“When Hope and History Rhyme”



“When Hope and History Rhyme”

John 20: 1-18

“I have seen the Lord.”

Jason W. Coulter

A sermon prepared for Ravenswood UCC

March 31, 2013

Most folks are familiar with the expression, “hope springs eternal.” It is no coincidence that our most hope-filled holiday of Easter comes in the springtime when tulips and daffodils push up through the cold dark ground to remind us that yes, hope springs eternal. But if you really want to tap into a deep vein of hopefulness, talk to the men in the short pants who play baseball, and to those fans who follow their exploits religiously. The game of baseball is one that has turned that hopeful expression around and given it new meaning when they say, “spring hopes eternal.” Tomorrow isn’t just the day after Easter, it is Opening Day, my second favorite holiday. And on Opening Day you will find 30 baseball clubs, all in first place, all hopeful, who are looking at their assembled young talent, and their cast of steely veterans, and saying to themselves, “This just might be the year. This could be the year. If our third baseman learns to lay off the high fastballs and our left-fielder doesn’t get tangled up and lost in the ivy, and if we can just get 200 innings out of the old left-hander we might, just might, go all the way….”

Now this being the Northside of Chicago, there are folks here who are well-versed with such hopeful fantasies. The baseball fans on the Northside invest their baseball hopes and dreams in the Chicago Cubs of the National League, who, should they fall short again this year, would mark 104 years of futility in failing to bring home the big prize to their devoted fans. Ahhh, the heartbreak the fans of the Cubbies have witnessed! Ground balls through the legs of a first basement, curses from billygoats, Bartman! It’s worthy of a lusty Old Testament lament! But I don’t want to be too hard on the Cubs. After all, anyone can have a bad century, right? And as a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers, I am certainly not one to throw any stones at glass ballparks since our trophy case is likewise bare and utterly devoid of the heralded hardware.

But that being said, there is something special about Cubs fans, right? The historical record and all the assembled data would say to Cubs fans, you don’t have a chance. The deck is stacked against you. It ain’t gonna happen. Not in this, the 104th year, not in any year. But then spring hopes eternal, and I don’t know if it’s the delirium of the flowers blooming or the residual effects of living through five months with an abundance of snow and a dearth of sunlight, but in the spring the mind of the Cubs fan just doesn’t function logically, and hope creeps in…….

Baseball mirrors the rest of the world in that you can divide their followers into one of two camps, the hard-bitten, data-driven realists and the hopeful (notice I didn’t say hopeless!) the hopeful romantics. The first group is sometimes called the sabermetricians of baseball. These are the people who obsess over the statistics and find real predictive value in what the computer models say about a particular player or team. They don’t just track home runs and strikeouts, they use a sophisticated alphabet soup of analytical tools like OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) or BBIP (batted-balls in play percentage) or my favorite, the VORP (value over replacement player) to estimate how the left-fielder or first baseman is going to perform, and where a team is likely to finish in the standings. So are you Cubs fans ready to hear what the computer has to say about your team this year? Are you sitting down? The Zips computer model has the Cubs with a record of 73-89 for 2013. So go ahead and book that October vacation because there ain’t gonna be any party in Wrigleyville this fall.

But then the hopeful romantics rise in defense of what could be. The hopeful romantics point out that the computer models were dead wrong last year about the Oakland A’s who surprised everyone by winning their division after having a dismal record the year before. And fans of the Cubs will never forget the 1984 team that came out of nowhere to win 96 games, take the NL East and come oh so close to the World Series.

Why do we hope? Why do we hold on to what seems impossible or at least most unlikely? Wouldn’t it be better for all of us, in baseball and in life, to guard our hearts against loss by running the numbers and making only fact based judgments about our life and our world? Maybe. But to do so would deny the gift of miracles – the joy of the unexpected - the amazement that gripped Mary Magdalene in the garden on that Easter morning some two thousand years ago.

Hope is nothing to be looked down upon. Hope is what gives us life. It’s what makes Opening Day exciting and special. It’s our calling card as Christians. It’s the unfounded belief we call faith. It’s that truth we hold dear, untested by any computer, unsubstantiated by the laws of physics, that says death does not have the final word! That word belongs to life.

The people of Jerusalem in the first century knew a little something about hope. As word of the miracles that this preacher from Galilee had performed circulated about the streets of the Holy City, the excitement grew. People spoke of his prophetic teachings, and the challenge he presented to the established order, and the crowds grew larger. They gathered by the thousands to hear him speak and his words sparked something in the people of Judea that led them to believe that he was the one. The anointed one they had read about in scripture. The one who would break the shackles of an oppressed and occupied people and lead Israel to freedom. This was going to be their year! And so, when they learned that Jesus of Nazareth was preparing to enter Jerusalem, they lined the streets of the city. Shouting his praises they cried out, “Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord – the King of Israel.” (John 12:13b)

But Jesus was no king. He was the humble Son of God who had an entirely different plan in mind. It did not involve revolution, but rather, submission. He did not intend to restore the kingdom of David but instead argued that “My kingdom is not from this world.” (John 18:36) When asked by Pontius Pilate if he was the King of Jews he replied in simple, contrarian fashion. “You say that I am a king.” (John 18:37) Jesus knew that the road he traveled would not lead to a throne but to the cross. But for those around him who saw in him nothing less than the long promised Messiah of the Hebrew prophets, the cross crushed all the hopes they held for Jesus of Nazareth. The cross claimed their hero. And it claimed their hope as well.

Now as I see it, the problem with the crowds in Jerusalem wasn’t that they hoped. It was that they hoped for the wrong things. In hoping for a revolution, they placed their faith in the here and now, in worldly things. The crowds in Jerusalem held out hope for power and justice, and in so doing they missed what Jesus was offering. The hope he held and offered to others was that through his life, his death, and his resurrection, people would know God’s grace through his love.

We preachers have been telling this story for thousands of years on countless Easter mornings. A sermon is a fine vehicle for weaving this story into our hearts, but in my mind nothing matches a poem. And I have found that no poem speaks more beautifully about hope than the poem by the Irish Nobel Prize winning poet and playwright, Seamus Heaney called “The Cure at Troy”

History says, Don't hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there's fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

 

You see, hope and history did rhyme at one time - in a garden, outside of a tomb, on a quiet Sunday morning, when the stone was rolled away to reveal a risen Christ. The risen Christ reminds us that with God all things are possible. In this Easter story there is good news – there is hope! When we sing “I Know My Savior Lives” we are refueled with hope enough for all the lifetimes to come. It is the kind of hope that cannot be crushed, not by kings and not by the St. Louis Cardinals. For this hope does not die easy. This hope does spring eternal! This hope is here and it is real! And if you don’t believe me, if you don’t believe in the enduring power of hope, well, just ask the people who sell the tickets at Wrigley Field. They’ll tell you its true! Amen.

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