Hope

Hope
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Lent III, Year C
March 20, 2022
 
We were getting ready for the business portion of our weekly Staff Meeting at Emmanuel last week, and I asked everyone what their favorite movie was.  I will not give up my colleagues, but I said one of my favorites is O Brother, Where Art Thou, (starring George Clooney) which is a stylized version of Homer’s epic Odyssey tale, set in the 1930s as the four main characters break out of prison.  I could go on about that film, its genius, its wit, and its extended metaphor.  I can quote from it extensively, but we can save that for coffee hour.  Then I was telling somebody else about the choices, and she said, “What is it with men, and prison movies?”  Then I thought about it and remembered that I love Raising Arizona (Nicholas Cage) which also begins in a prison, and then there’s the Great Escape (Steve McQueen), another classic, and then I went and watched Cool Hand Luke (Paul Newman), but really, the best prison movie men seem to love is The Shawshank Redemption (Morgan Freeman and Tim Robins).  There are so many great lines there, so many metaphors for life, so many so excellent expositions of Lenten themes.  My next book shall be entitled: Lent at the Movies, featuring all of the above.  
 
I stayed up way too late that night, watching Shawshank again.  And so many lines struck me.  A recurring theme is when Red, the main character, goes before the Parole Board.  They ask him the same question each time.  “Do feel you have been rehabilitated? Ready to reenter society?”  Red answers “Yes, sir,” and each time, year after year, Red’s form is stamped “Rejected.”  Near the end of the film, he goes before the board again, and he is asked the same question: “Do feel you have been rehabilitated?” And he says the following:
 
Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means. I know what you think it means, sonny. To me, it’s just a made-up word. A politician’s word, sonny, so young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here. Because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then. A young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man’s all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? That’s just a [B.S.] word.  So, you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time.
 
And, spoiler alert, Red is set free.  Preachers love this movie, and with good reason.
 
In God’s relationship with humanity, and humanity’s relationship with God, there is always a tension between our broken-bless our hearts, hot mess selves, and the holiness, righteousness, and perfection our pandering selves attempt to curate to please the Almighty.  We are apt to believe that God keeps score, that Church really has an attendance record that gets faxed to heaven, and that if we just did enough, prayed enough, kept our morning quiet time, read the Bible more, we will be good enough for God.  All of that is the self-centered curation a type of prison we inhabit.
 
There are some who profess to feel none of that guilt, borderline of full-blown narcissists, who are sure that they are right, righteous, entitled, deserving, and worthy of admiration.  These folks are not unsuccessful in this world, but they hurt people quite a lot, with heaps of self-justification as to why that is just fine.  Such folks may have no use for God, or such a shallow view of God so as to use God like everyone else.  They rely on cheap grace, their own wit, and a limited view of reality.  The bad news is that this offense is on our rap sheet too.  Same prison, different way of being there.
 
Somewhere in our sordid story of prison time, we resort to blame.  We are the real victims!  It is the system’s fault.  Then warden, guards, and parole board are corrupt.  And, when we are honest, we throw the blame on God for all sorts of random tragedies, some of which we perpetrate, doing so in the name of our own self-styled truth: “my truth” as we like to say.
 
When Jesus comes to us, he tackles all the tough reasons that lock us up.  Like anything difficult, we are complicated.  There is no simple answer or solution.  Today, Jesus is asked about a couple of tragedies where innocent people suffered.  He gives a partial answer, only, saying that we may feel better about such things, believing that those who suffered were somehow lower on the holy tote board, but that is not helpful.  Nobody has a clean slate, and that should keep us humble.  The right definition of humility is not just I am no good – it is I am no better than anyone else and I am no worse than anybody else either.  The question of suffering never gets a good answer.  It never has, except to say that God does not desire, require, or exempt us from suffering.  The miracle is that God can use it, but that is not all that helpful if you are the one suffering while others are not.
 
Finally, he tells a parable.  A man plants a fig tree.  For three years, it bears no fruit.  He tells the gardener to cut it down, but the gardener implores the man to give it another year.  The gardener will tend it and feed it, and if it does not bear fruit, it will be cut down.  This is both hopeful and grim. But Jesus never explains the story.  He rarely does, so it is open to interpretation.
 
There is one more fact that his listeners were bound to know.  Fig trees never produce fruit in their first three years.  Thus, the gardener stacks the deck for success, asking for more time.  All of a sudden, no matter how we seek to twist the metaphor, and label the parts, we are not hopeless.  Hope is the connective between our mess and God’s glory.  Hope is the winning ticket, and the get out of jail card, but unlike in Monopoly, Hope is not free from suffering. God suffers for us.  God suffers because of us.  And as Hope (another good name for God), God does not consign us to rot in solitary confinement.  Turns out, we are not even in prison at all – only the prisons of our own making.   
 
Back in prison, before his friend Andy escapes, Shawshank Red warns him: “hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”  But Andy says, no, “hope is a good thing maybe even the best of things and good things never die.”  And when Red finally gets free too, he heads off to find Andy, concluding: “it is a terrible thing to live in fear… Get busy living, or get busy dying… So, I hope”
 
We hope our way to freedom.  Amen.