December 14, 2003
Not Optimistic, But
Hopeful
Riley E. Jensen
This may be difficult for some of you to believe, particularly those under the age of 25 or so. There was a time when I considered myself something of a prototype for the hip young minister of Doonesbury cartoon fame who is the pastor of The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now (and I thank you for restraining your incredulous laughter). In fact I was in youth ministry of one sort or another for 12 years, 8 of those in the church.
That experience taught me not only a love but also an appreciation for the youth of the church. Now we all know (especially if you are part of that broad category termed “youth”) that youth are not always easy to love, much less appreciate. More often than not this is less a judgment on the youth of today than it is the clear memory of how it was when we grey heads were caught up in the excitement, and depression, and experimentation of that age group.
However, I can predict with confidence that anyone who spends time with the youth of this church will come away with respect and appreciation for their talents, gifts, and seriousness of purpose. Therefore, my experience with youth over the years and especially in this church has taught me that to think of youth as “the future of the church” is a misnomer. In fact youth are not the future of the church; they are the church now. They are certainly not a homogeneous group who all think alike. Rather they bring a wonderful array of talents and gifts that benefit us all and contribute to building the kingdom now.
When people talk about youth as the future of the church, they are certainly well-meaning if a bit condescending. The fact is that sometimes we use youth as a foil for letting ourselves off the hook. The grounds need to be cleaned and we say, “Wouldn’t that be a good youth project!” Or a need rises in the community and we say, “Wouldn’t that make a great mission project for the youth!” You see, sometimes we address advice to youth that we all need to heed.
That is exactly what was happening in our scripture lesson in I Timothy. The letters to Timothy, attributed to St. Paul, are meant to be words of advice and counsel from an old, seasoned warrior of Jesus Christ to a novice, a young apprentice in the faith. But if they were just that and no more, then we would be able to keep our distance and consign these letters to the dusty archives of well-meaning but unheeded advice offered to the young since the beginning of time.
However, they are much more than that. They are words drawn from the lifelong experience of the elder, intended for the younger, but meant for the edification of the whole church. They are meant to be words of instruction for a community in waiting, a community in anticipation, and a community in formation. It happens that as a developmental stage we attach those characteristics to the life situation of the young. They are waiting to grow up, to become adults, and to take responsibility for themselves. They are anticipating full independence, and freedom from the restraints of curfews and rules. And so they are in formation, and that is pretty much our definition of adolescence.
Sociologist Robert J. McCarty says that youth culture in the U.S. is being reinvented every three years. Keeping up with youth culture, he says, is like mapping territory that is constantly changing. This is not intended to be a sermon on youth culture. That is a sermon you don’t want to hear from me because you would rightly suspect that I haven’t kept up with the jargon, or the music, or the psychology of that rapidly changing culture. But at the beginning of this Advent Season, I believe that Paul’s words are especially relevant not only to young people but to all of us who are living in such a rapidly changing world.
Now, I don’t know how you were feeling when you heard our New Testament Lesson read this morning, but I can imagine that your eyes were looking furtively for the nearest exit. After all, we are into the third Sunday of Advent, and here we are hearing about deceitful spirits, doctrines of demons, and pretensions of liars. It’s certainly, not the kind of uplifting stuff that we come to church for, especially at this time of year.
There are a couple of reasons that I am subjecting you to some thoughts that may fly in the face of what you think you want to hear this morning. The first is that it is the tradition of the church during the Advent Season to call our attention to what is known as the doctrine of the Last Days. Christmas is so much more than just the nostalgic remembrance of something that happened 2,000 years ago. While Christmas is the reminder that God has come among us in human flesh, the early church longed for that same Jesus to return again in glory.
It believed that there would be signs and portents of this Second Coming. And so this apocalyptic view of history tended to be very pessimistic; the world is to become progressively worse until there will be a great catastrophe that ends it. But here Paul is not actually being overly pessimistic as he talks about he signs of the times. He was living in what he thought was the reality of the last days. In the midst of that reality of struggle and uncertainty, a reality where people were confused and lacking direction, Paul lifts up a word of hope:
“For to this end we toil and strive, because we have ourhope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all especially of those who believe.”
There is an old Bob Dylan song, “The Times, They are a Changing”. Of course, he wrote that during the turbulent times of the 60s. For us, positioned as we are at the beginning of the 21st Century, it is hard to imagine a cultural critique more obvious. But before I was a child of the 60s, I was a child of the 50s where stability and security were the dominant values. That world was pretty predictable.
What that meant for me was that if I worked hard, went to college, got a job, and raised a family; I would die surrounded by loved ones and the satisfaction of a life well-lived. So I followed the script. I worked hard, went to college, then to seminary, got a job, and raised a family. I was part of a lock-step generation that did things because it was part of an expected pattern. Of course, my children will have to have a skill set to deal with change that I have had to learn on the run. Predictions are that they will have five-to-six different careers during their lifetime. I tell them that they will have to have a skill that I have never had -- that of conducting a job search through a period of unemployment.
I think that all of us yearn for stability and security in our lives, but the fact is that our lives are seldom predictable day-to-day not to mention year-to-year. Someone has said, “Life is what happens during the interruptions. Certainty is what you know until the next surprise, the next uncertainty, and that is the only certainty upon which we can depend.”
On the one hand that can make us fearful and anxious because we are planners and list makers who work hard at perpetuating the illusion that we are in control of our own lives. But, thank God, we are also Christians and that gives us another kind of anchor in the storms of life. We have the example of those early Christian communities who are our predecessors in faithful living. As our scripture lesson describes, they were living between the times. They had chosen to put their faith in something other than material well being. They put their faith in the living God whom they believed to be their Savior.
Their attitude as they sought to make their way through shifting sands is best described as “not optimistic but hopeful”. I believe that is a wonderful description of the kind of people we are called to be -- “not optimistic but hopeful”. Perhaps a post 9/11 world is helping us to appreciate a condition that the Christian Church had always known, and to appropriate it as our own.
I found myself back in the New York area a few months ago. It was the first time I had returned since our leaving New Jersey to come to Grand Rapids five years ago. As we flew into Newark Airport on a clear Friday morning, Pam and I were both straining to sight familiar landmarks. As we landed from the north, the dramatic skyline of Manhattan seemed to rise out of the Hudson like one of the lost cities of Atlantis. There was the George Washington Bridge to the north; then as we passed mid-town there were the unmistakable pinnacles of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Then my eyes darted to the south to catch sight of the welcoming lady of New York Harbor just beyond Ellis Island. Then it dawned on me what was missing when I looked back to gaze into the spatial void of what had been the Twin Towers.
We were returning for the wedding celebration of our daughter. And while that was certainly an occasion of great joy, it also put me in conversation with many of her friends who had been at or near ground zero that day. I was reminded again-and-again as I visited with those young professionals that September11 robbed us of our innocence as well as the easy optimism that has always been so much a part of our national character.
On this Advent Sunday, I want to suggest to you that is a good thing. For we can lose our sense of optimism without becoming pessimists. We have heard those “glass half full/glass half empty” definitions of optimism and pessimism. It’s fun to be around optimists because they have the ability to put a shine on everything. But sometimes we wonder if that shine is just another way of denying reality. The reality is that life is uncertain. The reality is that life is a struggle. The reality is that we are not smart enough, or resourceful enough, or powerful enough to plan for every contingency.
A century ago one George Tyrell of Harvard said that, “Christianity is an ultimate optimism founded on a provisional pessimism.” However, Peter Gomes helps me more when he says, “Optimism is the belief that things will get better; hope is what sustains us when inevitably they do not.” This Wednesday night we will be having our annual service of hope and healing. This is not meant to detract from this season of joy, but rather to help us to move to the deeper meaning of that joy.
There is a line from W.H. Auden’s great poem “A Christmas Oratorio” which reads, “To those who have seen the child, however incredulously, the time being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” Why is it so trying? Why is it so difficult, especially for those of us believers who have captured a glimpse of the child. The trying part for all of us is living in the in-between time, but it is our hope set on the living God that enables us to continue our toiling and our striving. For in the child, we have a hint of the hope that is to be, we know that it exists and is not a figment of our imagination.
That child, growing into a man, and living the life of the divine among us gives us a kind of hope that enables us to walk through the valley of the shadow with the hope of that place of light where pain is ended and tears are no more. There is a line from an old gospel hymn that pops into my head during those times when the light is dim and the way is hard, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.” We don’t know if things will get better, but we will be sustained by the one who has promised to be with us no matter what.
Amen.