Electric Circuit Rider

In his sermon, “The Right to Hope”, Paul Tillich makes a distinction between foolish hope and wise hope.

Any fool can hope. We can hope to win the lottery. We can hope that some, as-yet-unknown rich uncle will die and leave us millions. We can hope that science will discover a way to genetically modify chocolate so that it removes fat. And we can sit and watch TV waiting for our hopes to be fulfilled.

Yet is that any more foolish than a childless couple going through all sorts of gyrations in order to get pregnant and failing over and over again and having their hopes worn down like a river wears down the stones in its streambed until, as the Bible delicately puts it, “It ceases to be with her after the manner of women” (Gen. 18:11)?

Tillich says that there is a difference.

Genuine hope is hope in something in the future in which the seed is already present.

“In the bulb there is the flower,

In the seed an apple tree,

Unrevealed until its season,

Something God, alone, can see.”

 The wise see in the tiniest things signs of real transformation. It’s not just the daffodils that are signs of spring, but the sharing of a loaf of bread and a cup of wine by all sorts of people: rich and poor, powerful and weak, young and old, brave and fearful that is a sign of the kingdom of heaven.

But there is something else about the hope of the wise. It needs to be strong enough to die and to be reborn.

There is little doubt that Abraham and Sarah’s hope that they would have a biological child died some years earlier. That’s why they laugh when God tells them that they will soon hold their child in their arms. The laughter is the rebirth of hope.

We laugh when the hope we thought we gave up a long time ago as a foolish hope peeks up out of the snow of despair. We laugh at ourselves for ever hoping. We laugh at all the work we put in to trying to fulfill that hope. We laugh at how disappointed we were at first when the hope failed to materialize. We laugh at the way we have accommodated to not having that hope anymore. And we laugh at the foolishness of believing, even for a second that a living hope could be reborn in us.

After she completed her Ph.D. in Theology, a good friend of ours was still stuck at home in a parsonage in a very small rural community, which could employ her husband as the pastor of one of the three churches, but had no work for a specialist in Ecumenics. So, for awhile, she watched soap operas every afternoon.

These were a revelation. The ethical dilemmas, relational difficulties, evil twins and even the occasional resurrection (You see, Darling, I didn’t really die in that plane crash, I just wandered around the Amazon for eight years with amnesia) seemed to her fertile soil for religious reflection, if only someone would exploit this goldmine of narrative theology.

Someone has – the book of Genesis.

Let’s update Abraham, Sarah and Hagar’s triangle, shall we?

For example, a wealthy childless couple forces their illegal immigrant housekeeper to become a surrogate mother who bears their child. Or, the housekeeper suggests that she could help the couple out by bearing a child for them because she sees this as a chance to take the place of the wife. Theological Reflection: Is sin a deliberate misuse of human freedom?

Or suppose the couple feels vulnerable because they have no offspring in a world that believes that the only real immortality comes through one’s descendents. And that illegal immigrant housekeeper agrees to be used because she can’t afford to be sent back to her homeland, which she fled because the dictatorship had marked her for execution. Theological Reflection: is sin a limitation on human freedom?

Do we sin because we freely decide to sin? Or do we sin because we are trapped in the sinful systems that run a sinful world? Can’t you see Morrie, Maureen and Mohammed, the three current writers on this show, spinning off various scenarios from these setups that will keep the show running for four thousand years?

After all, when people get tired of news about the Middle East, or documentaries about human cloning or special reports about sexual slavery in the third world, or appeals to help people in a famine – they can always turn to “The Journey” (Trinity Broadcasting Network), “The Promised Land” (Israeli Broadcasting Authority), or “Ibrahim’s Jihad” (Islam Channel).

If they stay true to the story, however, at the end of every episode, nothing much gets changed, except in some mysterious way, by some form of spiritual intuition or divine intervention, just when things are at their worst, a baby is born to a childless couple or a mother finds a well and gives a drink to a child dying of thirst.*

I know those are always improbable plot twists. All three of the religions that devote themselves to this particular soap opera call those improbable plot twists, “grace”. Grace can cause problems, too. But it always ensures that there will be another episode tomorrow.

*Note: as in the soap operas, Ishmael is both a teenager and an infant at the same time.

It was the Sabbath at the end Passover. I had brought my mother to visit my son’s family in southeastern Connecticut and she and I were sitting with Jim and his two kids, Amina – 3 and Ziv – 15 months,in the evening service at Temple Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, where the mother of those two cute little kids is the Rabbi.

Rachel, my daughter-in-law, had warned me that the readings for that Sabbath were not very interesting. It was from the Holiness Code in Leviticus, so she wove it into the significance of the weeks ahead between Passover and the festival of Shavuot (which we Christians call Pentecost) during which they “count the omer”.

The omer is a measure of grain and in ancient times the Hebrews brought an omer of grain to the temple as a sacrifice on Shavuot. Today, it means that they count up the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot.

Rachel made a point of the fact that they count “up”. It’s not a countdown, like at a rocket launch, but each day adds to the last – to the sum of life’s experiences.

These weeks of the church year following Pentecost are known as “ordinary time”. Usually we think that means, between now and the beginning of December, there are no big celebrations like Christmas and Easter to add luster to what is otherwise “ordinary time”.

But that’s a misunderstanding of what “ordinary time” means in the Christian year. “Ordinary time” is time that “counts”, they can be set in “order” by being numbered with “ordinal” numbers.
 We have several ways to count time during this period:

• We can count Sundays after Pentecost – this Sunday will be the fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
• We can count Sundays in “ordinary time”, which adds the weeks after Pentecost to the weeks of Epiphany (from the 12^th day after Christmas until Ash Wednesday). This Sunday will be the 10^th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
• We can count “Propers”. These are the readings that are designated for certain weeks of the Christian year. This weeks reading is “Proper 5 A” meaning that the readings are for the Sundays closest to June 8 in year “A” of the 3-year-calendar of readings that we call the “lectionary”.

But the point is that time counts. Our days add up. It’s up to us to decide what they add up to. We are not killing time. We are not wasting time. We are not counting down the days until we graduate, get married, retire or die. We are adding to the sum of our lives and to the totality of human experience.

One website actually suggests that we count our age in days instead of years. As I write this, I am 21,857 days old – a figure that makes me a little queasy – mostly because I’m asking just what have I done with all those days? What will I do with even one more?

That is why the psalmist says “so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12.