Spirit of Hope
I spent 124 hours this past week tending the hearts of young people.
I did better this year – I estimate that of that 124 hours, 30 of it was sleep. That leaves us just shy of four straight days of intense interaction. Some portion of that time was spent listening to the realities these young people face – from your standard teenage drama to real, painful, enduring family trauma, from the destruction of our environment and economy to the dreams of how they would save the world. We talked about it all. And I would estimate that about 45 hours of time was spent addressing a seemingly endless stream of questions.
Endless questions. Mundane questions about what the next meal would be, whether or not there was going to be a chance to swim, and whether lights out could be later…and BIG questions, like why do people use the bible to hate others? Why do people mistreat creation? How is God going to punish me if I do the wrong thing? Will you stop loving me if I misbehave?
Uff.
So if I seem weary, or a little hazy, this is why.
But also, my heart is full. My heart is full of hope for the world because these young people care deeply, and they see with eyes wide-open the pain of the world. My feet feel like they are drifting about a foot above the ground because I have been to the mountaintop with them, I have seen how God is always creating and redeeming, and I have come back down reminded of a call to get back to work and to share the good news.
Because it is good news. God is doing a new thing (always). And God is good, all the time. God is making all things new, dwelling with us and in us. Again and again and again over all of time.
And that gives me hope. And the world needs more hope. And our young people need more hope. And they need to see that they are good and beloved and able and part of the good new thing that God is doing.
Next week, we finish a year-long journey together through the big-ness of the scriptures with the help of Brian McLaren’s book, We Make the Road by Walking.
We started with creation, and we explored ancestors like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. We experienced God with us in the birth and ministry of Jesus and we wondered at the miracle of resurrection. We’ve celebrated the Holy Spirit, the third expression of the Trinity, especially in the way that new communities of believers gathered and grew and shared life in the wake of Jesus’ death and resurrection. And we have begun to understand how we are called into relationship with God and Christ and the Holy Spirit in order to bring about God’s preferred future – sometimes known as the Kin-dom of God.
To commit a year to study of a specific book is really unusual for a church family. Thank you for hanging in there. Throughout this journey together, we have adjusted our lenses to look more deeply at the big story of God found in the scriptures – for the time in which the story took place originally and for how it speaks to us today – vital work if we are to understand scripture as the living Word of God.
In chapter 51, author Brian McLaren focuses on the Revelation to John, a strangely told narrative of monsters and whores and horsemen and lakes of fire. It is a part of the Bible that has, over many years, has taken on interpretive life of its own, launching popular renderings including the “Left Behind” series that imagine the details of the Revelation as a symbol-filled script for end times.
But that is taking this sacred writing out of its historical and literary context and reading it through a lens of popular culture, a lens that preferences a specific kind of American Christian really. That is one way of reading it, but I believe that the theology of that reading is harmful. And if theology is deeply harmful, can it be solid and good? Can it be of God?
Also, we must acknowledge that to study the Revelation to John is a BIG task, one we cannot tackle in a single Sunday, but let’s try to see what McLaren points to on the journey we share.
McLaren makes the case that this is an underground message of hope amid a series of oppressive and violent regimes in the Roman empire.
The message of hope in light of the violent context is that while God is not present in the ways that Jesus once was, or in the ways that people imagined Jesus’ imminent return, God is still at work and will join the people in God’s time in a way that creates new hope, new harmony, new ways of being beyond the expectations of governments, empires, economies. The broken and oppressive structures of government and religion will be deconstructed or destroyed to make ways for God to be at work among the people.
McLaren summarizes this way: “God will be faithful and the way of Christ – a way of love, non-violence, compassion and sustained fervency – will triumph.”
It is vitally important to do the hard work of understanding texts like this one and really looking for how they give us clues about what God continues to do and how we might be called to do that work. This is not a blueprint for how the world ends – because if it was, the Jesus we see in this work would be nearly the opposite of the one who walked and taught and healed. If it were a blueprint, the damage we are doing to the environment would not matter because the foregone conclusion is that a new heaven and new earth will replace our polluted water sources, our poisoned air. Make no mistake, that kind of flawed blueprint interpretation has implications for our current environmental policies, our current economy, our current global worldview.
And that feels mighty dangerous.
We either believe that somewhere in the course of events God has predetermined an ending OR we believe that God is always actively moving and loving and creating and recreating….as God did in the beginning.
McLaren notes:
“Rather than giving its original readers and hearers a coded blueprint of the future, Revelation gave them visionary insight into their present situation. It told them that the story of God’s work in history has never been about escaping Earth and going up to heaven. It has always been about God descending to dwell among us. Faithfulness wasn’t waiting passively for a future that had already been determined. Faithfulness meant participating with God in God’s unfolding story. God wasn’t a distant, terrifying monster waiting for vengeance at the end of the universe. God was descending among us here and now, making the tree of true aliveness available for all.”
With that in mind, I want to return to camp for just a minute. Actually, I want to return to camp and to my own children’s future. And to the future of any children they bring into this world. And to your grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins removed… I want to return to the call that continues to be sung into my heart by the Holy Spirit…in ways made real and present at camp.
God is on the move always redeeming God’s creation. I need to be part of letting a new generation know this – in part because the voices of fatalism and moralism and judgment weigh so heavily on them.
It is very hard to be growing up in this world. Our kids are affected by trauma within their families and within their neighborhoods. They live in the shadow of gun violence that is not just on the street but in the schools. They are increasingly multi-ethnic and caught in the crosshairs of conversation about race. They have been given language and tools for understanding sexuality and gender that I never had, and they face judgment for claiming their identities. They are watching the generations ahead of them squander the gifts of the natural world, resources like water and clean air.
This takes a toll. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people age 10 – 24. LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to seriously consider suicide. There is a connection between adverse childhood experiences and chronic health issues like diabetes and heart disease.
Within our small community at camp, half have experienced significant trauma, from the death of a parent to abuse to absent parents who live in other countries. Many of them identified as LGBTQ. Many of them openly and honestly shared their mental health diagnoses. And they have lived for the past year and a half with the pandemic interrupting their lives in ways that alter their developing brains.
And they were all eager to hear that they were, in spite of all the hard things around them, beloved of God. They were all eager to hear that they had been created with amazing gifts that the world needs. They all needed to hear that God loved them and that love is bigger than all of the other things calling out to them. They needed a community where they were safe, beloved, heard, valued, and able to explore who they are and who they are becoming. They needed adults who would listen, who would refrain from judging, who would affirm their created goodness.
Of all of the calls that we have as Christians, of all the calls we have as we seek to be the body of Christ in the world, it seems to me after a week at camp that the most urgent is helping kids (all kids) know that God loves them – no matter what.
No matter what.
I want to get back to something I claimed early in this message –
In spite of all that our young people face –
My heart is full of hope for the world because these young people care deeply, and they see with eyes wide-open the pain of the world.
I have been to the mountaintop with these young people, and I have seen how God is always creating and redeeming, and I have come back down from the mountain reminded of a call to get back to work and to share the good news.
Because it is good news. God is doing a new thing (always). And God is good, all the time. God is making all things new, dwelling with us and in us. Again and again and again.
The Revelation to John proclaims a future where:
…the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Beloved, God already dwells among us. When we remember and reach for that indwelling, we manifest love in ways that are part of a new heaven and a new earth. I saw it this week at camp. I pray that it becomes one of our primary ways of being the church right here in Rockville – a place where we love young people with the fullness of our hearts, giving up some of our own comfort to be the hands and feet of Christ…so that they see the good news happening around them and with them and for them and through them.
May it be so.
Amen.
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