The 6th Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg
6th
Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B
June 30, 2024
This week, I came across a quote about
hope that I want to share: “Hope doesn’t
preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes
total sense…Hope is not optimism….Hope is a discipline and… we have to practice
it every single day.”[i]
I started thinking about how I talk
about hope. How many times a day do I
say, “I hope…” “I hope you are
well.” “I hope it goes easier than you
expect.” “I hope…” We’re talking about well-wishes when we talk
about hope that way, a sort of love made manifest in words. But
that’s not what this quote implies about hope.
Hope isn’t a feeling; it’s a discipline, a practice. What on earth does that mean and how might we
practice hope as a daily discipline?
Our gospel reading gives us two pictures
of hope in the same story. Jairus, the
leader of the synagogue, is seeking healing from Jesus for his young
daughter. He throws himself at Jesus’
feet, tells him his daughter is near death and begs Jesus to come heal
her. It’s definitely got the feel of a
last-ditch effort from a desperate father. They set out, and on the way, a
woman who has been bleeding for 12 years approaches Jesus and says to herself,
“If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” And miraculously, she is healed in that
moment. It seems at first that she’s
going to get into trouble or get called out by Jesus when he seeks to know who
touched him, but instead, Jesus commends her and her faith and sends her on her
way. Then they get word that Jairus’s
daughter has died, that Jesus has come too late, and the unnamed woman becomes a
lesson in hope to the faithful synagogue leader Jairus. Because rather than giving
up hope for his dead daughter, Jairus continues on with Jesus to his house
where the parents and Jesus and his disciples go in to see the girl, and they
all witness Jesus raising her from the dead.
Both the unnamed woman and Jairus practice hope by pursuing a path that
they believe will make lives better.
So, what can these two different
characters in the gospel story today teach us about practicing a daily
discipline of hope? Each of them, in
their own way, is willing to take a risk, acting in the belief that the world
could be better and centering their faith in that better outcome in the person
of Jesus. They also are at the end of
their own limits; they have no delusions that they can affect the change they
want through their own devices. So they seek out Jesus who they believe can
bring about the healing they are looking for.
In her book Atlas of the Heart, the
sociologist Brene Brown writes about hope saying, “Hope is made up of…. ‘a
trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”
We need all three of these aspects in order for hope to be
fulfilled. She also writes that “hope is
a function of struggle-we develop hope not during the easy times but during
adversity and discomfort.” (She continues
by writing about how hope is a learned behavior. That children often have to learn the habit
of hope from their parents and how they need boundaries characterized by love,
consistency and support to cultivate hope along with the space to experience
and grapple with adversity in their own lives.
When they are given the opportunity to struggle, they learn how to
believe in themselves and their abilities.)[ii]
Hope is a choice that must be coupled
with action in order to truly be hope and not just wishes.
This week, after we discussed hope in
our Wednesday healing service, one of the congregation sent me two different links
talking about how she was seeing conversation around hope everywhere after our
discussion. One of the links was to an
Instagram story by a woman whose username is anniebjones05. Here’s what she writes: “In April, I planted
a bunch of wildflower seeds in my front yard.
My parents came over, and we raked and weeded, dug holes and
fertilized. I fretted and tended and
watered, until two days later, when a torrential rainstorm came and swept all
the seeds away. I watched the dirt and fertilizer
flow into my front yard turning everything into puddles of mud. I waited and waited to see if anything
survived. Nothing did.”
She
continues, “In May, my parents came over and we tried again. We planted flowers in my front beds and tried
seeds again in the back. I tried to not
care if anything grew. I was afraid to
hope. I am always a little afraid to
hope. A few weeks ago, I started to see
green sprouts peeking up along our back fence.
Maybe the sunflowers we’d tried on a whim? A zinnia?
Two? In April, I cared so much.
By May, the rainstorm had taken my seeds and my care right along with it. Now it is June, and there are flowers. Plural! Zinnias. Sunflowers, I think, to come. They bloomed, disregarding my level of care
and despair. They bloomed, ignoring my
exhaustion, unconcerned with my cynicism.
They did not need my hope. She
concludes, “This is a true story. A
literal one. Of course, it’s a metaphor,
too.”
It's
interesting to me how in this story she uses the word “hope” to describe her
wishes for her flower garden, but really what was hope in this story is her
action to get out there with her parents and plant again after the first failure. I also appreciate the aspect of loving detachment
that she introduces around hope, a sort of sense of working toward making things
better with healthy detachment toward the outcome.
Today, we had a baptism at the 8:00 service. Her name is Sophie. So that’s why, in just a few moments, we will
renew our baptismal covenant as a part of this service. But I think it’s also an important reminder
to us in this ongoing conversation about hope.
It’s a reminder that in our baptism, we are invited to practice this hope
by loving action on behalf of not just ourselves but also our neighbors. Notice how in the last five invitations of
baptism, the first two are practices that help us nourish our own hope: continuing in the apostles teaching and fellowship,
in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, and resisting evil and whenever we
fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord. But the last three are about how we turn
outward and practice hope in the world around us: proclaiming by word and example the Good News
of God in Christ, seeking
and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and striving
for justice and peace among all people,
and
respecting the dignity of every human being.
Our baptism calls us to practice hope through loving action for
ourselves and for others.
A year ago, I shared a post from Bishop
Steven Charleston that came up in my memories this week. I was grateful for the timing of this
reminder from past Melanie. Here’s what
he wrote, “I have a little broom called hope.
I use it to sweep out the corners of my life where the dust of my past
has settled and the shadows of my heart cling like cobwebs. It does a good job. I sweep fear and worry out the door, leaving
only sunshine where the dark spaces once pretended to rule. I have a little broom called hope: please feel free to borrow it whenever you
like.[iii]
Your invitation this week is to seek to
daily practice the discipline of hope in your life. Do one thing every day this week that could
bring positive change to another person’s life or the world around you.
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