(By Jody)
Last week I introduced the idea that Christian hope in NZSL is [holding up a strong clasped fist “towards God”] – a secure grasp in the symbolic direction of God. Confidence in God. Not mere fingers crossed.
This week I want to explore another area in the hope landscape: surrender.
(This image (scroll down page) from the On Being website accompanied their podcast series “The future of hope” and was lifegiving lockdown walk material for me last spring.)
These two spaces, hope as hold, and hope as surrender, both belong in a Christian hope orientation course, but I didn’t feel I could cover both in one week. So if you sat through last week, feeling it was trite, or simplistic, to say with Isaiah 40 that confidence in God gives strength and power, wings like eagles, the ability to run without being weary, walk without getting faint, and hope despite all evidence to the contrary… today is a vital “other side of the story.”
I’ll start by saying that any and all profound ideas on this topic were sparked by an interview between two writers, Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Gilbert, as well as a bit of Paul in the book of Romans. Really, half the sermon is Elizabeth Gilbert quotes because she really helped my thinking about this aspect of hope - and if you have 50 minutes, stop reading this sermon and go listen to the interview instead!
Reflecting on experiences of pandemic isolation, as well the death of her partner, Elizabeth Gilbert agrees that she has learned she has less control over the external world than she perhaps imagined, but more control over how she responds to it.
She says of the pandemic, and her partner Raya’s sickness and death from cancer:
“And if there is one thing that I, if I had the chance to do it over again, could’ve done differently, would’ve been to walk into it in a stance of surrender — arms collapsed, no clipboard, no agenda, no cherished outcome — and to have almost gone limp into it, which is not the same thing as hopelessness, but it is a very powerful stance to take in the wake of something that is bigger than you are.”
And so Elizabeth Gilbert is a bit cautious about hope, and certainly about hope as a cherished outcome – a pre-determined and self-determined destination, or a “wilful inflicting,” when the real hope might be waiting elsewhere.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
(TS Eliot)
If hope is only fixation on a certain outcome, we could be disappointed. But if hope is a conviction that we can be right here, right now, without wishing ourselves away, and that there’s value in the being right here, right now, we have more scope to work with.
Elizabeth Gilbert and TS Eliot might sound fatalistic and opposed to the kind of hope Christians want to be steeped in; what about striving with God for what God is determined to do in the world?!
But surrender is an aspect of active hope. We know we don’t know all the details of how God’s intentions will be worked out. We know important themes; justice, mercy, reconciliation, resurrection, but we don’t know the minutia of millenia.
The Lord’s prayer: “your will be done,” Jesus’ agonised: “not my will but yours be done,” remind us, sometimes with relief and sometimes with horror, that we belong to a bigger world than the world of what I really want to happen.
In the opening lines of Romans Chapter 5, Paul talks about peace with God, and access to grace through Christ Jesus. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about surrender to Love.
She keeps hope with her by writing to Love, every day on and off for the last 20 years, and asking Love to write back. She started this practice in a time of great despair, with her life falling apart. And she wrote that Love wrote to her:
“I love you. I am with you. I will never leave you. You are not alone. I’ve got you. You are my precious. You are my beloved. You are my child. There’s nothing you can do or not do that could cost you this great love that I have for you. You — I don’t need anything from you in return. I don’t need you to provide anything for me; I don’t need you to prove anything to me. You don’t have to feel better, for me to love you. You don’t have to stop crying, for me to love you. You don’t have to be successful at anything, for me to love you. Nothing is owed, nothing is earned, nothing is asked.”
She reflects, 20 years down the track, that the soothing words mattered deeply, even though she was the one writing them. It strikes me as a version of what Paul is talking about in Romans. The Message puts it: “We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open God’s door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory…”
Elizabeth Gilbert believes that this “tremendously tender and merciful force,” Love, can bring change within.
And inner change, for her and for many wisdom traditions, is one very real place that hope lives.
“Not my will, but yours be done” is Jesus’ expression of hope outside a cherished outcome.
Inner transformation is another way of being true to hope. There is gripping confidence in God, but there is also willing surrender to God.
Surrender to God doesn’t mean giving up and doing nothing, or wanting nothing. But it does mean action we take comes from a sense of God’s loving company, rather than needing to make up for God’s apparent inaction.
Paul has a famous formula for hope: “we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…”
Elizabeth Gilbert says it more gently: “…when we do suffer and we come through it, oftentimes we can’t help but see where there was something in that suffering that had to happen. … you can’t quite bring yourself to want to say, “I’m glad it happened,” because it was awful; you would never wish it on anybody. You would never, if you were a compassionate person, say to somebody who was going through it, “Oh, you’ll be really happy when this is over, at what it turns you into.” And yet something interesting is happening here. You are growing into something more subtle, more elegant, more kind, more human than you might’ve been without it — certainly, more capable of empathy.”
Suffering, endurance, character, hope. It’s not an easy path from suffering to hope, but it is a track that has been travelled by many people. We dare not, unless we’re Paul, assure others of the destination, only find it for ourselves if it’s there. We don’t know how babies killed by bombs in Ukraine would talk about suffering and hope, and we should not speculate, only grieve. But we do know suffering changes us, and sometimes gives access to new hope.
However much hope is a strong clasp on confidence in God, it is also surrender to a hope that is not contingent on cherished outcomes. This is hope that does not put us to shame, because God’s Love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, and we are changed.
Last week I introduced the idea that Christian hope in NZSL is [holding up a strong clasped fist “towards God”] – a secure grasp in the symbolic direction of God. Confidence in God. Not mere fingers crossed.
This week I want to explore another area in the hope landscape: surrender.
(This image (scroll down page) from the On Being website accompanied their podcast series “The future of hope” and was lifegiving lockdown walk material for me last spring.)
These two spaces, hope as hold, and hope as surrender, both belong in a Christian hope orientation course, but I didn’t feel I could cover both in one week. So if you sat through last week, feeling it was trite, or simplistic, to say with Isaiah 40 that confidence in God gives strength and power, wings like eagles, the ability to run without being weary, walk without getting faint, and hope despite all evidence to the contrary… today is a vital “other side of the story.”
I’ll start by saying that any and all profound ideas on this topic were sparked by an interview between two writers, Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Gilbert, as well as a bit of Paul in the book of Romans. Really, half the sermon is Elizabeth Gilbert quotes because she really helped my thinking about this aspect of hope - and if you have 50 minutes, stop reading this sermon and go listen to the interview instead!
Reflecting on experiences of pandemic isolation, as well the death of her partner, Elizabeth Gilbert agrees that she has learned she has less control over the external world than she perhaps imagined, but more control over how she responds to it.
She says of the pandemic, and her partner Raya’s sickness and death from cancer:
“And if there is one thing that I, if I had the chance to do it over again, could’ve done differently, would’ve been to walk into it in a stance of surrender — arms collapsed, no clipboard, no agenda, no cherished outcome — and to have almost gone limp into it, which is not the same thing as hopelessness, but it is a very powerful stance to take in the wake of something that is bigger than you are.”
And so Elizabeth Gilbert is a bit cautious about hope, and certainly about hope as a cherished outcome – a pre-determined and self-determined destination, or a “wilful inflicting,” when the real hope might be waiting elsewhere.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
(TS Eliot)
If hope is only fixation on a certain outcome, we could be disappointed. But if hope is a conviction that we can be right here, right now, without wishing ourselves away, and that there’s value in the being right here, right now, we have more scope to work with.
Elizabeth Gilbert and TS Eliot might sound fatalistic and opposed to the kind of hope Christians want to be steeped in; what about striving with God for what God is determined to do in the world?!
But surrender is an aspect of active hope. We know we don’t know all the details of how God’s intentions will be worked out. We know important themes; justice, mercy, reconciliation, resurrection, but we don’t know the minutia of millenia.
The Lord’s prayer: “your will be done,” Jesus’ agonised: “not my will but yours be done,” remind us, sometimes with relief and sometimes with horror, that we belong to a bigger world than the world of what I really want to happen.
In the opening lines of Romans Chapter 5, Paul talks about peace with God, and access to grace through Christ Jesus. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about surrender to Love.
She keeps hope with her by writing to Love, every day on and off for the last 20 years, and asking Love to write back. She started this practice in a time of great despair, with her life falling apart. And she wrote that Love wrote to her:
“I love you. I am with you. I will never leave you. You are not alone. I’ve got you. You are my precious. You are my beloved. You are my child. There’s nothing you can do or not do that could cost you this great love that I have for you. You — I don’t need anything from you in return. I don’t need you to provide anything for me; I don’t need you to prove anything to me. You don’t have to feel better, for me to love you. You don’t have to stop crying, for me to love you. You don’t have to be successful at anything, for me to love you. Nothing is owed, nothing is earned, nothing is asked.”
She reflects, 20 years down the track, that the soothing words mattered deeply, even though she was the one writing them. It strikes me as a version of what Paul is talking about in Romans. The Message puts it: “We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open God’s door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory…”
Elizabeth Gilbert believes that this “tremendously tender and merciful force,” Love, can bring change within.
And inner change, for her and for many wisdom traditions, is one very real place that hope lives.
“Not my will, but yours be done” is Jesus’ expression of hope outside a cherished outcome.
Inner transformation is another way of being true to hope. There is gripping confidence in God, but there is also willing surrender to God.
Surrender to God doesn’t mean giving up and doing nothing, or wanting nothing. But it does mean action we take comes from a sense of God’s loving company, rather than needing to make up for God’s apparent inaction.
Paul has a famous formula for hope: “we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…”
Elizabeth Gilbert says it more gently: “…when we do suffer and we come through it, oftentimes we can’t help but see where there was something in that suffering that had to happen. … you can’t quite bring yourself to want to say, “I’m glad it happened,” because it was awful; you would never wish it on anybody. You would never, if you were a compassionate person, say to somebody who was going through it, “Oh, you’ll be really happy when this is over, at what it turns you into.” And yet something interesting is happening here. You are growing into something more subtle, more elegant, more kind, more human than you might’ve been without it — certainly, more capable of empathy.”
Suffering, endurance, character, hope. It’s not an easy path from suffering to hope, but it is a track that has been travelled by many people. We dare not, unless we’re Paul, assure others of the destination, only find it for ourselves if it’s there. We don’t know how babies killed by bombs in Ukraine would talk about suffering and hope, and we should not speculate, only grieve. But we do know suffering changes us, and sometimes gives access to new hope.
However much hope is a strong clasp on confidence in God, it is also surrender to a hope that is not contingent on cherished outcomes. This is hope that does not put us to shame, because God’s Love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, and we are changed.