This is the concluding sermon of four on "The Healing Church", focusing on four healing things -- Respect, Information, Connection and Hope -- which each of us can offer another person. I researched ten pages of notes on the topic of hope. I discovered that hope is central to our scriptures - the word "Hope" appears 70 times in the Old Testament, most often in the Psalms, and 73 times in the New Testament, most often in St. Paul's letter to Romans.⁽²⁾ Then I turned to this morning's Gospel lesson about John the Baptist, and an unnamed disciple of John's entered with his story and demanded that the notes be set aside.

It is dusk in the village. Inside the white walled house, you sit with the stranger at a rough table. A lighted wick dipped in cooking oil gives off the only light in the room. The stranger is obviously poor. His garments are worn and faded by the heat of the Jordan valley. He has the cracked, heavily calloused feet of one who has never worn shoes. The stranger is tense and haggard, bowed as if by great age or constant pain, but he lifts his face to thank you for your hospitality.

"It's nothing," you tell him. "In these hard times any of us might need a place to sleep. But you seem to carry a terrible burden. Share it with me if you wish."

The stranger takes a long sip from his cup. You refill it from the wineskin nearby. And he begins to talk.

"It all started out with so much promise. One day a man came out of the wilderness and began telling people to repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven was near.⁽³⁾ His name was John. He wore a rough coat of camel's hair tied around the waist with a leather belt. He ate nothing but locusts and honey from the wild. He quoted Isaiah and the other great prophets of the past. He took people into the river Jordan and baptized them after they confessed their sins.

"It made sense to me. Things have just gotten worse every year with the Romans in power. That statue of the emperor in the temple courtyard added insult to injury. And that gymnasium where young men practiced sports naked in the Greek style - it was just too much. I thought that if the Kingdom of heaven was on its way, I knew what side I want to be on, so I took my turn in the water, and soon I was one of the baptizer's disciples. John the Baptist, we called him. He was so persuasive. Tax gatherers would come to be baptized and he would convince them to collect only what was assessed. Soldiers came and he convinced them to cut out the bullying and blackmail and be content with their pay. Others who had two shirts or more food than they needed, he convinced to share with those who had none.⁽⁴⁾

"We knew he was special and it just fit when we heard the stories about his birth. It was said that his mother Elizabeth was beyond the time of childbearing when God promised her a son. His father, Zechariah, who was a priest in the temple, lost his voice when he didn't believe God could do such a thing, and didn't came back until he named the baby John.⁽⁵⁾

"John was so pure. He wouldn't compromise. I wish he had. He shouldn't have taken on Herod and accused him of adultery with his brother's wife Herodias.⁽⁶⁾ Soon it was all over. The soldiers came, arrested him, and took him away. Most of the other disciples never saw him again; but I got a job sweeping floors in Herod's palace, hoping to find a way to free him. I was there the day of the party. Herodias' young daughter did a dance. It certainly wasn't anything we'd allow our village girls to do, but Herod loved it. When it ended, Herod clapped his hands and offered her anything she wanted. I couldn't hear her answer, but some soldiers left right away. When they came back, they carried a platter.⁽⁷⁾ Something was on it. It was -- a human head, a shaggy haired head -- John's head. Oh, oh, I couldn't bear it. As soon as I could, I left the palace -- just walked away. I've been walking ever since.

"We all had such hopes. 'Prepare the way of the Lord,' he said, and we tried to. 'Repent of your sins, change your way of living, because God is near.' We did all that. But what's the use? It's hopeless. It's all over now. Herod has won. I don't know what we'll do. But I feel so restless, I have to keep moving. Thank you for letting me sleep here. I apologize in advance if I make a disturbance. I don't sleep very well now. When I close my eyes at night I see soldiers going to and fro with that platter. Sometimes it's as fresh as the first time, and I scream out loud and wake up. If only I could have been taken in his place. Why did God take him and leave me? Half the night I see the soldiers and the other half I just lie there thinking and thinking. I'll probably be up early. I'll just slip on out. Don't worry if you don't see me. The walking quiets my nerves."

You both sit there in silence. You wonder what to say. You could tell him that it's not so bad, that a man named Jesus, whom John baptized, has taken up the reins and is doing a good job of preaching, too. But somehow before you say it, you know it won't help.

"You really cared about him, didn't you?" you say.

"Yes. It was all mixed up, love, admiration and then, when they took him -- terror."

You notice a bit of moisture in the corner of his eye.

"And now, it's gone. All the excitement of being with someone who could make a difference, all the hope that God would hear our prayers and throw off this awful Roman oppression, all the caring for the people who came to the Jordan to be baptized and turn their lives into something better. It's gone, and I'm so empty."

Again, his words fill you with thoughts of your own. You've been out among the crowds listening to Jesus of Nazareth. You've heard not only John's birth story but that of Jesus as well. You think, well, there's a story too where everything went wrong - a pregnancy before a marriage, a hard trip on a donkey to get counted in a Roman census, of all things, just when the baby was due, and then to top it off, no room at the inn --- but there in a stable amid the straw, fodder, and animals, God gave a safe birth, admiring shepherds, a chorus of angels, and a star guiding a group of mystics all the way from Persia. And look how that baby turned out, you think, remembering the healings you've heard about and that great speech you heard yesterday. Jesus really turned things upside down, talking about the people who were blessed -- not the rich or the powerful or even the righteous religious leaders, but those who are poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, those who mourn...

That thought brings your wandering mind back to the stranger sitting before you. Here is someone who mourns, but he certainly doesn't seem blessed. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted," ⁽⁸⁾ you recall. But Jesus' words don't say who will do the comforting! In your mind you say a quick prayer. "Well, God, I guess it's you and me. Help me do the right thing!"

You sit there in silence. The lamp is burning low and you fill it with more oil. You feel tense and hungry; surely the stranger is hungry too. You bring out a loaf of bread, baked on the hearth that morning. You say the Jewish blessing both of you know by heart: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth."

The stranger's reaction startles you. "To blazes with God," he cries out. "God set the whole thing up. He got John out in the wilderness, he got him to draw the crowds, he got everyone's hopes up with this baptism thing, and then what: he lets Herod end it all." The stranger stamps his feet on the dirt floor of the house. "What kind of God is that," he cries out. "Either he can't do anything or he won't. I don't know which is worse."

And then the stranger is overcome with sobs of grief. You can't think of anything to say so you do the only thing that seems right; you put your hand on his shoulder as he weeps. After several minutes he looks at you with obvious embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he says. "I've never done that before." "It's OK," you tell him. "You've been through a lot."

You notice that the tension in the room is now gone, replaced by peacefulness. The stranger seems lighter, relieved of some weight he had been carrying. The room seems lighter, too. In fact, it is lighter -- through the window you see the first signs of dawn.

Perhaps hope is so central to our experience as humans that it needs a story to make it real. So now this morning I want to conclude with just a few reflections on the story and hope.

First, hope is our natural spiritual condition. We wake up each day hopeful, anticipating fulfilling new experiences. If that doesn't happen, we feel as if something is missing, as if we need to restore something deep inside us; but actually it's more often the case that something in us needs to be brought into the open air. Trauma and loss are spiritual experiences, and among the spiritual wounds is the loss of hope. To heal his spirit, the stranger in the story needed to talk about his experience, connect with another person, express his anger, and grieve for his losses. As the dawn breaks in the story, we know instinctively that with the healing of the stranger's spirit, possibility and hope have been restored.

Second, hopelessness can be contagious. After spending time with someone who feels hopeless, we can feel hopeless too. Mental health workers who hear terrible stories each day can "catch" hopelessness and begin to show cynicism and despair. Because hope goes to the core of our spirituality, its erosion affects not only work lives but spiritual lives, leaving us feeling "cut off from...familiar sources of spiritual comfort. This is an intolerable loss."⁽⁹⁾ In the story you, the host, felt the stranger's hopelessness; but you had some protection because of the sources of hope in your own life, including your contacts with Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching.

Third, you, the host in this humble village dwelling, brought healing by listening and understanding. You became the holder of the stranger's hope at a moment the stranger could not hold it himself. His pain had meaning for you even when it had no meaning for himself. Because you were there, he could express his anger, grieve his losses, connect with another human being, and begin to hope again.

Fourth, despair or hopelessness has a way of seeming terribly realistic, but in fact it is an illusion. The entire year I was in Vietnam I carried a book by the theologian Jurgen Moltmann: the Theology of Hope. I didn't know at the time he himself was a trauma survivor as a German prisoner of the Allies during World War II. He knew despair before he wrote, and he concluded, "Hope alone is to be called 'realistic', because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or to lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change....Thus the despair which imagines it has reached the end of its tether proves to be illusory, as long as nothing has yet come to an end but everything is still full of possibilities.⁽¹⁰⁾

Fifth, emotion is often uncomfortable to be around, and we are tempted to try to turn it off. It can be especially upsetting to us when someone is angry with God. We want to say, "oh, you shouldn't say that, you shouldn't feel that way," which only adds guilt to his or her despair. Or we may want to explain how bad things can happen to good people. That's a great discussion topic for Sunday School, as the Asbury class demonstrated last week. But what the stranger needed was just to get the anger out, not to have it explained. And then along with the anger, came tears. The sign of hopelessness and despair is that things seem stripped of meaning. Letting ourselves cry about something expresses not only our pain, but also the truth that what we are grieving for means something. "In Man's Search for Meaning (1959) Victor Frankl concluded that the single most important factor in survival of the Nazi death camps was the individuals' ability to make or find meaning in his or her experience. When we believe that our work and our pain have some meaning, we can find hope alongside despair, purpose in routine, and connection in our actions. If we can find significant ways to hold on to our own identity and values in contrast to ... cruelty, violence, or meaninglessness, ... then we can be strengthened rather than injured or eroded."⁽¹¹⁾

Sixth, hopelessness that is listened to is hopelessness that does not need to be acted out. In this season of Advent and Christmas, there is one place where there will be no tree, no carols, no celebration, and that, tragically, is in the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In today's Bethlehem, the stranger with the pain, the hopelessness, the anger is there, but the you who will hear and understand and try to make a difference is not. And so on the day this year that we all celebrate the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, there will be rock throwing and rifle shots and more death in Bethlehem. Who will be holders of the hope for Bethlehem and the lands around it?

Seventh, restoring hope takes time. What the story portrayed in one night's conversation can take days, months, or years to resolve. But the moment where this conversation takes place is always just before the dawn. Jurgen Moltmann writes that we are, "not set at the high noon of life, but at the dawn of a new day at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come, grapple with each other.⁽¹²⁾

Last, I identified many kinds of hope - hope that pain would end, hope for restoration to the way things were, hope for specific things like a bicycle for Christmas or recovery from sickness or even the Second Coming of Christ. But of all the kinds of hope, the one that seemed most important is the hope we see in every baby and especially the baby in the manger - hope as open possibility. We look at a baby and we don't know what the future will bring, but we trust that it will bring accomplishment as well as failure, joy as well as sorrow, and we look at the baby in the manger and see all that and more. We already know how the Christ story turns out: the little baby becomes the crucified Messiah ... and then the Risen Lord. Because we are Easter people, we can know the whole story and not be hopeless. We can celebrate Christmas because we know the hope of Easter.

1. Fourth of a series of four sermons on "The Healing Church", covering the RICH paradigm: Respect, Information, Connection, Hope, as presented in .Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000

2. In English, in the Revised Standard Version.

3. Matthew 3:2

4. Matthew 3:1-12, Mark 1:1-13, Luke 3:1-19

5. Luke 1:5-25, 57-80

6. Mark 1:14, Luke 3:20

7. Matthew 14:1-12

8. Matthew 5:4

9. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 161

10. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Translated by James W. Leitch from the German, Theologie der Hoffnung, 5^th ed., Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Munich, 1965, p. 25

11. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 176

12. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Translated by James W. Leitch from the German, Theologie der Hoffnung, 5^th ed., Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Munich, 1965, p. 31

13. Phillips Brooks, ca 1868