Living Hope

Note: As the Easter season hurtles toward Pentecost, I am posting a sermon that I was recently asked to provide a copy of for someone who thought of it after this Easter's sermon on hope. Many thanks to the late A. A. Milne for hours and hours of joy with my children in the Hundred Acre Wood.

1 Peter 1:3-9
Second Sunday of Easter 2008

How do you face the future? How do you move into the future? As you confront the future—or the future confronts you, how do you face it? This morning, I’d like to introduce you to six friends of mine. Many of you already know them. Some of you are intimately familiar with them right now; some of you have been intimately familiar with them in the past. They are a group of friends who endure blustery days and swarms of bees, high waters and heffalumps and woozles. And each of them faces the future in a characteristic way that sometimes sounds a lot like us.

The first of them is a grey donkey. His head is always down; his ears flop low; and he’s constantly losing his tail. His name is Eeyore, and again and again, he says, “Woe is me.” Eeyore is constantly relying on his friends to find his tail and pin it back on him. Eeyore faces the future with complete confidence—that it will go badly. “Woe is me.” Eeyore is never afraid or anxious. Eeyore is never uncertain or concerned because Eeyore knows how things are going to turn out: badly. “Woe is me.” I know a few Eeyores, do you?

And then there is Eeyore’s friend, Rabbit. You know Rabbit. He cries, “Oh my! Oh my! Oh my!” as he scurries around his garden. “Oh my! Oh my! Oh my!” he says all the time. Rabbit is anxious and afraid because things could turn out badly. They could go badly. “Oh my! Oh my!” says Rabbit. I know a Rabbit; he’s a good, good friend of mine. On the outside, he’s a blustery kind of guy whom lots of people don’t like because he just seems so full of himself and always certain and sure that he knows what he’s doing, and he isn’t afraid to tell anyone and everyone about it. I wasn’t sure I liked him much, either, when I first met him. But, then after a while, I began to see that inside all of that bravado and bluster and certainty, there was a scared little bunny that was really saying, “Oh my! Oh my! Oh my!” Rabbit faces the future with anxiety and skittishness and fear.

And then, of course, there’s the irrepressible Tigger. “The wonderful thing about Tiggers is Tiggers are wonderful things.” Remember Tigger? You know Tigger! “Their tops are made out of rubber; their bottoms are made out of springs; they’re bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. And the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I’m the only one.” Ah, Tigger! So caught up in himself and the present moment bouncing from place to place to place to place. Tigger faces the future without even thinking about it. Whatever is coming, Tigger just bounces into it. Tigger doesn’t worry. The future will be the present soon enough. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. Those irrepressible Tiggers in our lives are full of boundless energy and constant irritation.

Woe is me! Oh my! Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun! Then there’s Piglet. Little bitty Piglet. Piglet is the kind of character many of us might not think to mention when we name our favorites from A. A. Milne’s wonderful world of children’s stories. Piglet is so quiet and unassuming, you might not notice him. In fact, the first time I preached this sermon, I didn’t mention Piglet. But someone came up to me afterward and said, “You know, you really should have talked about Piglet because Piglet always needs a boost from somebody.” How many of us need a boost into the future? We know it’s coming; we know it’s unavoidable, but we can’t step into it until somebody else gives us a boost. Once we get a boost, we’ll be all right. We face the future needing a boost.

Winnie the Pooh faces the future differently than Eeyore and Rabbit and Tigger and Piglet. The future for Pooh is always about whether or not there’s enough honey in that jar up there on the shelf for when his tumbly gets rumbly. Pooh never seems to see beyond the next meal. And that sometimes gets Pooh into some predicaments—and his friends, too. Complicating things happen to Pooh and his friends because all Pooh can think about the future is his next meal.

There is one more friend. His name is Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin is the one who steps into the friends’ story from the outside and brings with him the capacity and the capability to give all the other friends hope. Christopher Robin is the one who sees beyond the predicament of the moment; beyond the next meal; beyond the need for a boost; beyond the bounce, bounce, bounce; beyond the “Oh my!”; beyond the “Woe is me!” And in so doing, he lifts the spirits, the circumstances and the capabilities of all the other friends to hope for an outcome beyond the condition in which they find themselves when Christopher Robin steps into the story.

This morning’s epistle lesson, 1 Peter 1: 3-9, suggests to us that in facing the future, hope comes to us from an external agency, from someone else steps into our stories, into our lives, and who energizes us with a hope that looks beyond the world as we can see it, beyond our situation as we know it, beyond any future outcome that we can imagine to an outcome in this life and in the life to come that only God can imagine or create: "By God’s mercy, God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ," 1 Peter 1:3 tells us. Hope, you see, is not something you can achieve; it is something you must receive. Hope is not something we can acquire or grasp or accomplish on our own, according to 1 Peter 1:3. Hope is a gift that comes to us from God when we are willing and able to open ourselves to the reality—the irrational and unexplainable reality—of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is the hope of the Christian faith. Hope in the Christian faith is not some wish for or work for or want. Hope is what we need when there is nothing else. Hope is a gift from God grounded in God’s mercy and energized by Christ’s resurrection. So a “living hope” comes to us from beyond.

But there’s another piece of this living hope that we need to see in 1 Peter 1. From the very beginning of talking about “living hope,” 1 Peter 1:3 says “us” or “we.” And when verse 4 turns to address the audience as “you,” it doesn’t speak to “you” as an individual. It addresses “y’all”—all of “us” together. If you’re not from around here, it’s to “youse guys” or “you-uns” or whatever they say wherever you’re from when they mean “more than one.” Living hope is not a solo act. All too often, when we lose hope or need hope or reach for hope or desperately wait for hope, we make the mistake of thinking that hope is a heroic act of individual virtuosity that each of us must achieve on our own instead of receive in the company of others. We make the mistake of pulling Eeyore out of the circle of his friends, and we say, “Woe is me!” all alone. We pull Rabbit out of his garden, and we say to ourselves, “Oh my! Oh my! O my!” in lonely isolation. We turn ourselves into some tenaciously singular Tigger who simply will not be denied; and we bounce ourselves and everyone around us into oblivion trying desperately to bounce the fear, the anxiety or the desperation out of our lives. We sit all alone waiting like Piglet for a boost that never comes because we have chosen to wait for it all alone. We make like a lonesome Pooh straining to reach the honey jar. 1 Peter 1:3-9 says that living hope comes to us in a context of us all, of “y’all.” Hope is not a solo act. Hope comes to us; we find hope; we live into hope in a community of others who sometimes are finding our tail for us and pinning it back on. A community of others who work together to pull us out of the tight spot we’ve gotten ourselves wedged into and we can’t possibly extricate ourselves by ourselves, a community of others who give each other a boost. We move in and out of conditions in our lives in which we are one of the friends or another in need of what the other friends bring to the party.

Obviously, 1 Peter 1 doesn’t know Pooh and his friends. But 1 Peter understands that a living hope is an act of community. It is an act of congregation because some of us are Eeyores and some of us are Rabbits; some of us are Tiggers and some of us are Poohs. Who am I missing? Piglet again? Piglet, poor Piglet, is just waiting for me to give him a boost. And some of us are to others of us like Christopher Robin. It’s our mutual role in this congregation to be a holy friend and to be wholly befriended as we pull each other along into the future. While one of those characters in particular may be our character type, at one time or another we find ourselves and our friends in a place that we haven’t been before. The Christopher Robin type might move through a passage in life by virtue of loss of family or spouse or health or a job where they’ve stopped being a Christopher Robin who brings in the capability and the perspective. Christopher Robin might become a Piglet and sit there waiting for someone like the person he or she used to be to give them a boost into the future. And who knows, it could be a Piglet who provides it! A living hope is an act of community that God gives us as a gift, and then we share it with one another as we pull each other through the blustery days and swarms of bees, the high water and the heffalumps and woozles that we all face.

We all face the future differently, but in our differences we face the future together with a living hope that comes to us as a gift from God through the Easter proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Thanks be to God for the gift, and thanks be to God for each other as we face the future together!


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.