Mark 9.14-27
“RIGHT-SIZED HOPE”
Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club tells of a girl whose mother has big hopes. That sounds good, but hope born of despair can burden rather than rejoice the heart. Hope can encumber us more than it blesses. But I get ahead of myself.
It is WWII and this Chinese mother has been forced to leave her home when the Japanese invade and burn it. She is wealthy. So she takes her possessions with her and her twin daughters. Slowly, as the mother puts it, she must leave all of her hope by the side of the road. First she leaves her flour and then her rice. Next her extra clothing and then her jewels. The mother contracts a bad infection and then dysentery. Finally, with the Japanese soldiers in hot pursuit, she must leave behind her twin infant daughters. She hides them. She does not want them to see her die, and she knows that she can’t carry on anymore. She leaves all of her hope beside the road. And she attaches what money and jewels are left to the twins’ clothing. She sews a note into the seams of their dresses about where to take them when the Japanese invasion and occupation has finally ended.
The mother survives. The twins survive. But they never see one another again. The mother searches for her twins, but never finds them. So she moves to Amer-ica, where she remarries and has another daughter. The new daughter explains her situation with her mother in these words, “I am the daughter who had to carry too much hope.” For the mother placed all of that hope she had left by the side of the Chinese road in her new American daughter. And it was too much for the girl.
Do you know what it means to carry too much hope, or the wrong kind of hope, until you reached the point where it didn’t feel at all like hope. It felt like burden. You probably do, even if you haven’t thought of it that way before. We are all looking for a right-sized hope, a hope not so small that it is less than all the joy and blessing God means for us. Yet we seek a hope not so large that we forever struggle beneath it, like the moving men staggering up the stairs under a piano.
Clearly, this struggle over right-sized hope is what our Gospel lesson is about. Jesus’ disciples cannot heal a man’s son, so Jesus gets involved. It seems the boy is possessed; he was probably an epileptic. Jesus’ disciples are unable to heal the boy despite the father’s pleas. At that specific moment in their faith walk, it is more hope than the twelve were able to muster for that desperate father.
Jesus is annoyed. “Where is your hope, guys? How can I put up with such weak and tepid faith? Bring the boy to me.” Frankly, it wasn’t easy to be Jesus, with the burden of all of the world’s hope squarely placed on his shoulders, able to offload so little of it. Casey Stengel once said of the ‘62 Mets, “Doesn’t anybody around here know how to play this game?” That’s likely how Jesus felt. The boy is bare-ly brought to Jesus before he lapses into a fit. “Heal him, won’t you, Jesus? If you can…” said the father. “’If you can,’” Jesus mocks him. Unlike his disciples, Je-sus is so accustomed to carrying outsized hope he has no room for “if you can.”
“All things can be done for the one who believes,” he tells the father. As with his disciples, Jesus tries to share the power of healing others with the father himself. And Dad wants take it. But after everything he has been through, but he dares not jump too quickly. Too many nights wondering why this sad disease ruined his son’s life. Too many nights of wondering before God if they were being punished. Too many nights pleading to God for things to improve, only to watch his own flesh and blood foaming and grinding in the dust again the next day.
Like the American daughter of that Chinese mother, this boy’s father feels a vast iceberg of hope riding on his shoulders. But he doesn’t want to disappoint or be disappointed again. He is so weary of dashed expectations that he could just spit. So he cries out the perfect prayer for all of us who have ever known this struggle, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” It’s a great prayer for all seasons, but most especially as hope feels more like looming burden than welcome relief, as you grope after a proportionately helpful human-sized hope that you can use.
Have you experienced this struggle for right-sized hope within your own family? In my family, it was my older brother who was freighted with far too much hope. Our family was blue-collar. Neither of my parents finished college and that fueled hope for our achievements. True to the American dream, my parents wanted the best for us. But living beneath that load can be crushing, especially for the eldest. Lee was the smartest of the three Rosenberger boys. Not only did he gravitate toward science, he read it extensively, loved it, and excelled in it. Lee had ever-expanding chemistry sets from childhood. He memorized anatomy. He was in the track to become a little Ben Casey or Dr. Kildare. Oops, I am dating myself.
But then came late adolescence. It didn’t help that in these late 1960s, American society was also shaking and convulsing at the same time. Lee was very much caught up in that countercultural upheaval. Like many, he threw off the American dreams of success that had been laid upon him to become a doctor or anything remotely like that. He was not interested in his classes. He skipped graduation. Any plans of continuing along to college in the near future had quickly dissipated.
My Spanish teacher, who had had Lee for all four years of high school, was distraught about this. My brother, who had placed sixth in the state on the Michigan Competitive Scholarship Exam, wasn’t even continuing on to college. Instead Lee worked in machine repair for Chevrolet in one of the Detroit auto plants. It is not easy being the eldest son and having parents’ hope piled on you. I flew beneath the radar of such intense hope, and so more easily found my way.
God alone is equal to the burden of the intense expectation of hope upon hope. So what is right-sized hope? Donna Schaper writes, in the face of great expectation, we need to be able to say, “I won’t be what I am not.” God gives us permission to say that because, in the face of great expectation, delivering Israel from slavery, God tells Moses, “I am who I am.” That is the meaning of God’s name, Yahweh. “I am who I am.” Likewise, we are who we are, God’s beloved children, as we remembered at our reaffirmation of baptism last January. And so the Chinese-American girl needed to learn to say to her mother, “I can’t be the twins you lost. I can only be me. Thank God, I am who I am. And that is enough.”
Our question today is, what is right-sized hope for us? Dennis Union Church has certainly embraced some high and lofty hopes. I think that is how you all stay so young, blazing on to the next horizons of hope! Our building project and capital campaign for a church our size is ambitious. Then we carry on full speed ahead with our trademark auction-bazaar last month, never mind the commotion of construction. We welcome a new choral director and dream dreams of new vistas of music. Twelve of us go to Guatemala to build homes this fall while another twelve head off to rebuild New Orleans this winter. Our Stewardship Committee candidly invites us to stand by everything we hear God calling us to do. We can hardly believe all that happens here. Is it too much? Not so long as hope creates energy rather than exhaustion, advancing dreams rather than paralyzing stress. The unfolding energy of God’s abundant dreams for us continues to amaze me.
One last story. The Shawshank Redemption is a film about daring to hope in the face of crushing oppression, clinging to hope in the face of despair. Red, a mur-derer in for life at Shawshank prison in Maine, long ago discarded hope as worse than useless. “Let me tell you something, my friend,” he warns Andy, imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.“ Like my sermon, the film presumes that hope is a mixed blessing.
After a devastating setback, Andy refuses to stop hoping. He foresees sometime in his future a hotel in Mexico and an old boat. But Red can hardly stand such talk. “I don’t think you should be doing this to yourself. It is a lousy pipe dream. Mexico is way down there and you are way up here. That is the way things are.”
Anyway, by the end, Andy miraculously escapes prison and brings down justice on his tormentors. Some time later his friend Red is finally paroled after several decades of parole boards arbitrarily jerking him this way and then that. Red finds a letter from Andy buried under a tree. “Hope is a good thing,” he writes. “Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” Was the hope born of these two friends right-sized and blessed? Or was it outsized, only a burden and a curse?
The movie closes on the beach at Zihuatenajo, Mexico. As a tanned Andy sands his rough ship, he looks up to see, of all people, Red sauntering toward him, his suit pants rolled up to his knees. As they draw closer and embrace, the camera pans backward to the far horizons of the Pacific. By the grace of God sometimes even vast hope can become right-sized hope. Witness Andy and Red closing out their days in peace. Witness the father of the boy-possessed rejoicing as Jesus does for his son what the disciples could not do. Witness my older brother, who has gotten his bachelor degree, his masters degree and this summer, his PhD.
When hope is weighing down your spirit instead of buoying it, pray that prayer of the father, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” It is the honest kind of prayer that can break hope down into right sized pieces. And look to the one who bore the hopes of an entire world, and said, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Look to Jesus Christ, the vindication of God’s hope among us, and be radiant. Amen.
From various ways we come again to meet in this sacred place, O God, from ocean and river, from mountain and vale, from office and kitchen and cottage. Apart for summer months, we yet have known that we were one in you and in the community we share side by side as Christ’s disciples in this our spiritual home.
Grant now that minds with too many cares and hearts with too many burdens may increasingly find a way where you await on the other side, the way of hope. Allow that souls beset by doubts and fears may soon and surely find you find you, O God, in the light that is never quenched, and the rock that is never moved. Keep us from such hunger to be perfect that we miss entirely the good within our reach. Save us from so many plans for tomorrow that we neglect the strength and joy of today. Spare us from grand proclamations of the sacrifices we would make for you to be faithful when so many opportunities at right at our fingertips.
And so open our eyes to the lonely we meet along the crowded ways of life, and to the hurting who have trouble showing it, and to the wistful who feel as though their dreams have been crushed. We profess our love for you and pledge ourselves anew as your disciples. We especially remember today Carlene Brown facing surgery on Tuesday, Lo Smith still trying to get the technology right around his heart, and David and Beverly Olsen as they are still aglow in wedlock. Hear now…
