Though he was Swiss, born in Basel, the Reform Protestant Theologian Karl Barth was teaching in Bonn, Germany when Adolph Hitler rose to power. Barth lost his position there when he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer, and went on to be the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, the theological argument against making the German churches subservient to the Third Reich. At that point a persona non grata, he returned to Switzerland, where he taught in Basel until retirement in 1962, the same year he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, not too shabby for an academic theologian.
His retirement freed him to travel, including a lecture tour of America’s top theological institutions. It was at one of these schools, the University of Chicago, that he was asked by a student if he might summarize his theology in one sentence.
Now, brevity was not exactly Barth’s forte. His “Church Dogmatics,” unfinished at the time of his death, comprised four volumes, but each volume was too large to be bound in a single book, so there were thirteen in all, each of the thirteen a physically and theologically dense doorstop. So yeah, summarize that in a single sentence…
Barth was undaunted. His response? “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Though the question was absurd, that Barth could answer it so readily speaks to a simple truth. Every practitioner of theology, that is, everyone who tries to make meaning at the intersection of the transcendent and the existential, comes to that encounter with a core set of beliefs, whether they stand at a lectern in the halls of academia, serve in an ICU with a family on the edge, or preach from a pulpit in a small Rust Belt city. Sure, there are charlatans and frauds, but they are in the minority, for most of us are too simple for that sort of socio-pathology, or maybe too lazy. Lying professionally is hard work. No, mostly we just preach what we believe.
And it is precisely this that has gotten me into trouble this week, that and boxing myself in with a sermon title that I stopped loving soon after it was printed in the Order of Service. “Oh look, we didn’t blow ourselves up with an atomic bomb yet!” seems like a miserable form of optimism.
Operating within my core set of beliefs, we concluded the liturgical year on the exact same theme with which we are beginning the liturgical year, for the Feast of Christ the King, the Kin-dom of God, is all about hope, the type of faith that believes in the essential goodness of God and God’s creation, that lives forward instead of backward. The first theme in Advent is hope, which is the exact same thing.
So what is there to say that I did not say last week? God is good, love is amazing, and though the winter can be long and the night can be dark, that is just how the system is wired, for joy comes in the morning, the soil will warm again and life will burst forth, the life that was always there, and we are called to be people of the Exodus, the wrong season, I realize, but hey, core belief… Good Friday is followed by Easter every year.
We are always challenged, leaders who speak to bushes and people who follow leaders, to journey from the bondage of sin and fear to the freedom of the Promised Land, the land where the “milk and honey” are love and justice, though we cannot bring our Golden Calf with us, for it is way too heavy. We weep in Gethsemane, are confused at the grave, and rejoice on the beach as we are fed yet again, fish over an open fire.
What is there to say about hope that I have not already said, that I do not say, in some form or another, every week that I stand in front of you as your pastor and teacher, as your coach echoing the call to life in full?
Here’s the thing: I know the opposite of hope too. I’ve known despair. I may not face the sort of neuro-chemical challenges that afflict some, or the hard-wiring of troubled genes and traumatic stress, but there have been dark nights for my soul, when I could not imagine that the dawn would come, that anything would ever be warm or light again.
I’ve been there, my chest tightening, feeling like I’m drowning.
But I have chosen, again and again, to believe what I say I believe, that being is good, that life is filled with beauty if I just keep watching, that the kin-dom of God is here, for the world is filled with the holy, even as neo-fascists march and the wicked steal from the poor.
I have chosen, for my natural inclination is toward pessimism and fear, for I am a bipedal primate, one animal among many, but one who can time travel, at least in my mind, to before and to after. Fight or flight does not work when the threat is a spinning globe circling a finite star and the unraveling of time.
I hear these rumors of happy babies and easy lives, but that has not been my journey, and most folks I know, the people that I choose, are a little broken.
I see no beauty in never falling down. I see beauty in getting back up.
I love that crocus that pushes up through the leaves and the snow.
I love a Savior that they saw defeated in the worst possible way, an innocent man tortured and publicly executed, made ritually unclean to his own religious community because he hung from a tree, this man who was filled with such holiness and love that the broken and the unclean felt whole again at his word, at his touch. This man who they experienced as still very much present with them even though they had seen him destroyed. This man who they imagined could not possibly have entered the world in the ordinary way, for he was extraordinary, so they told stories of his miraculous birth, believed that he was from God.
I believe he was from God, even if I have thrown off the rubrics and dogmas and catechisms of earlier ages.
And I exercise that belief and keep it strong in the same way I hone and perfect any essential life skill, for hope is an essential life skill. I practice. I pray. I immerse myself in his story and in the stories in which he immersed himself, the stories of the Hebrew and Christian covenant, and in the stories of those who have followed after him, who have chosen love and hope and courage, reformers who saw what might be, activists who fought the good fight, martyrs who were destroyed and lived on in new ways.
I have practiced hope as a spiritual discipline, and maybe that is the thing that is different about this week, for while hope, peace, joy, and love are all lovely things, they are all disciplines, the disciplines of preparation, the sun and the Son warming out hearts preparing us for what is about to grow. It makes sense that Christians in the northern hemisphere decided to celebrate his birth when the night is longest, that we begin and end with hope which is faith, which is about being in the world as consequence of the holy, as agent of the holy.
Hope, the impossible made possible, from a short homily on a holiday weekend to the holy miracle of a child born, in a stable or in his home, attended by astrologers or shepherds, or by doctors and nurses, at the breast of a first-time mother or in the arms of adoptive fathers.
Hope. It’s pretty simple really. God is good. All that She has made is good. You are designed to be good, to do good. Prepare your heart.
Amen.