So much violence and pain and aggression that you want simply to weep

Submitted by Gary Hall on April 18, 2007 - 10:14pm.

The Very Rev. Gary Hall

Dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary

April 17, 2007

Yesterday at about this time I was seated in my stall at the back of the chapel listening to Beth Scriven talk about the problem of sin and the present day church’s inability to deal with it. In the contemporary church, Beth said, we are pretending that we’re still in Eden, that the world and its inhabitants have not fallen. As I was turning those ideas around in my head after church I got in my car to go out to lunch and heard that (at that time) twenty or so people had been killed by a gunman at Virginia Tech. Now that number, including the gunman, is up to thirty-three. I’m sure there are some people who think of college campuses as pristine gardens. But even they would have to agree that we’re not in Eden anymore.

I’m never sure, as a preacher, what to say on days like this. When I hear about events like yesterday’s shooting I want to get into bed and pull up the covers and never get out. What do we make of a world in which such things happen? And that there are equally awful things going on all the time that we never hear of, what do we make of those? Unlike many people, I am not predisposed to blaming God for all of this so much as my fellow human beings. I think I want to pull up those covers so that I won’t see that the 23 year-old Virginia Tech English major who did the shooting looks an awful lot like me.

When you find yourself assigned to preach on a day like this, it’s important to remember that giving voice to the Gospel is not the same as pulling eloquent words out of a hat. We are, after all, in the season of Easter, and Easter proclaims Jesus’s resurrection from real, humiliating, hateful death. No matter how elegant we make it liturgically, Good Friday was still ugly and brutal and senseless, not unlike yesterday. On Easter Day Jesus did not spring up from a bulb like a bunch of daffodils; he was raised from total annihilation to new life. It is Jesus’s new life which gives us reason to hope for a similar transformation ourselves.

One of the things that makes Christians different from many others in the world is that we are people of hope. Clergy are often asked to explain to people what happens when we die, a question which no sane person can even pretend to answer. The point of Christian faith is that it arises not out of certainty but out of hope: “Faith,” as the letter to the Hebrews says, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” When we try to answer the unanswerable questions posed to us, we should be clearer than we usually are that we speak not out of certainty but out of hope. “This is the way it was for Jesus, and this is the way I hope it will be for me.” What we offer the world is what Jesus offered the world: a style for living in an often unbearable world. And that style, especially in Easter, is grounded in hope.

This last week I’ve been reading a book by one of my favorite writers, Jonathan Lear, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. The book is called Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, and it is a sustained reflection on what happened to the Native American Crow people, a Western tribe who were forced to give up their hunting and nomadic way of life and enter a reservation in the late nineteenth century. Lear poses the question, how do people go on when the culture which gave their lives meaning has been destroyed? And the answer he comes up with is something he defines as “radical hope.” As one reviewer [Charles Taylor, NYRB 4/26/07] said in discussing the book, “Hope can only exist if you are uncertain about a desired outcome. If it’s really a sure thing, your anticipation of it can’t be hope. “ As Lear himself says, “What makes . . . hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” [Radical Hope, p. 103] Real hope is not the same as a wish. I wish for something I know exists (a new house, a new job, a new car). I hope for something I can’t even understand the terms of yet. I hope for resurrection and I can’t honestly tell you what that means. But I know that being a Christian has something to do with choosing (or, more precisely, being chosen) to live my life organized around that hope. That’s not much comfort, I guess, when you’re looking for answers, but it’s what you and I Christian people have to offer.

Radical hope is what allowed the earliest Christians to live together without claiming private ownership of any possessions but holding everything in common: only a hope that radical and transformative could convince people like you and me to live together in a way which saw something even better than private property as the principle they were living for. And it was radical hope which prompted Nicodemus, a Pharisee, to pose his questions to Jesus under the cover of darkness. Though he was a representative of a culture which presumed to have answers, Nicodemus had hope that there was another way to frame the questions. He longed for something he couldn’t even see the outlines of. That longing is what radical hope looks like, and it is the community of that longing which is finally all we have to offer.

Yesterday’s events in Blacksburg, Virginia remind us that we live in a world which is often hard to bear, much less understand. Like the students of Virginia Tech, you and I live in a world where there is so much violence and pain and aggression that you want simply to weep. And like the men and women of the Crow nation, you and I as professional church workers are constantly threatened with a kind of annihilation which will make what we do seem culturally unnecessary if not meaningless. Our answer to that is what draws us around Jesus’ table together today: radical hope, a hope for “a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” We know, by means of the empty tomb, what God has done for Jesus. We hope, as Jesus’s beloved companions, that God will do the same for us. God can turn violence and despair into life and hope. This is what God offers us at Easter, and it is this, and only this, that you and I can dare offer the world in God’s name. Amen.

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