is the negation of our lazy, slothful spirituality—what a strange, odd,
unbiblical word. Hope is the negation of
our lazy, slothful unwillingness to be politically involved—to go to meetings,
to go to meetings, to go to meetings—on the left, and our refusal, now that the
evidence is in, to recant what for whatever reason we chose to do three years
ago—on the right, that negation comes to gruesome light, even in a twilight
hope.
Hope
is the negation of our falsehood, our capacity somehow to look past or forgive
or minimize the lying, the mendacity, the screaming falsehood of our naively
authoritarian leadership. Hope is the
negation of the dark wonder, that which makes things clear, or clearer, at
dawn. In the light of hope.
Let
us boil this down to daily life, if we may.
It is almost inevitable, you human being you, that in the age of
negativity, in the maelstrom of unlimited negative informational bombardment, and
of wind swept rain soaking every daily pore, it is inevitable that you will now
and then be depressed. You will be. That you now and then will be worried. You will be.
That you now and then will be haunted by bad memories and dark
dreams. You will be. You cannot avoid it. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. There.
That feels good or at least better. Hope walks by faith not by
sight. Faith is a walk in the dark. Faith is the power to withstand what we
cannot understand, to embrace hope that negates what it cannot eliminate. What you can do is this. Listen to the gospel, which is the negation
of negation by hope, the negation of acedia by hope, the negation of depression
and worry and anxiety by hope. Not the
elimination. No. The negation.
Hope will give you a breakfast ounce of courage. Hope will give you a noonday morsel of
anger. Hope will give you a twilight flicker
of faith. Because hope stands as the very
negation of negation. It is not
something, hope, that you or I can concoct or control or conjure. Hope stands in the pulpit, say, and speaks to
us, say, and does so without fear or favor, without quiver or conceit, say, and
utters a word of faith (take heart) in a pastoral voice (I am with you) toward
a common hope (you are a child of God).
Hope,
a sense that things are wrong and can be right-wised, is what gives us the
angry courage, the courageous anger, to rise up, to resist out a tradition of
principled resistance dating back to Amos of Tekoa, in the 8th
century bce, to struggle, to lose, to be defeated, and to get up again. Hope is the raising of the dead.
Jurgen
Moltmann: To recognize the event of the resurrection of Christ is therefore to have
a hopeful and expectant knowledge of this event. It means recognizing in this even the latency
of that eternal life which in the praise of God arises from the negation of the
negative, from the raising of the one who was crucified and the exaltation of
the one who was forsaken. It means
assenting to the tendency towards resurrection of the dead in this event of the
raising of the one. It means following the intention of God by
entering into the dialectic of suffering and dying in expectation of eternal
life and resurrection (211). Thus the
Spirit is the power to suffer in participation in the mission and the love of
Jesus Christ, and is, in this suffering, the passion for what is possible, for
what is coming and promised in the future of life, of freedom and of
resurrection (212). In all our acts we
are sowing in hope (213).
Before
dawn, aroused by a dream, you awake, it may be. In the mind clutter of the dream you stand
in community listening for a holy word, it may be. This is the gospel of Nehemiah, that there is
a Holy Scripture, strange yet audible.
Or you walk mesmerized by the beauty of a beach or a mountain vista, it
may be. This is the gospel of the
Psalmist, in the most beautiful of all 150 psalms, all nature sings and round
us rings, the glory of the creation. Or,
otherwise, you sense the tug of a common good, a common desire, it may be. This is the gospel of the Epistle, Spirit
known for what it does for the common good. In the mind clutter of the dream,
too, you may wait to hear something, it may be.
This is, here in Luke, Jesus, preaching, at home but not welcomed,
preaching the divine favor for the poor not just the poor in spirit, for the
oppressed not just the figuratively oppressed, for the captive not just the
philosophically captive. Before dawn, in
the moonlight.
Hope
negates what it cannot eliminate. Hope
is the negation of negation. Said Paul, Behold I tell you a mystery. Said John, Where I am you may be also. Said
Paul, The trumpet shall sound. Said John, You know the way where I am going.
Said Paul, the dead, the dead,
shall be raised. Said John, I am the way, the truth, the life. Said Paul, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
He opened the book and found the place where
it was written
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has anointed me to PREACH
good news to the poor
He has sent me to proclaim release
to the captives
And recovering of sight to the blind
To set at liberty those who are
oppressed
To proclaim the acceptable year of
the Lord
And he closed the book… and said to them, TODAY this
scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
