March 15, 2020
Text: Romans 5:1-11
Exodus 17:1-7
John 4:5-42
Good morning. I’m honored to be with you. Eighth Day was the sister church to which my husband, Doug, and I first belonged to when we stumbled into the Church of the Saviour in 1980, unaware that we were in the home of spiritual giants and were about to be changed for life. We still talk about how grateful we are that God dropped two 23-year-old newlyweds here. Church of the Saviour, beginning with the Eighth Day Community, has shaped our whole life since the first month of our marriage.
I’m here at the invitation of Jennie Gosché and the New Creation Mission Group. Jennie, and I know others of you, too, enjoyed my first book, All Creation Waits, and invited me after learning about my new book, Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. The vanishing, in this case, are twenty-five of the world’s wild animals that we may lose in the next few decades unless we radically change the destructive way we live on planet Earth, animals like the polar bears that Jennie loves and photographs.
It just so happens that all the scriptures assigned for today are about Wild Hope! The Spirit of God is known for that kind of timing and humor. Wild hope comes up most explicitly in today’s text from the 5th chapter of Romans.
The apostle Paul writes that thanks to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus our bond with God—a loving bond that God intended from the beginning of time—has been restored. Then he writes, that because of this restored bond of love between us and God, “we rejoice in our hope of sharing God’s glory.” That’s the end of verse 2: “We rejoice in our hope of sharing God’s glory.” That is a wild hope, is it not? It’s almost an outrageous hope—that we, frail, failing creatures that we know we are, can share in the glory of God.
It doesn’t come out of the blue in chapter 5, though, this wild outrageous hope. Paul has been building his case for that hope from the beginning of the book of Romans, and especially the preceding chapter. In chapter 4, Paul says that when God promised Abraham that he, Abraham, would father a child with Sarah, even though he was a hundred years old, Abraham didn’t laugh, shake his head, say, “God how unrealistic can you be? Don’t you know the science?” No verse 18 of chapter 4 says, “Abraham, against all hope, in hope believed the promise, being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what God had promised.”
Abraham has a wild hope that he can believe God’s wild promise—that he could father a child at 100. In verse 21 of chapter 4, Paul says that Abraham believed in a God “who gives life to the dead and calls into being, calls into life, things that are not.” Abraham at 100 was as good as dead—not only in body, but in spirit—and God gave him a son, a new life. That, Paul says, is who God is, the One who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that are not. That’s who God has been from the beginning of time.
Today’s Old Testament scripture demonstrates another instance of God calling into being things that are not. In Exodus 17, the Israelites are in the desert after their escape from Egypt. During that escape, there was too much water—the Red Sea blocked their path with the Egyptian warriors hot behind them. God did the impossible and pushed back the sea. God called into being things that are not—a road through the sea. Now, in today’s reading, the Israelites are safe from the Egyptians, but now there’s not enough water. It’s a desert, after all. The people are thirsty, with no water in sight. They complain to Moses, rather loudly and angrily. A riot is about to break out. Verses 3 and 4 say,
“But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?’ Then Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.’”
Despite the example of Abraham in their faith tradition, despite all the miracles of God through Moses in Egypt, including drying up of the sea, the people don’t yet believe that their God is the one who calls into being things that are not. Later today’s text says, “They tested the Lord saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” That’s a question I feel like I’m asking every day these days. Aren’t you? The Israelites in the desert, we in our personal and public and political deserts, we don’t have the wild hope in God that Abraham had. Despite the Israelites’ unbelief, God again does the seemingly impossible—God tells Moses to strike a great rock with his staff and water spills out. God calls into being things that are not: water from a desert rock. God proves again to be a God worthy of our Wild Hope.
In today’s New Testament Scripture from John’s gospel, Jesus meets a woman at a well. Now, instead of a human, Moses, asking God for water, God, in Jesus, asks a human, the woman, for water. Unlike God spilling enough water from the rock for all the Israelites, this human woman is reluctant to give God even a cupful of water from a stone well. She is reluctant, unwilling to believe that this man Jesus is really doing what he seems to be doing—breaking all their cultural taboos to reach out across gender, race, and class boundaries to connect with her and give her the worthiness she’s been looking for in all the wrong places. It’s her wildest hope—to have that sense of internal worthiness, value, belovedness that Jesus calls in verse 14, “the water that becomes a spring welling up to eternal life.” God could call into being for her the things that are not—a life of belovedness, of centered serenity. Given her life so far, a life of serial adultery, that’s one wild hope for her, as wild as Abraham fathering a child at 100, or the Israelites drinking water from a rock. But it’s what God, the God of Wild Hope, could do for her, if she were willing.
With all this history of God’s people behind us, by the time we get to chapter 5 of Romans, Paul is saying that those who have encountered the living Christ, as he has, as maybe we have, those people who have been restored to a life of belovedness in God, those people “rejoice in the hope of sharing God’s glory.” That sounds completely wild and outrageous, that we would share in God’s glory. And what, for heaven’s sake, does it mean—that we share in God’s glory?
Well, if God’s glory, if the magnificent, incredible thing about God is that, God is One who gives life to a man as-good-as dead, who gives water in the desert, who gives a restless, desperate woman serenity, who calls into being the things that are not, the wild hope that we could share in God’s glory might mean that we can become those who partner with God to call into being the things that are not. Just as Jesus, sharing in the glory of God, called into being the things that are not: enough bread from 5 loaves to feed 5,000 people, sanity for the possessed, health for the sick, belovedness for the rejected. We can share in God’s power to restore all things—but only, only, Paul says in verse 5, “only because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
Thirteen-and-a-half billion years ago, a force at the center of the uncreated abyss exploded, scattering itself, implanting itself in everything that spun out and evolved from that great shout. Love was that explosive force that implanted itself at the core of everything that came after, every planet, star, rock, sea, plant, animal and person. It has been implanted in us since our creation, and it has been ignited by the Holy Spirit. Its force is still explosively creative, calling into being the things that are not, evolving new life forms—new ways of thinking, new ways of being, individually and in community, new institutions.
The Academy of Hope, the Potter’s House, Joseph’s House, Christ House, Family Place, L’Arche DC, the many faces of Jubilee—all life-giving forms that did not exist until a people with the love of God at their center called them into being. And it’s ongoing in the ways of being together you of Eighth Day are pioneering.
The force of that One Great Love to call into being things that are not, that’s the Wild Hope of Eighth Day, and it’s the Wild Hope of this book.
The first working title of this book was not Wild Hope. It was All Creation Groans. Those are also the words of St Paul to the Romans, in chapter 8. He says, “All creation groans in this one great act of giving birth.” When I began investigating the mass extinction of animal species around the globe, I expected to hear nothing but unrelenting groaning: Elephants and rhinos with their faces hacked off by machetes, Pangolins force-fed a slurry of limestone to bloat them, so they bring their traffickers more money per pound, Polar bears drowning in a sea with no ice floes, Giant river otters poisoned with mercury used in gold mining, and on and on.
I didn’t expect to see or hear in all that groaning any impending birth—any new life. To my surprise, as I did my research, I kept finding signs of birth, of new life, of hope—the wild hope that calls into being the things that are not. I found people around the globe in love with species from orangutans to olms, devoting their lives to them under conditions that would do most of us in, giving these species a shot at resurrection.
In 1972 there were thirty Amur leopards left in a slice of land in southeastern Russia. Conservationists called their demise a “classic extinction pattern,” and waited for those thirty to die out. Remarkably, for three decades, they did not. The number held steady at about thirty. Astounded, the conservationists lobbied the Russian government to set aside land for them and in 2012 it did. It created Land of the Leopard National Park. In the slice of land the leopards were given, scientists thought their population might double, to sixty. Remarkably again, it tripled. Again, conservationists were astounded. The conservationists made a reality TV show focused on one mother leopard and her 3 cubs. They called it “Spotted Family.” It was such a hit all across Russia that the conservationists developed a sponsorship program for leopards in the park. Celebrities, politicians, school soccer teams could donate money to name and sponsor a leopard. The money has allowed the park to improve the habitat for leopards and improve enforcement of poaching laws. More important than the money has been the change of mind about leopards in Russia. Not just conservationists but people across the society now insist the leopards be protected and that their habitat be enlarged. And across the border in China, the Chinese have begun competing to be better leopard protectors than the Russians. They’ve set aside six times as much land as the national park in Russia, land that adjoins the Russian park, to protect leopards. Leopard numbers have risen now to over one hundred. Love has called into being things that were not.
And yes, in those same decades that the Amur leopard has been rebounding, hundreds of species went extinct in the wild, like: Costa Rica’s golden frog, Spix’s macaw in Brazil, the Yangtze River dolphin in China.
Right after Paul says in Romans 5 that we “rejoice in our hope of sharing God’s glory,” he writes,
“we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance produces character; character produces hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, hope does not embarrass us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
I think I wanted to name the book All Creation Groans because I thought hope would put me to shame, would embarrass me. If I told stories of the impending birth inside all of that groaning creation is doing, if I told stories of hope for species, of people sharing in the glory of God by calling into being things that are not, I feared people would say to me, “Be realistic. That is not what the science says.” The science says there’s no good news for Earth’s species in the current climate of destruction. I didn’t want to be embarrassed writing about hope and be thought naïve. Contrary to what Paul says, I thought hope would embarrass me, put me to shame. I didn’t want to be naïve like the writers of today’s scripture who looked at the science and still believed that Abraham could father a child at one hundred, that water could flow from a desert rock, and that a serial adulterer could live of life of centered serenity.
I think I’m not alone. I think that many of us who see and suffer the pain of any crisis—the pain of immigrants or the homeless or the disabled or the addicted or the Earth herself—we know all too well the science, the news, the facts. We’re realistic. I think we resist Paul’s call to “rejoice in the hope of sharing God’s glory,” We resist believing that with God we are calling into being things that are not, helping to restore all creation, not in the sweet by and by, but now. That we are people of Wild Hope.
Paul doesn’t say we won’t suffer the pain of those we love and care for. He says that while we’re rejoicing in the hope of participating with God in calling into being the things that are not, we will also suffer in the process of doing that. But we can rejoice in the sufferings of the process, because, Paul says, the suffering somehow increases our hope that the Love of God is at the center of it all and is calling into being things that are not. Maybe this means that our suffering, our willingness to suffer for others, is evidence that God is calling into being the things that are not—for that is a new—human beings who suffer for others because they live in a Love bigger than personal or tribal profit. That is the Love that from the beginning of time has called into being the things that are not.
Friends this is a very great mystery. One that is difficult to live in. I’m still nervous about readers telling me I’m foolish and unrealistic in my hope for species. That my Wild Hope is a Crazy, Foolish Hope. I hope that if I am a fool, I’m what St Paul calls a fool for Christ. I want to be a person who, knowing all the facts, still rejoices in the hope of sharing the glory of God, the wild hope that she is partnering with God to call into being the things that are not, and who, in the process, yes, suffers, but also rejoices in the suffering because it testifies to her that the Love of God has indeed been poured into her heart and many, many hearts, and from there is making all things new.