Where I Find Hope: the Fourth Day after Easter, 2013
Douglas Olds
April 4, 2013
Well, that was quite a Lenten journey. How about for you? And thanks be to God that we are blessed with
life and living hope from our faith and the testimony of a cloud of witnesses (Heb
12.1-2) to the resurrection of the Son of Man: Jesus Christ who is revealed to
be the author and bearer of human salvation, the redeemer from the curse of death, the
Word and Son and Lamb of God. He is risen and living among us and with God, together sending the Holy Spirit from unseen light for guiding and sustaining our mission. Trinitarian
power, mysterious and wonderful. Amen and Amen, as my friend Douglass Fitch says.
Today’s Presbyterian Lectionary includes this First
Reading from Ezekiel 37:1-10 (14), so influential to the resurrection hopes
that our church looks to today:
[1]The hand of
the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of
the LORD and
set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.
[2]He led me
all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and
they were very
dry. [3]He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I
answered,
"O Lord GOD, you know." [4]Then he said to me, "Prophesy to
these
bones, and say
to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. [5]Thus says
the Lord GOD to
these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall
live. [6]I will
lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and
cover you with
skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall
know that I am
the LORD."
[7]So I
prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly
there was a
noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.
[8]I looked,
and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and
skin had
covered them; but there was no breath in them. [9]Then he said to me,
"Prophesy
to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says
the Lord GOD:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these
slain, that
they may live." [10]I prophesied as he commanded me, and the
breath came
into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast
multitude.
--[DAILYLECTION email list of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) for April 4, 2013].
Earlier this week, Monday in
fact, I spoke with a young woman from Petaluma, up the road from my home in
southern Marin County, California. Her
name, which I am withholding for her privacy, was an Ethiopian word for
sweetness, honey, and wine. She had a
cast on her left forearm and the fingers on that hand were askew and out of
alignment. A purple and deep scar ran down from her exposed elbow and
disappeared underneath the covering of her cast. After exchanging some details about my life
to her, she told me her story of her arm.
Four summers ago, while driving
on Mt. Tamalpais (a prominent landmark in our county), she had a severe car
accident. Her car flipped and rolled, settling off road where it was unpaved and wild.
Emergency teams rescued her and medically evacuated her to a hospital by
helicopter. She would undergo 26 operations on her arm from that day to the present.
More to come, in all likelihood. She
averaged an operation per month for the first year and half as the doctors
first worked to save her arm from amputation and then to reconstruct its
function. She never lost hope, and she
aimed to be out of the hospital before 100 days of inpatient treatment. She was released on her 99th day. Upon
release, she lost fear of losing the arm, yet to this day she is struggling with
chronic pain and has flashbacks to the accident that causes her anxiety.
She smiles brightly as she tells
this story, not sardonically or fatalistically. It is a smile that seems to me filled
with something beyond a simple faith. Her
story is alive and breathing in that smile. I asked her where her hope comes from. “From my
arm, it is healing. And I’ll tell you
something. For four months after the
accident, my arm was ejecting twigs and glass and cattails that had been
ground into my arm in the accident. A
two inch piece of glass came out after 4 months, and that seemed to finish all
the stuff I had in me.”
I had never heard of story like
this. I had heard of transplant
rejection, where the body rejects the organ of a (non-related) donor. But here is an account of the resilience and
tenacity of a human arm. My new friend told
me a story of an arm's overcoming inert and dead matter. She told me her story of a resilient and
tenacious spirit, as well. Resilient and tenacious life.
This story gives me hope. Life overcomes the inert. I wonder what those who place their hopes of enhancements
by implanting technology into the body might make of this story.
Again, here is the breath of life
and spirit of this hopeful young woman overcoming the dry twigs and the fired silica
sands of her own wilderness experience.
She is persevering. She says both the pain and the function of her
fingers are getting better, and in that she finds hope.
“And you know what else?” she
went on. “I had this dog, a small, shi..y dog, and I’m lying in the hospital and
I’m thinking I’m going to have to get rid of him when I get back home. He brought
me nothing and he didn’t behave. But
when I got home, it was if he was waiting for me. He was all attentive and turned into a great
dog, a companion. He’s at home waiting
for me now.”
My young woman friend tells me
this story on the day after Easter, April 1, 2013.
[
Skip down to next line for more hope. The next section is on the challenges of destiny.]
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." This quote of Edmund Burke has been adopted into the tradition of eternal recurrence that "Christianity’s most perceptive critic"[i] F. Nietzsche proposed was the fate of the earth. Destiny. To me that suggests lack of freedom, lack of autonomy, and the ever-frustrated will to escape through domination. These signal lack of humanity. Destiny is that which leads inexorably to death’s final word, where only the self-assertions and self-promotions in this life matter in the eternal memory of the earth. Destiny lives on in the memory of the earth. Note the negating multiplier in Burke’s quotation as it goes forward from the present: ignorance of the past brings on destiny, yet we know that our destiny is to die. It is our ignorance of what happens after death which is intolerable.
Therefore we must commit ourselves to knowing fully the past and overcoming ignorance. We turn away from present and the future, so that we may be absolutely certain we've won the past. If we feel ourselves slipping in the present, we must commit to even deeper strata of memory, to deeper lessons of myth, archaeology and paleontology. And primatology. Yet the lessons we learn are of the dead who are no longer here. Even a method that uses the experiment that involves the death of organisms analyzes the effect of death of the living preparation. Death drastically intrudes into the animal or plant, though we may think we have just halted the life process in mid-stream and thus are studying life. We study ever more the act and effects of death in order to prepare for enhancing life. And there is no more "fertile"study of heightened preparedness for meeting destiny than in war. And no more eternal assurance than total war. War then becomes the peak experience of living.
Negations of openness to the future--the ignorance and the focus on memory--turn us into backward looking creatures, learning our lessons from ever deeper strata of the past in order that we may hold on to our grasp on security. Ignorance of the future and memory of the past are correlated forces, so that the more we divert ourselves by the study of death and thus turn from musing upon destiny, the more we think we control the past. If only we can control our fear of death do we presume to have a place in the eternal earth. We bluff, we take addictive substances, we arm ourselves to the teeth. Anything not to discern that nature involves something other than total struggle. Eternal recurrence is not a living testament from a living God. It is a dead earth. It is an earth run as a business undergoing a fire sale, in liquidation, with no care for future generations, no stewardship ethic, no concern for a greater good outside of warrior ancestors and warrior sons. The earth is plundered and set ablaze in a ritual of death that celebrates the victorious ancestor. The dead may live again unless the heirs catastrophically cede control of the present. Existentially, then, each present moment is devoted to control. Parents teach children war so that the parents may live again.
From my vantage as a confessing Christian let me therefore suggest a reconfiguration of Burke’s popular quotation: “those who repeat history are destined.” These are those human moral nihilists who deny bearing the image of a peaceful and just God and thus try to impose their will on the living through domination or trickery toward their fantasies of the past, either in nature balanced solely by brutality or in some effortless paradise (powered by slaves or parents). The Hebrew and Christian scriptures repeatedly demonstrate that these are the ideas of dying Pharaohs and their dead imperial idols destined not to share in the living eternity. The living God won't have it. The living God desires progress in peacefulness, in courage, in commitment to life, in neighborliness so much that especially the fear of death be conquered. And that fear, to be vanquished, has to be unexpectedly conquered, by embracing death meekly through acceptance rather than going out in a blaze of self glorying violence. Only by this demonstration that includes a final blessing of forgiveness (the "victory of the Cross") may we escape our tendency to domination and relentless slave driving. For if we don't have hope for life after death, we wall off from life, turning away from being thankful for the sustaining function of nature. We expand total war to include
a war on nature which we blame for our deaths. And the only way we can strategize against that nature is to create atavistic myths of fierce hominids or hominoids or whatever predator species we claim to understand.
Yet at Easter, we Christians testify to a hope of something better here and now and something truly good after death because we have tasted and experienced God’s goodness in the blessings we have been given. Those blessings includes the Good News of Easter and the gospel of Discipleship as we make our way towards death. We have a living hope and we have a trust and faith that helps us be alive, open to the future, not consoling ourselves by ever more revisions of the past that trap us in an ontology of death. Yet there is a way out of that trap, and we preach it in the Gospel every Sunday.
Our hope as human beings, it is clear to me, is in our bearing the
image of God: active in history but constant in love and trusting that a Good God has a plan announced in the Gospel for reconciling humans with their God and with each other. What we make of that image and plan and experience of God's goodness shows us our eternal
destiny. We are not programmed, though
if God chooses, who can resist? I believe and trust that God preserves all present acts of love and justice eternally. We have a future if we commit now to repent from our will to cling to the past that only confirms time's and life's passing away.
Who among us feels that we do not
have free will? If not--if no free will--is regret for any
past action even possible? I testify to regrets, because I have misused my freedoms
to impose my will for something that denies freedom to others. My conscience convicts me. Whence comes that conscience? I believe professed atheists when they testify they have a moral center
and shy from doing harm to others. They too bear the image of God, though they may exchange it for idols. Even Christians who settle for a god stuck in the rut of past historical action--or worse, frozen historical roles--are
subject to idols.
In a way, we all are challenged
by this year’s calendar. Is the earth,
in the throes of a
human induced major extinction event and resource shock, global warming, and
the rattling of weapons of mass destruction, really fit for eternal human
habitation? How then
can destiny give any sense of hope or be the basis for any rational commitment? The alternative that asks no question that suggests meaning or purpose to life is in view, nihilism, is not on the moral plane of Hamlet. It is instead the suggestion that the only play in life is the tactic of Russian roulette, only that we may presume upon the
ignorant "niceness" of those inclined to intervene when we put the gun to our or someone else's temple and start threatening to pull the trigger. Nihilism in the face of destiny is lethal. But who cares? Who really cares? As George W. Bush, after creating an Iraqi insurgency, taunted,
"bring 'em on!"
We are also subjected to a
petty choice by the calendar this year: April 1
st, the day after
Easter. We Christian fools went back to into the world committed in and communicating our Easter hope.
We holy fools. That is the date I received the story of the young woman
with the tenacious living arm and smile. I acknowledge a possibility that Christians are deluded in whole or in part--we all have our bouts with doubt. Jesus only seems not to doubt, though he struggles with fear and with temptation. That consoles me: God has chosen to share the struggle of humanity facing the inevitability and destiny of death. I do not write with bad faith. I believe in God's goodness. I believe that my faith has experiential and historical warrant.
------------------------------
I read
this
story in a hard copy newspaper on April 1. It tells a vignette of an ugly social reality in the recent political economy.
But I find hope in the truth telling and the commitment that this past will
not stand in 2014. This story suggests that leaders have the opportunity to commit to progress, to protest the ugliness of injustice. We all have the responsibility to commit to progress. I see signs of this
commitment blooming and taking root in many sectors. I
am hopeful. Truly hopeful. Momentum is building. I have some anxiety of the cost
of forgiveness and reconciliation that truth tellers and those who have been
politically and economically excluded must go through, but the process has
started. There’s no going back. Not possible. Thanks be to God.
So you who are holding out: whence comes your hope? Are you hiding your witness in order to fight
the liars with lies
(or amorality with amorality), to come out of your secret places and claim you were on
the side of truth and morality all along? We church
folk have to forgive you, too. That's our task as we welcome you into the God-bearing image of repentant humanity. Yet consider
the path of reconciliation involved in that course of fighting fire with fire.
I am hopeful. Hallelujah. No exclamation point in 2013 without counting my blessings in the present. Hallelujah! The road to reconciliation is
long and hard. Consequences don’t vanish
without reconciliation, and even then possibly not entirely in this life. We don’t forget, perhaps
especially our own complicity. Yet, I don’t claim to be a victim, so I don't fully know the contours of memory of the truly brutalized: the
raped, the orphaned and widowed, t
he maimed, the
dispossessed, the traumatized. I can accompany and learn from these as they tell their truth. I believe them. They bear the scars of the myth of destiny, and their telling the truth gives us all hope that they can and will triumph over that myth.
Where there is a spring tide of truth and hope there is life. That Easter Spring tide is here, blooming in the open light. Amen to truth where ever it emerges, and Amen to hope. Jesus is indeed risen for me to commit to life here and now.
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[i] Charles Hefling, “Why the Cross?”
Christianity Today, March 20, 2013, pp. 24-27.
