Scripture: Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
Hope
You and I can run down the litany. A mosque is blown up in Egypt, at least 305 people killed. A veritable contagion of men abusing and harassing women. The ongoing epidemic of gun violence in this country. A nation divided into faraway, warring camps. Hope? Where?
And that’s just in the public realm. A litany of despair insinuates itself into so many personal lives, as well. A woman can’t stop her drinking. A son’s addiction to porn is seemingly intransigent. A young father succumbs to cancer. A friend slips into dementia. Children make bad choices. Teasing grows into bullying. Sometimes the news, both public and personal, is so overwhelmingly grim that it saps life and joy, and leaves us but the shell of ourselves. Hope? Where?
When life is in a tailspin, how do you retrieve hope? Where do you go to bring back a sense that all is not lost, that life is not at its end? One of the Bible’s most prevalent subjects is hope. In the face of apparently long and forbidding odds, over and over again, the Bible’s writers affirm that there is something good yet to come. When we’re in deepest despair, this relentlessly hopeful insistence can come across as irritatingly out of touch—“What do you mean hope? I don’t see it.” But secretly, in our heart of hearts, we know that hope is out there somewhere. We long for it. We pine for it. And maybe more often than we’d like, we don’t know how to get it. We don’t know what to do, what steps to take, to regain hope.
The writer of the Psalms knew a thing or two about hopelessness. The Israelite people were constantly beset, behind and before, by seemingly intractable forces of division and destruction. They were a tiny nation in a sea of great powers. Assyria, Babylon, Rome—they all took over that tiny Mediterranean nation at one time or another, and treated the people horribly. Israel was buffeted to and fro and used as a kind of punching bag by its neighbors.
Understandably, they wondered why God didn’t intervene. They were impatient for help. Psalm 80 virtually begs for God’s presence and involvement, repeating the same plea three times, but each time escalating it. “Restore us, O God” (v. 3) is what we hear the first time the phrase is uttered. A few verses later the ante is upped: “Restore us, O God of hosts” (v. 7). And at the end of the psalm, the request is even more intense: “Restore us, O Most High God of hosts” (v. 19). Same phrase, getting more and more insistent. In the psalmist’s eyes, God has not done enough, and Eugene Peterson’s translation puts it particularly vividly: “Get out of bed [God,]—you’ve slept long enough! Come on the run before it’s too late” (80:2, The Message). We know that feeling, don’t we? “I’ve suffered long enough, God,” we may think; “Get out of bed and help me.”
One of the odd and wonderful things about this psalm is that it offers a litany of complaint about all the things God doesn’t seem to be doing. But the whole litany is addressed to the very God about whom the psalmist is complaining! The psalmist hasn’t given up on God, in other words. She or he is still engaged and wrestling with the very God whose behavior is so frustrating.
This is a clue for us. If the psalmist is that honest about feeling abandoned, then we certainly can be that honest, as well. Sometimes people think the Bible is all smiley and sappy about everything, as though there is no edge, no struggle in any of its authors, just pure unadulterated trust and happiness—a kind of Pollyanna relationship with God: “Yeah, everything’s fine, thank you. All good.” This is not at all the way the Bible reads, though. The Bible’s authors bring all the fullness of their rage and doubt and despair to God. They’re brutally honest. They’re not shy about saying to God, “Enough is enough!”
This is the way we’re invited to be, as well. If you’re petrified about a diagnosis, bring it to God. If you’re desolate about a spouse’s death, bring it to God. If you’re distraught about a work failure, bring it to God. Everything is important enough to bring to God. And nothing should ever be hidden from God on the mistaken assumption that “we shouldn’t feel that way.” No, if we feel that way, we feel that way. Talk about it with God. And then don’t leave it at that. In the wake of the torrent of worry or anxiety or complaint, be sure to leave some silence. Because it’s only into a quiet, welcoming space that God can offer a response. It’s only into a stance of openness that God can bring hope.
And as we make hopeful room for God, what is it that we receive? Eugene Peterson’s version of the three-times repeated litany says it so beautifully. What is it we can expect from God? It’s this: “Smile your blessing smile: That will be our salvation” (vv. 3, 7, 19). What is it that we’re to look for in our struggle and despair? Not perfect little packages neatly tied with beautiful bows. Not immediate and magical solutions to every problem. Not the wiping out of all pain and suffering and despair. No. What the psalmist looks for—and knows enough to ask for, because this is what the people have received in the past—is God’s smiling face, God’s “blessing smile.”
Hope can be a strange and mysterious and elusive thing. “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul,” said Emily Dickinson, “And sings the tune without the words,/ And never stops at all.” “The thing with feathers”: it’s that strange force that lifts us, and turns us around ever so slightly, and allows us to see a way clear when all we had perhaps been able to see before were roadblocks. Hope: God’s blessing smile.
A few years ago, when I was on sabbatical, Mary and I spent part of our time on the small island of Iona off of Scotland’s west coast. It’s an astoundingly verdant place, and extraordinarily beautiful. But it’s also somewhat austere, and is battered by abundant wind and rain. The wind blows at 15-25 mph all the time and it gets 72 inches of rain a year, twice what we get here. The cold goes right through to your bones. It can wear you out.
One day, Mary and I walked into a small shop, one that sold jewelry that had been made from items native to the island. As we walked in the door, Mary remarked to the shopkeeper that her hair was flying in 1000 different directions, and that with these almost constant gale-force winds, it was virtually impossible to tame your hair. And the shopkeeper said to Mary, “Ah, Dearie, we call that ‘Iona hair.’ Not much you can do about it, she said. “What we worry about,” she said, “is when we have Iona hair on the mainland!” And after a little more conversation about the weather, the shopkeeper said in her lilting Scottish brogue, “Ah, Dearie, there’s no such thing as bad weather. Just bad clothing.” No such thing as bad weather. Just bad clothing.
Those are words that have stuck with me and become a mantra of sorts. And it’s because they say something about hope. Hope is partly an attitude. It accepts what is. It acknowledges what cannot be changed. Like the Serenity Prayer commonly said in 12-Step programs, it reminds us that there are some things we can’t change, and the only way to deal with those things with any degree of wholeness is, with serenity, to “accept the things we cannot change.” Not to fret about the things we can’t change, but to accept the way things are. This is some of what it is to live with hope, to live in the beam of the shining God-smile: put on the proper “clothing” and adjust to what is.
So hope is partly adapting to the way life unfolds. Hope is also, in part, a willingness to do things in a new way—to receive the God smile that is given to us moment by moment by acting into that smile. “Be the change you want to see,” is one way of putting it. Hope isn’t the same as optimism. Optimism thinks things are getting better. And if it sees things getting worse, optimism may give up. Hope, on the other hand, even if it sees things getting worse, but still invests itself in a better way. I may think, for example, that things between Christians and Muslims are getting worse—which is a sort of pessimism—but if I live in hope, I may make it a point to get to know Muslims and engage them and share the work of building a better world with them. Hope engages for the world it seeks. The God-smile beams as we live into, and participate in, the world God is shaping.
So hope doesn’t try to change things it can’t change. And it invests in a better world. And the third thing about hope is that it finally trusts God. So if your mother is a shrew and your father is a crank, and at the same time you want to be hopeful, eventually you have to realize you’re not going to change them. And if you’re going to be hopeful, you have to act in the kindest, most loving way you can toward them. And if you’re going to be hopeful, you finally trust that God is in the middle of whatever stresses and strains may continue to fester. The shining God-smile.
I have a friend who has cancer. And this is what I’ve noticed about her. She knows she’s getting fabulous medical care and that she is cherished by her family and friends. But she also knows something else. She knows that, no matter what happens to her, she will be held in the arms of God. This lets her live with a palpable sense of lightness—“the thing with feathers”—a deeply held conviction that, no matter the outcome, “all shall be well,” because God walks with her and holds her up at every moment of her life, as well as in her eventual death. For her, hope is lived out in all three ways we’ve mentioned. She knows she cannot control the outcome, so she lives with serenity—to adapt our earlier metaphor, she dresses appropriately for the weather she’s given. She continues to live with passion and joy, as she lives her life fully invested in all its richness—she lives as she would in the best of circumstances. And she trusts that, in all things, her life is filled to the brim with blessings—God is her taproot, the one on whom she leans. May we live as she does, with deep and abiding hope in God’s ever-beaming, ever-shining smile.