Holding On
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Oh, you got to hold on, hold on
You gotta hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on
Tom Waits, “Hold On”
On Labor Day Sunday, we celebrated the marriage of our youngest offspring, our son Isaac. It was a wonderful time: our entire family was there, as were friends of our son we hadn’t seen in years. The celebration after the wedding was joyfully raucous, and perhaps best of all, the ceremony was genuinely enjoyable. Our daughter Jessie presided, and her homily was a perfect blend of exposition, sage counsel, and of course, humor. She began by informing our new daughter-in-law, Allison, of something she probably already knew, which is that “we Shumans are not happy people.” After naming the reasons she thought we tended to be dour, she reassured Allison – and Isaac – that they needn’t worry too much, because happiness, nice as it is, isn’t really all that important. Happiness is born of circumstance, which changes day by day, hour by hour, and sometimes even minute by minute. Happiness, she averred, is too ephemeral to be made the measure of how it’s going in our lives and the world. What really matters is something even the glummest of us can possess – joy. For while happiness is born of fortune, joy is born of something far more substantial, which is hope.
Perhaps.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about hope and its corresponding vice, despair, and not solely by choice. My most recent project, a book on the opioid crisis, got me invited to speak last week at a conference on Health, Hope, and Despair. My lecture addressed the still-worsening opioid crisis and its role in the phenomenon called diseases and deaths of despair, and my preparatory research involved re-confronting a lot of terribly bleak facts about a twenty-year-old epidemic that is now killing more than 100,000 people a year, a desperate situation if there ever was one. On a front closer to home, declining enrollment at the college where I work led to the release of 24 staff over the summer, accompanied by the announcement that 20 faculty would be let go this fall, effective at the end of the academic year. I have friends who have lost or are going to lose their jobs, something that would certainly tempt me to despair. And not to beat a dead horse, but the nation’s deep political fissures are only growing worse, even as we find ways to ignore increasingly dire news about our rapidly declining chances to do anything about climate change other than ignore it. Not to put too fine a point on it, and with all due respect to my favorite preacher, but hope has for a lot of people gotten damned hard to come by. Despair is not only easier, but in some ways seemingly more fitting. Hence the aforementioned “perhaps.”
It's fortuitous (or providential), then, that this week’s lectionary offers to help us wrestle with these matters by providing an abundant consideration of hope and its significance for our bearing witness to God’s good intentions.
The most straightforward, and therefore (to my mind) the most problematic of this week’s hope-full texts is Psalm 91, a lovely paean based on the covenantal promises of God to Israel. There’s no equivocation here, only resolute declaration: God will deliver us from peril. God will cover us with his wings of refuge, protecting us from violence and pestilence. The concluding stanza reiterates these promises; God says, “Those who love me, I will deliver;/I will protect those who know my name./When they call to me, I will answer them;/I will be with them in trouble;/I will rescue them and honor them./With long life I will satisfy them/and show them my salvation.”
This is all well and good, especially if we understand it eschatologically; we might even go so far as to hear the Psalm as a reassuring response to the central petition of the Our Father: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Read against that horizon, most readers can find at least a trace of hope. But many of us, even the most convinced, don’t live eschatologically day-by-day and hour-by-hour, and for the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick and dying, and the inconsolably grieving, these promises may not do much work.
The week’s other First Testament text, from Jeremiah, is helpful at this point, for it is a story of what I recently heard a philosopher helpfully call “hope by proxy.” Some people face situations – or entire lives – so grim that hope is simply impossible for them. For those who have no hope, the only way forward is the less desperate among us hoping for and with them; because their despair is a product of the grimmest of circumstances, such hoping must often include doing for and with them, by succoring their pain and demanding the justice necessary to ease or eradicate the causes of their despair. Which is to say that hope is born of human connection, including and perhaps especially the neighbor love at the center of the life of faith.
Just so, Jeremiah’s situation is instructive. The people of Judah faced decidedly dire circumstances, and Jeremiah had problems of his own. He had been arrested by King Zedekiah and was spending his days in the king’s presence, tightly bound. His personal fate, like that of Jerusalem, appeared grim. Judah faced a case of political intrigue gone wrong, brought on by a King to whom history would not be kind. After Babylon conquered Assyria, and then Egypt, to become the regnant political power in the Ancient Near East, Judah existed as a tributary – a client state – of Babylon. But Zedekiah decided to stop paying tribute to Babylon and instead entered an alliance with Egypt, doing so against the counsel of his advisors, who included Jeremiah. The armies of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, subsequently marched on Jerusalem and laid siege to the city. By the time the events of chapter 32 unfolded, around 588 BCE, the fall of the city was imminent, and Jeremiah told Zedekiah as much. So, there he was.
And yet Jeremiah did not despair, for the LORD offered the prophet an encouragement that Jeremiah understood was also a sign of God’s steadfast love to be shared with the people of Judah. Jeremiah learned from his cousin that according to the instruction laid out in the Torah (Leviticus 25), he had the “right of redemption” to a parcel of land that had been owned by his late uncle. He bought the land from his cousin, and upon signing the deeds and having them duly witnessed and sealed, asked that they be placed in an earthenware jar to assure their longevity. The deeds needed to “last for a long time,” for they were to be a reminder, and thus a sign to the people of Judah, that in spite of the events that would come to pass in the near future – the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, and the capture of Zedekiah, who was forced to watch his sons’ execution before being blinded and taken to Babylon to die in prison – there would come a day when “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” Despite all the tragedy that had and would come to pass, the people of God would continue in the land because of the steadfast love of God.
Despite his troubles, Jeremiah not only found hope, but established a sign of hope for the benefit of Judah and subsequent generations of God’s people. In this, he was offering hope by proxy. His hope-full action stands in stark contrast to the inaction of the unnamed rich man in the familiar story of Lazarus and the rich man from Luke 16. Although we have no access to his state of mind, the destitute Lazarus had every reason to despair, for “even the dogs would come and lick his sores.” The rich man, meanwhile, had an abundance of opportunity to afford Lazarus some hope by caring for him. Their respective deaths brought about a reversal of circumstance; Lazarus was carried away to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man found himself in Hades. When the rich man called out to Abraham, asking first for succor from Lazarus, then that Lazarus might be sent to warn his brothers lest they suffer similar fates, Abraham declared that his brothers had “Moses and the prophets,” and that “if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
Like the rich man and his brothers, we have Moses and the prophets, as well as the teaching of Jesus. Though they differ in several respects, they agree concerning the foundation of the way of God’s people, to love God and our neighbor in all that we do. The love of neighbor must always include offering hope to those whose circumstances have caused them to lose hope. More often than not, that offering requires of us concrete acts of mercy (See Matthew 24:34-46). By acting in ways that may offer hope to others, we might well rediscover hope to bear us up through our own moments of despair, giving us the strength to hold on. And when that happens, we just might rediscover joy.