Hold Fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
Recall a time in your life when you were filled with hope. Perhaps it was holding a new baby. Or maybe it was getting accepted into college or starting a new job. It may have been when you were falling deeply in love and making all kinds of plans for the future. Try to feel the excitement and the anticipation again. Tried to experience once again how wonderful life seemed.
Now recall a time when things seemed hopeless. Perhaps it was a time when a relationship was coming apart. Perhaps it was a time when a loved one died. Maybe it happened when you or someone you love received a frightening, life threatening diagnosis. Recall, just for a moment, the pain and the emptiness.
This morning’s sermon is the second in a series that explores St. Paul’s famous statement on the core of religious faith -- faith, hope and love. Last week we examined faith. I suggested that we understand faith in the way the ancient Hebrew people did. I argued that faith should be viewed not as a matter of trying to believe what someone tells us to believe, but rather that faith is really about being faithful to the people we love and the things in life that we hold sacred.
You and I need hope the way we need air and water and food. A human being cannot live without hope. Our hopes and our dreams shape our lives and give them meaning. Hope is central to religion because hope is central to life. Without hope we are paralyzed. Without hope we enter into an abyss of despair, cynicism and depression. Without hope there is no reason to get up in the morning and no reason to live. Without hope we have no direction. Any religion that does not speak to our hopes is a religion that is irrelevant and meaningless.
Yet for us hope must have a different meaning and a different foundation. You and I are surrounded by people whose religion instructs them to hope for miracles and supernatural intervention in this life and to hope for eternal life after death. I do not share those hopes and I know for a fact that the overwhelming majority of you don’t either. Yet you and I need hope as much as anyone. What hope is there for us? What what do we dare to hope for? And on what can we base hope that will endure, hope that will see us through? We, too, face disappointment, loss and death.
What do you hope for today? What keeps you going when life is hard, when you face loss and pain? What we hope for shapes our experience, shapes our view of life, shapes our capacity to feel joy and fulfillment. Our hopes determine our ability to act with purpose. Our hopes for tomorrow affect the meaning we find today.
It matters, then, what we hope for. What we hope for is not trivial; it is not beside the point, not mere wishful thinking. What we hope for is at the center of our lives, at the center of our identity, at the center of our religion. Our hopes shape who we are and how we live each day.
To see this clearly we need only look at what happens when we have false hopes — hopes founded on wildly improbable fantasies. Think, for example, of the thousands and thousands of young men who practice basketball because they hope to become professional basketball players. They hope that basketball is their ticket to wealth and fame. The awful truth is that they have a better chance of being hit by lightning. Yet too often they turn away from real opportunities, neglect their studies, as they cling to foolish hopes.
How many young people fritter away their energies in the hopes of becoming rock stars or movie stars? How many women and men remain trapped in violent and abusive relationships because they cling to hope that somehow their partner will miraculously change?
Ironically, even the Apostle Paul can be viewed as the tragic victim of a false hope. It is clear that Paul expected Jesus to return during his lifetime. His missionary zeal was based on the hope that Jesus would return any day. Instead, although we do not know for certain, he was probably executed in Rome around the year 62.
False hopes lead to tragedy, waste and disillusionment. And false hopes can be a copout. If my hope is that I will win the lottery or that some doting deity will take care of me, I do nothing for myself. That kind of hope is paralyzing and irresponsible.
It matters what we hope for.
If wildly fantastic hope leads us astray, the opposite is just as deadly. Our hopes can be so limited, so circumscribed, that our imaginations are stifled. When we are afraid and hope for little, we build ourselves a prison. I recall a study done of elementary school girls in the small town in Oregon where I lived. Rather than having wild fantasies, most of these girls imagined themselves becoming waitresses and hairdressers. There is nothing wrong with being either, but I was appalled that their were virtually no girls who envisioned a future rich with challenge and adventure, few saw themselves capable of leadership and professional competence. One way in which people are oppressed is that hope is taken from them or they are taught not to hope. These girls had been taught that they could aspire to very little, so they were going to strive for very little. We cannot strive unless we have hope. What a pitiful waste.
Our hopes shape our lives.
So what can we hope for? How can we find a hope that will guide us to lives that are full and rich and meaningful? How can we steer between impossible fantasy and imprisoning fear? And where does religion fit in?
These are especially hard questions for people like most of us here today. Most of us are here because we simply cannot accept the traditional answers of most religions. Most of us do not believe in a God that is waiting to perform miracles on our behalf. Most of us do not believe that we will be taken up to heaven when we die. I do not mean to demean or ridicule such beliefs, but the fact is that most of us do not hope for miracles or eternal life. What can we hope for if we don’t believe?
There is a profound irony here. We live at a time when science and technology have given us humans power we have never had. We have control of our environment that ancients would have attributed only to gods. We can fly across the continent in a few hours. We can hear voices of people thousands of miles away and not be imagining it. We can listen to music played by people long dead.
And yet the scientific knowledge that has given us this new power has undermined a hope based on prescientific theology.
We need new hope for a new age.
I believe the sources of hope are all around us. The hope that will sustain us and guide our lives will come from within us and among us.
We can fashion a hope that is based on what is really and truly possible. And how do we know what is possible? We know what is possible because we have already tasted it, felt it, seen it.
This is the hope that comes from within. This hope is grounded in memory. We know life can be wonderful because we have experienced it. We know we can create relationships which are deeply fulfilling. We have seen beauty, we have heard music, we have felt loved, we have touched one another’s lives. We have seen justice and seen people liberated from oppression. We have seen children play and heard them laugh. We have held a newborn baby. We have seen friends die with dignity and held in love, knowing they will be remembered. We have seen sunsets, mountains, flowers and clusters of galaxies. We have sung and danced and fallen in love.
We have experienced ecstasy and peace and wholeness, and because we have experienced it we can imagine it happening again. Once we experience love, beauty, peace, community, reconciliation, intimacy, wholeness, joy — once we know what life can be we are filled with hope. We have hope that cannot be taken from us, a hope that will sustain us. We know in our hearts and in our brains and in our bodies what life can be. This is a hope based not on idle promises, but hope built upon the solid foundation of what is possible.
That is a deeply religious hope. Our glimmers of what is possible, our experiences of love and beauty, are deeply religious experiences. The glimmer of what is possible is what some call the face of God.
We don’t have to hope for the impossible. That’s too easy. Ultimately it is dishonest.
Neither do we need to settle for aspirations that are timid and narrow.
And we don’t have to pretend that life is a bed of roses. Yes, there is hatred, violence and ignorance. But we know life need not be like that; evil and ignorance need not prevail.
There is also a hope that emerges from our being part of a much larger whole. No one is alone. Each one of us is connected in thousands of ways to other people. Our lives have been shaped by countless generations who have come before. Our lives will shape the lives of those not yet born. Our sense of individual independence is an illusion. We are part of a social, cultural, historical and even cosmic fabric. When we lose sight of that we descend into narcissism, escapism and consumerism. When we lose sight of our connections across space and time we can become irresponsible and truly dangerous. We are part of a community of memory and hope.
Just take the example of this beloved congregation. Everything good and worthy and compassionate that we have done together we have done because we dared to hope. Everything good that we will ever do together we will do because together we can hope. Our hopes and dreams set the limit of what we can do. It behooves us to have high hopes. Our hopes challenge and liberate us.
We can build our hope on what is real and on what we can do with our own lives if we live religiously — if we live with discipline and purpose and in harmony with our ideals.
What can we hope for together? We can hope for relationships where we know and love each other. We can hope for a community and even a world where children are loved and cared for and educated, where people have fundamental freedoms, where we celebrate human diversity. We can hope to be good stewards of our small blue planet.
Together we can hope to become agents for profound change in our world. We can hope to be powerful witnesses for compassion, peace, equality and justice. I hope we can be examples to others that we can be deeply spiritual and religious people without resorting to fear, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, indoctrination and violence. Reverence need not be reactionary. Let us show a better way and invite others to join with us. I hope that our church and our movement will lead the way, for the world desperately needs religion that is beyond tribalism, religion that looks to the future rather than trying to recapture a mythical past.
Living with such a hope is not easy. Deep, durable and realistic hope creates a tension between what is and what can be. How can we settle for discord, hatred, violence, and injustice when we know that this need not be so? When our hopes are realistic and not pie in the sky fantasies, then our hope calls us to act. Our hope calls us to live lives that are faithful to our sacred sense of life’s possibilities.
This is the link between hope and faith. Our hopes can guide and shape our lives. This is what it means to live religiously: we must fashion hopes that are worthy and real, and these hopes must guide our lives. When we do that our lives become wondrous spiritual adventures! When hope guides us we form deep friendships. When hope guides us our lives are filled with joy and meaning. When hope fills our hearts we are fully alive. With hope our lives suddenly transcend all the pettiness that can trap us.
It matters what we hope for. Our lives literally depend on it.
Let us, then, hope wisely. Let us form our hopes out of our most precious memories and our most profound experiences. Let us shape our hopes from those things our hearts love most.
As each one of us forms our hopes and dreams, let us remember that we must dream and hope together. Hopes that do not include others people turn destructive and self-destructive.
Just look around! Look at the good, committed, idealistic, loving people gathered here. How can we not be filled with hope when we look around and see what we can create together?
May each one of us be filled with hope today—hope that is real, hope that is solid, hope that we share. As we move into the future, may we let hope guide us every step of the way. With hope guiding our way, hand in hand we will create lives filled with love and meaning. If we faithfully follow our hope, we can heal our wounded world.
Hope makes it all possible.
Amen.