Sunday
January 27
Hope is the Negation of Negation
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to listen to the entire service
Click here to listen to the sermon only
We are living through a negative time.
Before dawn, aroused by a dream, you awake, it may be. In the mind clutter of the dream you stand in community listening for a holy word, it may be. Or you walk mesmerized by the beauty of a beach or a mountain vista, it may be. Or, otherwise, you sense the tug of a common good, a common desire, it may be. In the mind clutter of the dream, too, you may wait to hear something, it may be. Before dawn, in the moonlight. Drowsiness returns, and you return to the arms of Morpheus, God of sleep. But the time to rise comes along soon enough, and you take stock again, and you realize what time it is, again.
We are living through a negative time.
For some, the negation is a chosen, intentional negation of inherited forms of public speech, of national discourse, of governmental responsibility, of encroaching overweening statism, of political correctness, of international order and regular borders—a time to pluck up, a time to pluck up what is planted. Or so one supposes.
For others, many others, the negation is a consequence of all this and more, and amounts to a frightening, even terrifying daily rending of the garment of national life, of the rending of the garment of civil society, of the rending of the garment of compassionate care for the young, the poor, the sick and the old, of the steady destruction of treaties, alliances and agreements welling up from a steady disdain for treaties, alliances and agreements, a rending of the garments of courtesies developed over longtime to shelter ourselves from our worst selves, the standard (if sometimes honored in the breach) shared, common rejection of misogyny, racism, sexism, xenophobia, greed, pride, sloth, and falsehood. And in their place another kind of clothing, a laughing joy in and willingness to slaughter the truth by fulsome mendacity in the small and in the large.
Whether with some you celebrate such, or whether with many you abhor it, now over the last few years, it is clear, we are living through a time of negation.
You arise in the morning, in a wonderment, a dark wonder. Will someone be given the nuclear car-keys with which to incinerate another land? Will the government return again to potential ‘fire and fury’ against a foreign people? Will the lax tax on the rich bankrupt government protections of the poor? Will the clearly emerging authoritarianism become patent and fulsome on the strength of a manufactured crisis at a border, or far away, or most possibly in cyber gear?
You brush your teeth, pour your coffee, turn on the news, and, amid a wonderment, a dark wonder, you do wonder: Did I ever think I would live to see the day that my beloved country to which I have pledged allegiance since kindergarten, for which I acquired a selective service card, to which I have paid taxes now grudgingly now willingly over many decades, on whose account I have voted every years since the years of the silent majority and that Methodist minister’s son from North Dakota, land where my father has died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, be held hostage, like a 13 year old girl in Wisconsin, like her the whole country bound, gagged, hidden under the single bed and held hostage to the megalomania of an imperial, increasingly authoritarian, government, to a complicit citizenry which cannot yet fully reckon, neither to reject nor recant the 2016 tragedy, to a Senate whose every murmur now carries the middle name Faust, for its deal with the devil in aid of paternalistic judges and capitalism gone wild, and a willful blindness to the roaring, rising tide of exclusion, falsehood, selfishness, incivility, unkindness and greed.
Each morning brings a darker wonder and you wonder how this can ever have anything other than the bleakest outcome. We are living through a negative time. In our time, we are hostages to negativity, living through a most perilously negative time, with no exit readily or easily in sight. Some of us may realize that we will be dead, even long dead, before the blood is fully spilled and washed, before the dawn comes, before a return to the country’s rightful mind. We are living through a time of negation.
For a post-Christian culture and society, the next question, then, is not what it is right now and right here in Christian worship, the question of the possibility of preaching, not what it is right now and right here in the spirit of Christian community, not what it is in this venerable pulpit and other siblings to it across the land. As a whole, as a culture, we are no longer rooted in or grounded by hope, if we ever fully were, no longer grounded by the promise of the Gospel, if we ever were, so, for society as a whole, the basic question of this moment, the preaching moment, is not, for the culture, a big or even serious question at all. The symbols of faith have grown cold in a culture, in a land that is God-forsaken, or, better put, simply, forsaken. So, our problem, or mine in this moment, the prospect of preaching, the problem of the possibility of preaching, the problem of how to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, the problem of how to preach a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope, the problem of hope itself, in its realest, truest form, faith working through love– is not that of our culture. The radio program ‘wait wait don’t tell me’ is not waiting for the telling of a true hope. It is not perseverating about whether there can or will be any preaching worthy of the name in our time, let alone who on earth will deign to try to do it, Sunday by Sunday. No, only the bitter biblical herb of ‘hope deferred that maketh the heart sick’ has any natural or easy purchase in our non-religious age. Yes, we are living through a negative time.
In our time, hope, if it has any hope in it, is itself—negation. A cheery, light, pseudo inner life, a false gaiety, a ‘que sera, sera’, is not hope. It is false hope. Some listening today will find the depiction of negation offered this morning as too negative. You may be people my age and older. Some though listening today will find the depiction of negation as not negative enough. You may be people my children’s age, now some 35% of whom identify, or non-identify, as ‘nones’ those of no religion at all, but one whose watch much of the mess of these years will have to be cleaned up. No. Hope that is seen is not hope. That is in the Bible. Who hopes for what he sees? That too is in the Bible. We hope for what we do not see (the key for once is in the adverb, NOT). That is in the Bible too. In our time, hope, if it has any hope in it, is itself pure negation.
(Pause).
And in that negation, it may be, is the lone location just now for preaching. Hope is the negation—of negation. Hope is the negation—of negation.
Hope is the negation of prideful over-confidence in our national or personal histories. One lasting good in a negative time is that it leaves little space for high horses ridden and deadly assumptions hugged. Authoritarianism can evolve, right here, just now, all the glories of the freedom trail notwithstanding (repeat).
So D Bonhoeffer: Godwould have us know that we must live as (men and women) who manage our lives without (God). The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. Before God and with God we live without God.
Hope is the negation of our lazy, slothful spirituality—what a strange, odd, unbiblical word. Hope is the negation of our lazy, slothful unwillingness to be politically involved—to go to meetings, to go to meetings, to go to meetings—on the left, and our refusal, now that the evidence is in, to recant what for whatever reason we chose to do three years ago—on the right, that negation comes to gruesome light, even in a twilight hope.
Hope is the negation of our falsehood, our capacity somehow to look past or forgive or minimize the lying, the mendacity, the screaming falsehood of our naively authoritarian leadership. Hope is the negation of the dark wonder, that which makes things clear, or clearer, at dawn. In the light of hope.
Let us boil this down to daily life, if we may. It is almost inevitable, you human being you, that in the age of negativity, in the maelstrom of unlimited negative informational bombardment, and of wind swept rain soaking every daily pore, it is inevitable that you will now and then be depressed. You will be. That you now and then will be worried. You will be. That you now and then will be haunted by bad memories and dark dreams. You will be. You cannot avoid it. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. There. That feels good or at least better. Hope walks by faith not by sight. Faith is a walk in the dark. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand, to embrace hope that negates what it cannot eliminate. What you can do is this. Listen to the gospel, which is the negation of negation by hope, the negation of acedia by hope, the negation of depression and worry and anxiety by hope. Not the elimination. No. The negation. Hope will give you a breakfast ounce of courage. Hope will give you a noonday morsel of anger. Hope will give you a twilight flicker of faith. Because hope stands as the very negation of negation. It is not something, hope, that you or I can concoct or control or conjure. Hope stands in the pulpit, say, and speaks to us, say, and does so without fear or favor, without quiver or conceit, say, and utters a word of faith (take heart) in a pastoral voice (I am with you) toward a common hope (you are a child of God).
Hope, a sense that things are wrong and can be right-wised, is what gives us the angry courage, the courageous anger, to rise up, to resist out a tradition of principled resistance dating back to Amos of Tekoa, in the 8thcentury bce, to struggle, to lose, to be defeated, and to get up again. Hope is the raising of the dead.
Jurgen Moltmann: To recognize the event of the resurrection of Christ is therefore to have a hopeful and expectant knowledge of this event. It means recognizing in this even the latency of that eternal life which in the praise of God arises from the negation of the negative, from the raising of the one who was crucified and the exaltation of the one who was forsaken. It means assenting to the tendency towards resurrection of the dead in this event of the raising of the one. It means following the intention of God by entering into the dialectic of suffering and dying in expectation of eternal life and resurrection (211). Thus the Spirit is the power to suffer in participation in the mission and the love of Jesus Christ, and is, in this suffering, the passion for what is possible, for what is coming and promised in the future of life, of freedom and of resurrection (212). In all our acts we are sowing in hope (213).
Before dawn, aroused by a dream, you awake, it may be. In the mind clutter of the dream you stand in community listening for a holy word, it may be. This is the gospel of Nehemiah, that there is a Holy Scripture, strange yet audible. Or you walk mesmerized by the beauty of a beach or a mountain vista, it may be. This is the gospel of the Psalmist, in the most beautiful of all 150 psalms, all nature sings and round us rings, the glory of the creation. Or, otherwise, you sense the tug of a common good, a common desire, it may be. This is the gospel of the Epistle, Spirit known for what it does for the common good. In the mind clutter of the dream, too, you may wait to hear something, it may be. This is, here in Luke, Jesus, preaching, at home but not welcomed, preaching the divine favor for the poor not just the poor in spirit, for the oppressed not just the figuratively oppressed, for the captive not just the philosophically captive. Before dawn, in the moonlight.
Hope negates what it cannot eliminate. Hope is the negation of negation. Said Paul, Behold I tell you a mystery. Said John, Where I am you may be also. Said Paul, The trumpet shall sound. Said John, You know the way where I am going. Said Paul, the dead, the dead, shall be raised. Said John, I am the way, the truth, the life. Said Paul, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
He opened the book and found the place where it was written
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has anointed me to PREACH good news to the poor
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
And recovering of sight to the blind
To set at liberty those who are oppressed
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord
And he closed the book… and said to them, TODAY this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
Leave a Reply