Sunday March 16th, 2025 Worship

For those of you who were at the Wednesday night Vespers service, you heard the poem, “Rough Translations” by Jan Richardson. I’m not going to read the whole thing again today, but I really want to focus on the first stanza, as it helps us think about the Scripture readings for this week. The poem begins, “Hope nonetheless. Hope despite. Hope regardless. Hope still.” I intentionally chose this poem because our Scripture readings are really focused on how there is still work to be done. And, as we have talked about hope being active, I would argue that much of our ability to continue with the hard work that needs to be done is by building a foundation on hope and the trust we have in God. Richardson’s words today also remind us of the importance of hoping, even when it feels pointless. When we cannot understand why we would begin to hope or continue to hope, we hope anyway. This is what gives us the strength to keep going.
I want us to go back to the beginning, to today’s story of the covenant between God and Abram. Now, I have often reminded us that covenants go beyond just simple promises. It isn’t like how we can promise a friend that we will do something for them and then we might accidentally forget. When they come from God, they are unbreakable promises about what is to come. Since it doesn’t happen very often, it’s usually about something major. In Abram’s case, the covenant regarded the land in which he and his descendants would dwell, you know, those descendants that Abram was complaining about not having earlier in our Genesis reading for today. So, this covenant today isn’t just about land, but about who Abram is to be for the future generations of the world (Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18). All Abram can do at this point is trust in God and hope in these promises to come, as he is after all an older man with no heir and a wife who is beyond child-bearing age (Genesis 15: 3), or so they think. Yet, our reading today tells us that “Abram believed the Lord…” after he hears that he will in fact have an heir (Genesis 15: 6a). Based on the fact that he still didn’t have an heir and was nearing the end of his life, Abram was trying to determine if God was trustworthy, but the ritual of the covenant building gave him something to build his hope and trust on.
While these stories of the early covenants between God and humans like Abram and David feel distant from us, we continue to tell these stories as a way of honoring and remembering God’s faithfulness and trustworthiness throughout history. After all, if trust is a two-way street, we can rely on the stories of our religious past to strengthen our faith for the future. Just as we also get to draw on the stories of our grandparents and parents, as well as our own stories as we build the trust in what God will do in the future, based on what God has done in the past. We recall what God has done in history to give us hope for the future.
And, while Abram and Paul are not always the perfect examples of faith that we lift them up to be, they do help give us perspective about what it means to be human and to have faith in God. Sometimes, it isn’t always easy. And, while they don’t always get it right, it is important that we frequently hear reminders from Paul to the churches of his time reminding them to stay strong in their following of the cross of Christ, especially when it seems easier to walk away from the faith. He often writes these reminders, like he is in today’s letter to the Philippians, while he is being persecuted or is imprisoned. If there is ever a time when one might walk away from their faith, Paul shows an example of what it means to stand firm on that foundation of hope and trust, despite everything that is happening in the world around him.
But, my favorite example of work still needing to be done comes from Jesus’ response to the news that Herod is plotting to kill him; ‘Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem’’ (Luke 13: 32-33). It is clear from his response that Jesus has accepted the reality that he will be killed by Herod, but I appreciate the way he basically says, “not yet, I still have things to do.” I imagine that Herod didn’t like receiving that answer too much. Jesus standing up to Herod’s power here is a strong indicator for why people felt the need to get rid of him, after all, he is challenging the authorities far too much and they can’t let other people see that they can get away with doing that too. But, there are few other examples of people being so grounded in the work that they are doing that they can stand up to an Empire and say, you can’t kill me yet, there is still work to be done.
These attacks on people stepping into their work isn’t just a phenomenon of Jesus’ time but has been the case throughout history that it is often the people who are in power that are threatened by what we are doing and want us to stop the work that we are called to before we are ready or finished with the work. Yet, throughout history, we also have examples of people who continued in the work that needed to be done, despite how difficult it was or the threats that they faced. In my Seminary Ethics class, the person that was always lifted up was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ultimately died in a concentration camp after being a part of an underground church that continued to teach and proclaim the Gospel as they understood it. While Bonhoeffer is an important example in history, I did also find it interesting that we were not also looking at many of the ethical challenges of our times.
Because while WWII was one of the biggest examples in history, the reality is that we continue to be faced with these challenges throughout the course of our lives. Those times when we have to decide to do what is right or what is easy, because they are often not the same thing. Where we have to decide if we will continue doing the work that we are called to as individuals and the church, even when it is upsetting those in power and comes with even more challenges and threats. But, before we can even begin to answer those questions, we have to go back to the original question: what is God calling us to in this time and place? From there we can decide how we want to move forward in completing it and who is there to help up along the way.
Every time we have to make one of those decisions, it can take a lot of energy. We can question whether we are making the right choice or if we will have the ability to continue in that path forward when it gets difficult. When those times happen, that is when we can come back to our foundation of hope and trust that we have in God. The reminder that even when the times are difficult, that God continues to support us and give us strength for the days ahead. That God goes with us. It may not make the challenging decisions any easier, but at least we will know that we do not have to go through it all alone. And even in the face of all that, we: “Hope nonetheless. Hope despite. Hope regardless. Hope still.” Because as Jesus reminds those messengers bringing the news of Herod’s plot, there is still work to be done, and we can’t always wait for others to do it instead.