Pentecost 7A (lectionary 16A)
Texts: Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
July 19, 2020
The Thing with Feathers
One of the many – and I do mean, very many! – frustrations of the Covid pandemic is just how much we don’t know.
This weekend we in Faith’s leadership had been planning to resume in-person worship. When we decided against it – it’s still too risky, and most of our people told us they would not come – the question was: If not now, when? And, of course, we have much to see before we can answer. The only answer for right now is, we just don’t know.
Will the schools open full-time, next month? We’re not really sure. Will the State have to walk back and re-impose some of the earlier social restrictions? We don’t know that yet. I attack my wife, the doctor, with, “Is this safe to do? Is that safe?,” and she pleads with me to understand: There are no definite answers. So much of this stuff, we just can’t see it yet; we just don’t know.
St. Paul in today’s lesson from Romans writes that “the creation waits with eager longing.” Well, ain’t *that* the truth? What we translate there as “eager longing,” in the original New Testament Greek it means literally the craning of the neck, that craning of the neck you do to get a better look at what’s coming down the road. It’s the way you look toward the exit at airport security, looking for the loved one who’s just flown in. It’s the pregnant young couple, putting together the nursery and looking forward with wonder and no small measure of fear, to what new parenthood will bring. And it’s all of us, watching the TV and reading the paper greedily for any shred of news about a coming vaccine. One of the things Paul says we’re expecting is “the redemption of our bodies.” The creation waits with eager longing, indeed.
The tension between what we’re living in now, and what we hope for, Paul calls that “the sufferings of this present time.” Suffering is what comes of knowing what the world could be, even as we live in the world as it is. The image from today’s Gospel lesson works for this. The field, this world that God created, was planted with good seed. It was going to be so beautiful as it grew to maturity, but an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat, and the weeds went viral – I use that word quite deliberately – and, even as God’s good intention for the crop matured, the field turned into a mess, the wheat lived under the threat of all those weeds, and the workers in the field nearly made things worse by trying to take control of the situation. It is at the will and at the insistence of the master, that the workers finally hunker down keep their social distance and endure the wait between the viral appearance of the weeds and the maturing of the good crop. Redemption does come, but it comes in the good time of the master, not by the short-cuts proposed by the growing-desperate workers in the field.
So, we wait. It’s the curse, and the suffering, of the pandemic time: we wait. St. Paul writes: “We know the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, [we] who have the first fruits of the Spirit” – who know that God’s intention for this world that He so loves is significantly different from what we know at the moment! – “[we] groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
“For [it is] in hope [that] we are saved. Now hope that is seen, is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it, in patience.” So writes the apostle.
So we live in suffering, and we live in hope. But what can Paul possibly mean when he specifies that true hope is always in something that is not seen? Let’s talk about hope, for a bit, not least because these days we need it. Let me tell you about what I’ve learned about Christian hope, from a couple of my teachers.
The first teacher is the poet Emily Dickinson. She writes:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
That verse has been stuck in my head since high school, and there are two things I take from it about hope. One is that hope is something as common, and as embodied a part of our everyday world, as the most nondescript little sparrow. A mere thing with feathers, that perches as routinely as you please in your soul. Expect to find it there, that little thing with feathers.
The other thing is that bit about singing the tune without the words. We don’t know the words yet, that God will supply to the song that we sing. That means we hope for what we do not see. We don’t know the words that will end the pandemic; we just don’t know yet. But we sing the tune anyway, open to what God will do.
The second teacher about hope is the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who wrote a book about Christian hope back in my school days that I have never forgotten. Hope, says Moltmann, is different from simple optimism. That’s because true hope is not based on the possibilities of the situation and on correct extrapolation of the future. That’s what I keep asking my wife for: why can’t you tell me what’s going to happen, extrapolate into the future! Why can’t you give me hope in something I can see!
No; hope is not like that. Hope is grounded in the faithfulness of God, and therefore on the effectiveness of God’s promise. The funny thing about this kind of hope – trusting that come what may, the future is in God’s hands – is that it comes into its own, it really comes to be, exactly when there is no reason for optimism. Hope can spring up even in the valley of the shadow of death; indeed, it is right there that true hope comes into its own. Elsewhere in the letter to the Romans St. Paul puts forward as the quintessential model of hope: Abraham, who hoped against all hope because he believed in the God “who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not [yet] exist,” (Rom 4:17-18) as Paul writes. Hope blooms *especially* in situations which, for extrapolative cause-and-effect thinking, can offer only utter hopelessness. Why? Because as the prophet Isaiah writes, “[It is] people who walk in darkness [who] have seen a great light; those who live in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.” (Isa 9:2)
If darkness has descended upon you and your world, well, in the way of thinking that is Christian hope, you don’t need to persuade yourself that things are not as bad as they seem, and you certainly don’t need to attack your wife as you search desperately for reasons to be optimistic. Remind yourself instead of the simple fact of the Gospel of John: the light of the One who was in the beginning with God shines in this darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The details of how all this will work out, the details of redemption of our bodies and of the rest of creation, will probably be as surprising to us in the end, as that harvest of wheat and weeds together was to those workers in the field. And certainly the wait for redemption often passes with excruciating slowness; certainly, at least, in these days of pandemic isolation.
Even so, craning our necks with a mixture of eagerness and sheer endurance, we who are people of God? We wait for the coming of the thing with feathers. We hope, for what we do not see.