By Ben Cluff, Lay Preacher

​May the words of my mouth and meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen
Good morning, 
I see that a number of you are here from last week. Rich Simpson did a wonderful job of setting me up for the lectionary readings for today, BUT, this week we are not to follow the lectionary. However, I will referenceRich’s homily in a few ways today. Rich shared the work and thoughts of Walter Brueggeman and I will, as well. 
Rich also spoke of having the long view of our life’s journey and how we may view our life experiences, both good & bad, differently over time. He suggested the way we see these events fitting into our respective spiritual journeys may change over the long run. 
I would like us to keep this in mind today, as we come together to consider hope, to share hope. 
Let us begin this consideration by defining the word. Hope can be defined as a noun, and as a verb. 
As a thing, a noun; 
Hope is a feeling that what is wanted will happen; desire accompanied by anticipation or expectation. 
Hope is the object of this desire accompanied by anticipation or expectation. 
Hope can be a person or thing from which something may be hoped. 
As an action, a verb: 
Hope is to want or expect - to want or expect very much. 
So these are the dictionary definitions from our time; but in reflecting onthe nature of hope, I realize that hope can be invisible. It is not as if I can grab it and hold it up in front of you and “See, here it is.”
How does hope manifest itself in our lives, so that it becomes visible?The evidence of our hope, often lies in the observable actions we take, the rituals we engage in, and the words we speak. 
The root of hope comes from the Greek elpis - anticipation or expectations, but expectation without a doubt, a certain hope, a confident expectation. 
I don’t know about you, but, I know there have been times whereinI haveused the word hope, but with a strong component of doubt. For example, “ I hope I win the million dollar lottery.” this is not a hope of certainty, it is not expectation without a doubt. 
Let’s take a look at our considerations of hope already encountered in today's readings. 
We open our first reading from Lamentations - “ My soul is bereft of peace, gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for but this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning - The Lordis my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.” 
My soul is bereft of peace and gone is all that I had hoped for, but, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases - his mercies are new every morning - the Lord is my portion, says my soul - therefore I will hope in him. 
Hope is the vehicle by which Jeremiah, the author of Lamentations, is moved from being bereft of spirit and having forgotten what happiness isto knowing the steadfast love of God. 
I want to speak here, briefly about a time in my life wherein I felt as if my soul was bereft of peace - I was lost, I was way off course. I was making bad decision after bad decision and did not know how to right myself. I was in despair and despondent. It was at this time that I uttered a prayer for the first time in years. 
God, I do not know if you are there. I certainly do not know if you are there for me. I need help, help me, I am lost.
This prayer was offered through a feeling of extreme desperation. This was the darkest period of my life. I actually was on hilltop when I offered this prayer. If you had met me at the bottom of that hill and said, “Well, well look at this hopeful lad”, I would have thought you were nuts BUT, as time has gone on, as my journey has continued, I now see that moment as being filled with hope. Hope, invisible to me at the time, hope camouflaged as despair. I had experienced hope, without even realizing it, at the time. Prayer is hope. 
In our third reading, Rachel Held Evans, so eloquently, speaks of those days when that close relationship between faith and hope waxes and wains. She reminds us of how our shared faith and hope has the ability to bolster us on those days when our faith and hope may be in short supply. 
“For better or for worse there are seasons when we hold our faith and then there are seasons when our faith holds us.” At those times she says she is so very thankful for all the saints, past and present. 
“They believe for me when I am not sure I believe. They hold on to hope for me when I’ve run out of hope.” And she identifies some of those saints of the present; “the old lady next to me in the pew”, a young one reciting the Apostle’s Creed. 
We share that expression of hope and faith for each other, each week when we come together to share the Eucharist. This prompts me to think of the Prayer Circle, here at Sts. James &Andrew. There are folks who pray daily for individuals and families that have indicated a desire for that extra comfort of intentional daily prayer. I see this as a communal expression of hope, the thought of it can carry us on those days when we may not be entirely ‘on the beam’ , so to speak. 
And Paul Hawken, in our fourth reading, gives us that wonderful sentiment, “Hope makes sense only when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful." 
This is so inline with consideration of that root of hope, elpis. Angelos Chaniotios, a Greek historian and classics scholar, has written that ellipse can be defined as “justified expectation”. In his study of hope in ancient times, he has portrayed hope as “unconditional faith that may even defy reason.” 
Are we able to maintain hope or rely on the hope of those around us, particularly, on those days when the world can seem so overwhelming?
Saint Paul, in his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:2-5), writes that were rejoice in the hope of sharing the glory of God, we glory in tribulation or suffering, knowing that tribulation or suffering produce patience and endurance and endurance produces experience or character, and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us. 
I must admit, there are days when patience and endurance do not come easily as they do on others, but I am bolstered by the line in Paul’s letter, “and hope does not disappoint us”. 
This line reflects a justified expectation, a certain hope, a confident expectation. 
Hope is active, not passive. How often does our expression of hope come in the form of sending good vibes or positive energy to a friend or loved one before a medical test or doctor’s visit, or before an important interview or exam? 
Theologian Walter Brueggeman writes, “Hope on one hand is absurdity, too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. 
Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality, which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. 
On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question” 
Particularly in challenging times, when the evidence is bleak, we seek to influence that reality, positively with hope. 
Hope beyond all hope 
Unconditional faith that may even defy reason Hope makes sense only when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful 
Moving from feeling bereft of peace and having forgotten what happiness is to knowing the steadfast love of God
As we approach the coming week, let us be subversive, let us be filled with confident expectation, with certain hope, for ourselves, for each other and for the world at large. 
Amen 
Lamentations 3: 17-25 
Wholehearted Faith Rachel Held Evans 
2009 University of Portland Commencement Address Paul Hawken 
Elpis in the Greek Epigraphic Evidence from Rational Expectation to Dependence fromAuthority Angelos Chaniotios 
Romans 5:2-5 
The Prophetic Imagination Walter Brueggeman

The narrative suggests two reasons as to why Joseph’s brothers hate him so much. One is good old-fashioned sibling rivalry: they are jealous of him because they believe that their father, Jacob, loves Joseph more than he loves them. We never got an amazing technicolor dream coat! But the narrative gives a second reason that his brothers can’t stand Joseph: he is a dreamer and they don’t like the dreams he has been having. 
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Inexplicably, however, the lectionary committee (in their infinite wisdom) cut out the middle part of today’s narrative. So if you come to this text without already knowing the story then you may not recall what it was Joseph had been dreaming. Jacob has settled back into the land of Canaan after two decades away from there. Joseph is now seventeen years old, and no one seems to deny that he is a spoiled brat and a tattle tale. And then in verses 5-11 of the thirty-seventh chapter of Genesis, the verses not included in today’s reading, the narrator says: 

Once Joseph had a dream which he told to his brothers; and they hated him even more. He said to them, “Hear this dream which I have dreamed: There we were binding sheaves in the field, when suddenly my sheaf stood up and remained upright; then your sheaves gathered around and bowed low to my sheaf.” His brothers answered, “Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us? And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams. He dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: And this time the sun, the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” And when he told it to his father and brothers, his father berated him. “What,” he said to him, “is this dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers and bow low to you to the ground?” So his brothers were wrought up at him and his father kept the matter in mind. 
(Jewish Publication Society translation)

Now as we all know, some dreams are best kept to ourselves. Some are just too weird to share with others. But Joseph apparently relishes his dreams and can’t wait to throw it into the faces of his brothers, apparently as evidence of his superiority over them. Let me be clear: I am not saying this is an excuse for attempted murder. Only that Joseph was a bit of a jerk as a seventeen-year old. 
Now to preach this sermon I am going to have to spoil the ending. I need to tell you (if you don’t already remember it) that the dreams do come to pass. Joseph is taken out of the pit and sold to the Ishmaelites who take him to Egypt. Long story short, it turns out he is not only a dreamer but a pretty good interpreter of dreams and that gift will get him out of jail after he is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. He is then promoted to a cabinet position in the Pharaoh’s administration—Secretary of Agriculture. After the economy enters into a serious seven-year recession and famine threatens the land, his father and brothers come down from Canaan to Egypt and because of his political position, Joseph is able to save them from starvation. And guess what? They’ll bow down before him! 

One way to preach this story is as a transition from Genesis to Exodus: literally that is how the Joseph story functions in the Bible.  We move away from the patriarchs and the land of Canaan, and the children of Israel end up in Egypt. That is where the story will pick up with the call of Moses and the Exodus event. I’m sure there are countless sermons that could be preached on this transition including sermons about family dynamics and in particular the complexities of large blended-families. 

But I want to raise a serious theological question with you today. The Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob materials reflect a more primitive social context and worldview. In that world, Abraham seems to hear God’s voice as clear as day: “Go to a land I will show you.” Or, “take your son, your only son whom you love, and go with him to Mt. Moriah.” God speaks, Abraham obeys. That is what makes him the father of faith. 

But Joseph moves in a more subtle and sophisticated cultural milieu, and I would argue that is a world more like the one we inhabit. By the time we get to Joseph, God’s way of communicating is more hidden and less direct; instead of “go” or “take” we get these dreams. It isn’t even clear initially that God is behind the dreams that Joseph is having, the root cause of which may well have been (for all we know) too much garlic in the hummus. The point is that the meaning of dreams is never literal and rarely obvious and so dreams always need to be interpreted in order to figure out what is of God. 

So Walter Brueggemann argues that what this text is really attempting to do is to raise a crucial and far-reaching faith question: what does it look like to trust God in a world where it isn’t quite so obvious what God is up to? It’s easier to obey God’s will when God is clear, but what to do when it isn’t so clear what God is asking of us? 

Think about that for a moment. If, like Abraham, we could really “hear” God and know what God wants of us, then maybe we could muster up the strength and the courage to act. But what if the harder part is figuring out what God is up to and what God wants of us? The fancy theological word for that is “discernment.” But all that word really means is that most of the time we have to try to figure things out when at best we get dreams that need to be interpreted or epiphanies that give us glimpses and half-guesses into what might be God’s will for us. Most of us don’t get clarity from God and when we do we are probably wise to be suspicious of our own certitude. 

Stay with me on this! Bruggemann argues that this Joseph narrative is about “God’s hidden yet decisive power that works in and through, but also against human forms of power.” Got that? God’s work is hidden, yet decisive and also against human forms of power. That’s a big huge theological claim!

Joseph’s call is hidden, even from him. To say this in a much simpler way: God is at work in this text, but that doesn’t become clear until the end. God is working in and through (and sometimes against) all of these mixed-up characters to bring about a new reality, but that work is mostly hidden from the sight of the characters in this story and even to some extent from us as readers. And I wonder – isn’t that more like what we go through than Abraham, most days at least. 

Now the text doesn’t say that God made the brothers do this terrible thing of selling their brother off. The text doesn’t negate free will. But it does seem to be insisting that God can use even our bad choices to bring about good, that God can use our sibling rivalry and petty jealousies and ineffective parenting and all the rest and still bring about good. In other words, this narrative is exploring the nature of God’s providence. That word is one I think we need to rediscover and reclaim in our theological vocabularies. It comes from two Latin words, pro-video, literally “to see before.”  God sees. Not passively but actively; not sitting way up in heaven distant from our daily lives but right here, in the midst of it all. That doesn’t mean God is some kind of puppet-master who is pulling all the strings and making us do what we do. But through it all, God sees and God acts. God’s hidden yet decisive power keeps working in families—not just when we get it all right (which we rarely do) but even through the messes we make. 

I think most of us probably believe that at least to some extent, or at least we want to believe it, at least when it comes to personal lives. God has a plan for us. It may be harder for us to make the claim that this narrative makes that God’s activity isn’t confined to individuals and families, however, but global events as well. This is headed toward a story of God’s liberating activity of bringing a band of slaves out of an oppressive political situation and into freedom. It’s harder when you read the newspapers or watch the news to believe that God is involved in global events, working in and through (and sometimes against) human forms of power in order to bring about peace on earth and good will to all. But maybe the great challenge of faith in our time is to trust that God is seeing to things we can’t yet see. As in this story, when it is only at the end of this narrative that the characters in this drama get how it all fits together as part of God’s plan. So it often is for us as well. 

So Brueggemann makes the claim that a narrative such as this one creates a listening community that is invited “to live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of the disclosure.” I love that! We see the “hint of the dream” in today’s reading—Genesis 37.  (Well, actually the lectionary committee didn’t even give us that much but it is in the text!) Next weekend we’ll read from the 45th chapter, what Brueggemann calls the “doxology of disclosure” part of the story. Unlike today, when we don’t hear mention of God, next week it will all be about God: God did this, God was at work in these events, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise God who has provided for us and who saves us from our foolishness and so on and so forth. 

But we live most of our lives between the hints and the doxology, don’t we? We work on letting go and letting God, some days with little more than a hunch or a dream or a prayer to go on. We live our lives as followers of Jesus Christ asking for discerning hearts so that God can work more in and through (rather than against) us to bring healing to our lives, our community, and our world. Faith is hard when like Joseph we find ourselves in a pit, abandoned by those we thought were supposed to love us. Faith is hard when the doctor says cancer or our spouse says “I don’t love you anymore” or our kid is in real trouble or the world seems bent on destruction. 

But God sees further down the road than we can see and that is good news for us. We don’t have to worry about making it all fit together—as long as we are moving toward doxology we can let God worry about the disclosure part. Our work is to move from the hint of the dream to praise. To proclaim the mystery of faith: that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Which is simply another way of saying what Julian of Norwich said in the midst of the bubonic plague: all shall be well. Or as Francis of Assisi prayed in a time of war and a church in profound need of healing: Lord, make me a channel of your peace. Faith in God’s providence doesn’t make us passive: rather, the hints of God’s kingdom that we do get sustain us for the work God gives us to do, as we live toward the doxology of disclosure, toward the plan God has for our lives and for this world. ​

This saying, about whether we find something or not, surfaced in my mind as I have been thinking, this week, about the set of small parables we’ve head in our gospel this morning.
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But let me start with a story I enjoy every time I think about it.   I’m going to read you a piece about it that appeared in the Washington Post, some years after the event it describes:
 
In Washington DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
 
After about four minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.
About four minutes later, the violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
 
At six minutes, a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.
 
At ten minutes, a three-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent - without exception - forced their children to move on quickly.
 
At forty-five minutes: The musician played continuously. Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About twenty gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.
 
After one hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all.
 
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.
 
This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.
You may well have heard this story before.  We could even call it a parable, in that it meets several of the characteristics that fit the parables that Jesus taught:
 

• It’s about something simple and familiar we can easily recognize from the world of our own experience.
• It contains an unexpected twist that invites us to pause and think, and
• The more we reflect on the story, the more implications and insights it suggests.

 
This story came to my mind, like the aphorism about expecting the unexpected, as they’re both about what we see, what we notice, and particularly, about noticing something unexpected that may be hidden.
 
The parables in this morning’s gospel are part of the large body of parables that Matthew reports Jesus as having taught.  Many of them including this mornings’ parables are about what is translated in today’s version as “the Kingdom of Heaven”.
 
You’ve heard me say this before, but I prefer other terms to “kingdom of heaven”, in part because “kingdom” by definition suggests a patriarchal social order, and in part because Christian tradition has come to associate “heaven” with a realm outside of the world we live in, that we might access after we’ve died.   I feel quite confident that an otherworldly heaven is not what Jesus was concerned about.
 
I prefer the language “the realm of God”, a way of living and being in a community of respect, compassion and justice that reflects the Love that is God‘s self.  Our presiding bishop often uses the phrase “God’s dream”, which is helpful, too, and comes from Verna Dozier’s 2007 book, The Dream of God. 
 
So in his series of parables Jesus is suggesting to his hearers what God’s realm or God’s dream looks like and he compares it to five examples:
 

• a mustard seed planted in a field
• yeast that leavens whole batch of flour
• treasure found buried in a field
• a merchant finding single pearl of great value
• a net that pulls in a mighty but mixed catch of fish

 
There are a couple of common threads in these brief parables.  The first two parables are about something small and seemingly insignificant that proceeds to grow in size and ultimately take over.
 
I find it interesting that mustard seed and yeast would not have had positive associations for Jesus’ community. Mustard was considered a weed, an invasive plant that, once it took hold, would self-propagate and potentially choke out the other crops.  Yeast, likewise, looks quite undistinguished to begin with but then bubbles up and completely changes the nature of a batch of flour, and apparently, is not used by nomadic people because it makes dough hard to manage.  Having come home from Maine, ten days ago, to a crop of weeds the likes of which I have NEVER seen before, I can understand how first century listeners may have been startled to hear God’s realm likened to mustard seed.
 
The treasure hidden in a field and the pearl of great value are both unexpected finds.  Like the mustard seed and yeast, both are small, and both were hidden from view.  Both inspire the ones who discover them, however, to basically abandon all their other priorities to commit to the treasure and the pearl:  both sell “all that they have” in order to possess the one desirable thing they have found.
 
The net thrown into the sea draws in fish of every kind – both those that are desirable to eat AND those that, when hauled up on shore, are just going to be tossed into a basket and disposed of.  This parable seems to be directly connected to the parable we heard last week:  like the weeds that have grown up among the wheat plants, that need to be gathered and destroyed, there are “bad” fish pulled in with the good ones.
 
This week Julie Carew shared with the vestry an approach to Bible study that invites us to look at Jesus’ teachings through the lens of “Beloved Community”, that is, recognizing that Jesus was teaching with love to an oppressed people, and not from the perspective of power and privilege, and I’ve thought about how it might shape our understanding of today’s parables.
 
Adopting this approach, it’s easy to understand how this set of parables about God’s realm would have great appeal to the disenfranchised – both the disenfranchised Jesus’ world, and of our own:

• if what the world offers you is not sufficient or satisfying, while the notion of having your world disrupted by an invasive, mustard seed-like force may be distressing, it offers hope of improvement. 
• For those who are perishing – whether by illness or poverty or the inequities of the world – Jesus’ promises of a powerful, yeast-like force loose but hidden and ready to change the world is good news.

 
For those of us living more comfortable lives, these parables may be scarier to embrace.

• Do I really want the yeast of God’s realm to bubble its way into all of the corners of my orderly universe?
• Am I ready or willing to lose “all that I have” for the treasure of God’s realm?  The pearl of great value?
• Do I even want to THINK about which fish basket I’d land in if the sorting took place today?

 
But the piece of the parable that’s been most thought-provoking to me this week is the suggestion of how subtle and hidden the bubbling up of God’s realm may be.
 
I think we could suggest that God’s realm is like Josh Bell playing the violin in the subway station.  Because we are so much dominated by the schedules and lists and agendas and priorities playing in our heads, what Bach, what Stradivarius are we not noticing?  What opportunities to join in the work of God’s realm are we missing?
 
Where is the work of God’s love taking root and growing, hidden away like a treasure, a pearl of unusual value, or a master musician, playing incognito?
 
As we contemplate the opportunities and the risks of God’s realm, may we continue to keep our eyes and our hearts open

• To see and value what the world doesn’t see
• To act differently than the options the world offers
• To invest in a future trusting in and based on Jesus Christ.