Living Hope: Sermon for the 203rd Convention Holy Eucharist
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church Tifton, Georgia on November 8, 2024 for the 203rd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.
Living Hope
1 Peter 1:3-9 and Luke 24:13-35
The shepherd is out on the dusty road in the shank of the day, rounding up not one, but two lost sheep. He is seven miles beyond the old stone walls of Jerusalem. The Shepherd knows where to find these two who are wandering further from the flock. He expected this. He had spoken those words from the Prophet Zechariah hours earlier at Passover in an Upper Room, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.”
Now, Jesus joins Cleopas and the unnamed other disciple on the road. They are in the depths of despair as they walk toward Emmaus. Neither of these first followers of Jesus know this seeming stranger on the road to be their Rabbi. This lack of recognition reveals the way despair clouds our vision and hinders us from seeing rightly.
Jesus asks them what has transpired this Passover as if he doesn’t have a clue. Cleopas and the other disciple tell Jesus about how the one they thought was the Messiah had been put to death and then add, “Some women from our group have l
eft us stunned. They went to the tomb early this morning and didn’t find his body. They came to us saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who told them he is alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women said. They didn’t see him.”
Despite Jesus’ having prepared the group traveling with him by telling them in advance what would happen, they were unprepared for Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. The devastating pain of Friday’s grief had made it feel impossible to go on. That heartache remains so raw on this Sunday afternoon. These two have heard Jesus’ resurrection proclaimed by the women who described a vision of angels, but as Peter and John found the tomb empty, without seeing Jesus, they remained in anguish.
Despair is diametrically opposed to hope. This is part of the teachings of the great Christian ascetics that we know as the Desert Mothers and Fathers who lived as hermits in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century after Jesus’ resurrection. They named despair as one of what we know as the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth is how we in the West translated their word which is better translated as Despair.
In Rowan Williams’ Passion of the Soul, which will be our 1Book1Diocese read for this coming Lent, works from this desert wisdom as talks about despair as the difference between Peter and Judas. Both betrayed Jesus. Judas ends his life while in the midst of despair, while Peter makes it through that dark night of the soul to see the risen Jesus and so finds hope renewed.
Despair is the natural condition that arises from looking at the fallen world as it is. We see all the effects of our sin and disobedience to God’s will. We see the painful divisions that we humans have collectively created. Despair is what arises in our spirits when we look realistically at this situation but do so without the hope in a God who acts in human history. Hope sees the world from the godly perspective, knowing that all we see is not all that there is.
I want to pause here to note how the Enlightenment that led to the gifts of modernity also found its way into our faith. The Desert Mothers and Fathers saw the struggle of good and evil playing out not just in their lives as they saw the cosmic struggle of good and evil playing itself out within their own hearts as they sought through their prayers and fasting to overcome temptations. They lived in a world shot through with a sense of transcendence, the knowledge that what we see is not all that exists in the universe as the time we live in is held in eternity.
The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries grew out of the Christian quest for knowledge of the natural world. The very pursuit that Christianity began and encouraged took on a life of its own when the only things that could be claimed as fact were things provable through the scientific method. Don’t hear me as bashing reason though. I love modern medicine and air conditioning. But while Karl Marx was proclaiming Christianity was “an opiate for the masses” and Nietzsche declaring, “God is dead,” the cultural concepts of God were not the only things dying. The whole Enlightenment project itself was beginning to unravel.
For anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, the idea that everything was getting better all the time was revealed to be a lie to those who watched their friends die in the trenches of Europe in the First World War. Any sense that a scientific approach alone could provide a better future died in Auschwitz and incinerated at Hiroshima. We could no longer delude ourselves into believing that science alone could guide us into a better world. We need to be guided by the Spirit of the living God.
Yet, we see how a few centuries of increasingly explaining away faith in rational terms sapped belief of its believability. Science seemed to grow by leaps and bounds, leaving religion tagging along. This put our sense of the world in the box of the immanent, the sense that what I see and know is all that there is to know. Yet our faith in Jesus Christ is both immanent and transcendent. We worship Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” The eternal Word becoming flesh and living among us shows the immanence of God, God is in all things. But unlike in pantheism, where God is identified with the universe, which is a manifestation of the divine, we know that the creator is not contained within the creation. Augustine of Hippo wrote that the divine is both within me and beyond me saying that God is, “more inward than my most inward part, higher than the highest element within me.”
God is in everything, but also beyond all matter, and not is bound by space and time. This is no small thing, as if we lose the sense that God will not show up, then despair makes perfect sense. Yet, we know that the God who made us out of love for love is not standing back like a disinterested clockmaker or an unjust judge. Our transcendent God entered into this broken world in the person of Jesus, to redeem us through his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. This same God is with us in everything we face and yet beyond us, seeing our finite world from the perspective of eternity.
I wanted to add this before we rejoin our trio on the Road to Emmaus as we see both of these aspects of God in this passage. Knowing the immanent God who is present in our hearts and minds as well as the transcendent one who inhabits eternity matters for how we Episcopalians in Central and South Georgia can navigate the coming years for our congregations and how each of us can thrive in our one wild and wonderful life no matter what happens.
On the Road to Emmaus, Jesus offered the best Bible study in human history. He patiently explains how everything he has done was predicted by the prophets which is apparent in the light of the resurrection. The prime example of this is Isaiah 53 that says, “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”
God gave Isaiah the gift of this prophecy so that after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, the church could know that the crucifixion was Divine Providence. That while we were yet sinners, the Messiah would come and die for us. We see that in his teaching after the resurrection, Jesus finally broke through to get his followers to see how this was what was planned all along. In the incarnation, God becoming human in Jesus, was God’s bold plan to enter into the creation to weave back together the fabric of the cosmos, torn by human disobedience and sin. The one who the cosmos could not contain humbled himself and in this we see that the Holy Trinity is not a distant observer, but knows and understands this broken world from the inside. When we experience betrayal, suffering, and crippling grief, we know that God truly understands as Jesus experienced all of this and more.
Jesus does not break into human history with blinding light and an audible voice. Often, I experience God in what could seem like coincidences and yet are clearly something more. One example that comes to mind here at St. Anne’s. When I was assisting Bishop Benhase as Canon to the Ordinary, I was at a meeting with my colleagues in the same position throughout the southeast. We were in Charleston. On the last morning of the meeting, I decided that rather than praying Morning Prayer in my hotel room, I would go to Grace Cathedral to pray. When I got there, a woman was about and to lead a scheduled service of Morning Prayer that I did not know was set to happen. It was just the two of us in the chapel in the back of the cathedral dedicated to their martyred bishop. After praying together, I introduced myself and learned that she was the Cathedral Administrator Emily Guerry. When she learned what I did for a living, she said she was interested in moving to our Diocese to be near her parents, ideally along I-75. I explained that those calls were rare and I didn’t always hear of them, but I promised to listen for any possibilities. The meeting ended later that morning and I drove home to Savannah. Once back, I opened my email to see that the Rev. Lonnie Lacey had written to say the vestry had budgeted money for a top-notch administrator. He wanted assistance in finding the right person. I replied that the Holy Spirit had already taken care of that for us and gave him Emily’s contact information. She interviewed and Emily, Lonnie, and the Vestry could all see that this had been God’s doing. Moments like this cause me to say, “God is showing off.”
There are also the times when someone experiences and unbidden experience of peace or a sense of the oneness of creation that they know is from God. I know firsthand about such experience and second and third hand about so many more. Considering the stigma, many remain silent rather than share what they saw and felt and the long impact a mystical experience has had on their lives. I discovered that if I ask “Have their been any experiences hard to explain to others that have mattered a lot to you?” I will find someone has had a small mystical experience that is significant for them, yet they have trouble sharing as it could easily be dismissed by others.
Our loving God often works in and through the hearts of those who will listen. The Spirit can and does use seemingly small moments like when someone feels they should take a friend to chemotherapy and sit with them or when another person shows up to be with a co-worker after the death of their child. Every time we embody love to a neighbor we don’t just have hope, we are living hope.
We saw what living hope looks like in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Along the storm’s surprising path, Grace Church in Waycross used its existing connection to the Okefenokee Alliance for the Homeless to provide sleeping bags, tents, baby supplies, and more. Annunciation in Vidalia, St. Mary Magdalene in Louisville, Trinity in Statesboro provided gift cards and pastoral care to neighbors who were hurting. In Valdosta church members provided care and support for one another and those in the community impacted by the storm. In Douglas, the people of St. Andrew’s provided meals, including a Thanksgiving feast, gift cards, and pastoral care aided by our friends in the Diocese of Alabama. Saint Paul’s in Augusta opened their hearts to the downtown, even as they welcome people to recharge physically and spiritually through safe air-conditioned space and days of meals. At the Byllesby Center in Augusta, more than 2,000 hot meals were provided together with other support. Episcopalians in Savannah coordinated drop offs to get diapers and feminine products from local nonprofit Over the Moon to some of the hardest hit areas in our diocese. We experienced the generosity of the people in the Diocese of Central Florida in sending aid to Augusta. At Calvary in Americus, they collected support for our friends experiencing the immense tragedy of flooding in Western North Carolina. In each of these acts, we were not holding on to hope, but living hope. This is part of how the transcendent one acts in human history.
Seeing the ways God has broken into your life before gives confidence when looking to an uncertain future. For example, we can look at decline in church participation across the generations and join others in despair. Or we can look to the ways that the living God has been present with us in the past, is with us now, and already holds the future. That perspective makes it possible to be both realistic about where we are and what we face while remaining hopeful about the future. Whatever causes us to despair, when we tap into the certainty that God can, does, and will show up, we have a reason to hope.
The same is true for you and your family, that whatever may come, you know and are loved by the God who holds eternity and is also Emmanuel, with you in every storm of life. Knowing the power and presence of God is what makes turning from despair to hope not only possible, but also reasonable and right. For greater is the one who is in us than the one in our despairing world. Amen.