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| Nation Shall Not Lift Up Sword Against Nation Micah 4:1-5 December 2, 2007
Anticipation is the psychological attitude for religious hope and we are called by the Christian Gospel and the messianic Torah to be a people of hope—whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not. Whether we think or feel hope, we are called to anticipate it. That is the revelation of the Bible, the unveiled, unexpected truth given just after the brain gives up, the heart gives out, and all hope is given up. Then shows up the revealed good news. I was trying to think, if anticipation, anticipating, is the psychological practice of religious hope, what might be the opposite of that? To define the opposite of anticipation might help to clarify. I’m not fully satisfied with what I came up with. Perhaps you’ll do better, but I did think that there is a kind of paranoia that is the opposite of anticipating hope and good news, the kind of a low-grade paranoia of everyday life, the sharp edge that cuts into all fruit expecting to find a rotten spot. Now I opened with saying anticipation, anticipating such good news as war-less nations, was the proper, practical and productive stance, place, of the religious person. And yet paranoia—what psychology defines as “systematic irrational fears”—could also be called proper and practical. There is, after all, a lot to be afraid of. It’s just not productive. Paranoia, fear-based anticipating, is simply destructive, and profoundly so. It is perhaps more that coincidence that the great similarity between these polar opposites, hope and fear, is that neither can be argued with. The epitome of the young and inexperienced mental health worker is the person who tries to argue a paranoid person out of their fear-based perception of reality. Reason, reasoning, is a failure against fear, as it is against anxiety. People of fear are just as foolishly stubborn in the face of “reality” as are people of hope. In fact, both are also similarly contagious. One of my seminary roommates had his field work in Belleview Psychiatric Hospital in New York. Trying to convince his “patient” that there were not people outside the hospital window waiting to “get” him, my friend ended up checking all the windows himself on the way out of the hospital that evening “just to make sure” no one was also out to get him. That’s the destructive irrational contagion of paranoid fear. We can just imagine then the constructive, productive, similarly irrational contagiousness of hope, of anticipating hope. It is possible to imagine the plowshare of anticipating hope to be just as sharp as the sword of anticipating fear. I guess this hope for hope thing was on my mind this week even before I knew it to be. Somehow in glancing at the Post headline early in the week I misread a headline. What I thought I saw was this: “Unrestrained optimism at Mid-East Peace Talks.” “Unrestrained Optimism.” Well, it changed my day. I thought, wow, I’ve never seen a headline like that. I thought, wow, something must have happened. I thought, wow, finally the urgency of that situation has bubbled up to the surface and the Johnny-come-lately politicians must be ready to play catch-up to reality. You can see how my rational sense of reality was being confirmed by this good news. While I was happily surprised it did make sense. It was: reality has caught up with politics. Nor was I in some blissed-out euphoria. I immediately had a pessimistic and realistic feeling. Now that the Israel-Palestine problem will be fixed, we can get on to the even bigger, more dangerous real problems in the world. You could say I reverted to seeing the half-empty part of the glass. I think that was good. In other words, living a moment, even a mistakenly read moment, of un-anticipated hope didn’t make me a blithering idiot about the rest of the world’s, nor my, reality. Neither would, or does, anticipating hoped-for good news mean you are a dullard for hope. Plowshares and swords are both sharp. Hope as a plowshare cutting into fertile soil, for seed time and harvest, is realist hard work and certainly a productive thing to do as well as proper to a called people and practical to real people. What may bend swords into plowshares in our future may just be how increasingly impractical war is becoming. With all this religious psychology of anticipating hoped-for good news in mind, it becomes easy to interpret our Gospel stories of the busy angel Gabriel. I want you to see the story of Gabriel telling good news to old Zechariah and then the young Mary as illustrations of a spiritual difference. Zechariah reacts to his Gabrielic good news very differently than does the young I-have-yet-to-know-a-man Mary. In “reality,” so to speak, neither of these angel-hearers has any reason to expect good news, especially so-called “unrealistic” good news. Zechariah is, as scripture says, simply serving his scheduled time for sanctuary-incense burning. This is a lottery experience. His priestly order is divided into sections. It is simply his section’s turn to be on duty, and “chosen by lot” (Luke 1:8), he’s in offering incense and he has a vision of the angel Gabriel telling him his old wife Elizabeth will have her life-long hope for a child to birth come true and it will be John the Baptist—the herald of Jesus Christ. Zechariah has a sharp response to this terrifying vision and good news. One can see him looking Gabriel in the eye and saying, “How will I know that this is so…?” And he makes his realistic argument for why it cannot be so. Gabriel is pretty sharp back. Their swords clash. “Because you did not believe my words which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” Which is what happens. And of course it’s what happens because this is a story-account, even an interpretation, of what happened. This story is not written, told or read in real time—as we live our lives in real time, not knowing how things will turn out. Stories, like the brain itself, are largely rear view mirrors of life, based on interpretations of the past. As that famous theologian of anticipation and hope, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote: “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” So looking back we can see what happened to Zechariah and interpret why. He simply was not prepared to anticipate good news and so he lost the joy of being able to talk about it—even though it still happened without his voice. Mary, on the other hand, is shown to be someone who knows how to hear good news, similarly unexpected good news. When Gabriel announced to her that she, like her cousin Elizabeth, is going to mysteriously give birth, she asks in wonder, “Me? A woman without a man?” and simply says, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). There is a world of difference in these two responses. In Mary, Gabriel’s words resonate with her. In Zechariah, we see someone reflecting on the words—what we call rational thinking, and then making a reasonable argument in response. He says, “How can this be?” She says, “Let this be.” For our purposes it is humbling and important to know that in neither case was the announced reality changed by the quality of the responder. But we can also read ourselves into these stories. We can see how our quality of being like Zechariah—and many, many of us are just like him, only reflectors on rational negatives—leaves us mute and unable to speak of and share in the advent of good news. And we can read into Mary, and read ourselves into her story, and see someone who had the grace to anticipate good news—to ponder with downcast eyes into her heart and then to lift her face and break forth into a song. So let it be with us: anticipators of hope. Amen.
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Is Still Speaking www.stillspeaking.com |
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