Sermon April 29 , 2007 Dr. Eleazar Fernandez

Desperate Times, Defiant Hopes

Good morning to you all! Worshipping with you and leading our morning reflection have been, for me, a source of joy and nourishment.  Your hospitable hearts and minds have allowed me to explore some of the issues I care about so deeply.

One of the side effects of gaining in years is greater exposure to suffering, such as sickness and death of family members. Along with the blessings of getting older is greater and deeper experience of personal losses. And when our hearts and minds are in the right place, the more we suffer. To paraphrase one of my favorite texts (Ecclesiastes 1:18):  Where there is much wisdom, there is much vexation. She or he who increases in knowledge increases in sorrow; the more one learns the more one suffers.

There is suffering in every corner of God’s world, and people suffer for different reasons. People suffer because of natural calamities, such as tsunamis or earthquakes. But the ones that have caused massive suffering are of human making, particularly the making of those who lord over others. In spite of the euphoria of the evangelists of the global market, the promised economic prosperity of the global market has not benefited the largest and poorest segment of the population. Metaphorically speaking, contrary to the expectation that a rising tide raises all boats, the rising tide raises all yachts. Worse, the world’s poor do not even have boats, and they are drowning in the tsunami of corporate profits.

Intertwined with the tsunami of corporate profits which has drowned the largest segment of the world’s population is the war on terror. Taking the Philippines as the “second front” on the war on terror, the current leaders of the Philippine government have adopted the ideology of U.S. counter-terrorism, used its funding, and quickly labeled citizens, NGOs and church bodies that call for the transformation of the Philippine society as “terrorists.” This label, which serves as a warrant for repression, if not as a death warrant, has been issued to many prophetic church people in the Philippines, and some of them (my close friends) are no longer with us.

After many years of struggle for a just and sustainable tomorrow, the forces of reaction are still pervasive and in control. The writer of the book of Malachi articulates this poignant cry not only for the Israelites of old, but also for me in our desperate times: “As you see it, proud people are the ones who are happy. Evil people not only prosper, but they test God’s patience with their evil deeds and get away with it.” (3:15).

Deep inside I am grieving and crying. I am crying because I see the pervasiveness of the forces of reaction and death, and it seems that we are not making significant progress after years of struggle. I am crying for the world I love so dearly, yet often serve so poorly. I am crying because I am growing weary. And I am crying because I may succumb to compassion fatigue and may lose hope.

It is difficult to live in hope when our day-to-day lives are saturated by events that continue to make a mockery of hope. Our experience in life may make us wise, but not necessarily hopeful. We may even become so wise that we know how to masquerade our growing status-quo conservatism in the form of piecemeal pragmatism and more-calculated-do-not-rock-the-boat-realism. We may become so wise in hiding the death of our youthful and daring idealism in the form of ludic or playful intellectualism. Likewise, we may become so wise that we know how to hide our complicity through calculated silence; nonetheless, it is still complicit silence masquerading as prudence.

Since our experience in life may make us wise but not necessarily hopeful, we must learn to hope. If theologian Jürgen Moltmann could say that we learn to hope when we say yes to the future, I say that we learn to hope when we say yes to life and to the God of life.-Jürgen Moltmann

Unless we say yes to life and its radical demands as to how we should live in the present, I have to say that our groaning in pain, to use Pauline imagery, is not the groaning of the birth of a new and better tomorrow (Romans 8: 22-23), but the groaning of our march toward death.

Conversely, to say yes to life and to the God of life is to say no to death and the gods of death. There is no way to reclaim life that is tyrannized by the forces of death apart from prophetic naming or prophetic denunciation of the gods of death. Not only is silence a lie when truth needs to be spoken, but our continuing silence is a form of blessing a lie. Whatever we do not question when the time is ripe for questioning, we bless. If we truly love life, we cannot remain silent; we must say the prophetic no of hope against the gods of death.  

Speaking the truth is, of course, is a risky act to do, especially in a situation in which the forces of reaction are desperate to maintain the death-laden status-quo. The forces of reaction will do everything with all their might to silence those who utter prophetic words of judgment. In this situation when it is easy to be overcome by fear, our hope must take the form of courage. Courage is the daring side of hope. The courage of hope is not oblivious of danger, but it dares because it believes that there is something greater than fear, something that fear itself cannot stop us from pursuing. In courage we know not only what is to be feared, but also what is to be dared. What is to be dared is life. This is reason enough to dare, more so when we realize that the hopes of the victims as well as those who are yet to come are tied to our acts of re-membering and hopeful acts of courage in the present.

Our daring acts of hope are all the more crucial in moments when the forces of reaction are tyrannizing us with more suffering and death. In these crucial moments, our daring acts of hope may need to take the shape of presence and solidarity with our brothers and sisters in their hours of deepest anguish. You may have heard of this story, but allow me to share it because it illumines the ideas I am trying to articulate.

A little girl was late getting home from school. Her mother became more and more worried as the afternoon wore on. When she finally arrived, the mother said,   “Where have you been?! I’ve been worried sick!” The little girl responded, “Well, I   was almost home, but then I saw Suzie sitting on the curb crying. Her dolly was broken.” Her mother, relieved, said, “Oh! So you stopped to help her fix her dolly?”   The little girl with the wisdom of the universe said, “No [mom], I sat down on the curb, and I helped Suzie cry.” - Kathy Black

Of course, we want to accomplish more in our daring acts of hope, but crying with those who cry or lamenting with those who lament, especially if we express it in public, is not only a strategy but a fundamental expression of who we are and an expression of our oneness in suffering and hope.

I am fully aware that it is easy to give up hope and be swallowed by despair when we do not see the standard, visible, calculable and the measurable so-called outward “signs of hope.” However, have we taken into serious account the words of our Pauline text? “[B]ut if we see what we hope for, then it is not really hope. For who of us hopes for something we see? (Romans 8: 24).

This text, I believe, does not totally rule out some visible signs of hope. In desperate times we crave for some visible signs of hope. But these signs of hope are beyond what technical reason can see, measure, and calculate. They are signs that only hope grounded in faith has the eyes to see. They are signs that optimism, which is often confused with hope, is blind to see.  

 I suspect that our despair is partly due to a common misunderstanding of what hope is. We are swallowed by despair partly because we have confused hope with optimism, an optimism bred by a kind of life that has been spoiled by getting most of the things we have expected in life. Despair may be the opposite of hope, but it appears to me that the greatest enemy of hope is not despair but optimism. Optimism wears a false smile. It cannot survive the darkest moments of our lives and society.

Hope, authentic hope, cannot be swallowed by despair because it does not hang or fall based on optimistic signs around us. Hope has a different basis and it operates on a different norm, which gives us a different set of eyes. A moment in the life of Albert Camus helps us see through the eyes of hope in these trying times.

When Europe had been wasted away by the Second World War, the young Albert Camus returned from France to his native Algeria. "In the light cast by the flames," he wrote, "the world had suddenly shown its wrinkles and afflictions old and new. It had suddenly grown old, and we had too." Exhausted both morally and spiritually, he returned to his village in the Mediterranean--Tipasa. And there he wrote: "Misery has taught me that all was not well under the sun, but the sun taught me that misery was not everything." - Mary Jo Leddy

No doubt misery is everywhere, but hope helps us to see that misery is not everything. As we grow in years, for sure wrinkles will be written upon our brows. Nonetheless, even if wrinkles must be written upon our brows, hope prevents them from being written upon our hearts.

No doubt, the forces of closure and reaction are pervasive, and what we can do seems small in comparison to the magnitude of the challenges that are before us. Regardless of outcomes, hope demands that we live differently as if the future were present. Hope demands that we live with integrity in the here and now in spite of the brutal reality that defines our world. 

While our hope is oriented toward the coming of the new tomorrow, it is as much a journey as a destination. Our hope for a new tomorrow is a journey in hope, and finding hope is finding home in our journey. When we have found home in our journey in hope, we experience a miracle: we see the flower in a bud, the spring in the freezing winter, and the butterfly in the chrysalis. And when we have found home in our struggles, we have found home in God and God has found home in us.  Earthen vessels though we are, we can embody hope because God has found home in us.