[Sermon delivered at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin, TX, November 13, 2005]
My title this morning -- “Hope is for the Weak: The Challenge of a Broken World” -- may seem unnecessarily harsh. After all, hope is an enduring feature of our species, something people search for (often quite desperately) and hang onto (usually quite tightly). For guidance, we tend to look to those people who have hope, not to those who have forsaken it. How can this hope be weakness?
It also may seem unnecessarily rude to come into a church with such a message, given that churches are major traffickers in hope. I suppose one could even take “hope is for the weak” to be a critique of preachers who deal hope, most effusively as they pass the collection plate.
Well, I intend to be harsh, but not rude. There is no reason to fear harshness; in fact, at this moment, we need to be harsher than ever because more than ever we need to love deeply. Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement was fond of quoting a line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
So, out of love, in action, I will speak harshly. But I do not reject hope, nor do I want to undermine the hope dealers. Indeed, though I’m not a member of this or any church, I am here today out of respect for St. Andrew’s and its social-justice work, and because of a sense of a shared project rooted in hope. In fact, I’m here to argue that we have to take hope more seriously than ever. If we want to invoke hope, we owe it to ourselves and to the world to be tough-minded about that hope.
When I assert that hope is for the weak, there is implied no criticism of hope or the hopeful. All it means is that hope is for us all, because we are all weak. We are human, and to be human is to be weak at times, to struggle with uncertainty, sometimes to lose our grip on ourselves and on the world. Hope is the name we give to our ability to persevere when we are weak, as we all inevitably are sometimes.
So, to claim hope implicitly acknowledges one’s weakness, which is a good start. Then we can see that real hope requires real humility. To claim to not need hope is the ultimate arrogance, a vain attempt -- and one that, in the end, will be in vain -- to ignore a deep yearning in us all. The weakest people in the world are the cynical, those who claim to have advanced beyond a need for hope. Cynicism is simply another name for moral laziness and cowardice; it is a way of choosing to give up without taking responsibility for the choice.
So, if you are holding onto hope, I say: Hold on tight, because the ride we are on is going to get rougher -- rougher, in fact, than you and I sitting here today probably can imagine -- and we will need that hope. We live in a world in crisis on every front -- political, economic, moral, cultural, and, most crucially, ecological. This is not the first time the world has faced crises, but it is the first time that we must confront such global crises on so many fronts with so little time for correcting the course. Our margin of error is shrinking by the day. I cannot offer definitive data and logic to prove this, but I firmly believe that these crises pose a threat of a new, and quite frightening, order. The widening of the inequality gap, the pace of technological change and the accompanying unintended consequences of that change, and the destructive capacity not only of our military machine but of the way we live our daily lives -- all have upped the ante. The fallout of our failures can no longer be easily contained and will not remain localized.
We are stumbling into something that I believe we don’t really understand, but the markers of the intensity of the threats -- the breakdown of the values needed to sustain real human community and the weakening of ecosystems needed to sustain life -- are easy enough to see if one wants to see them.
And it’s going to get much worse before it gets better, at least in the United States. I think that at some level many people feel what I’m talking about, even if they keep themselves from thinking about it. They sense that we are on the edge of something that is, at best, going to be destabilizing and destructive, and, at worst, catastrophic. I think part of the cultural fascination with the rapture and the Book of Revelation is rooted in this; it is not crazy to talk about the end time.
But, I would argue, it is crazy not to name, understand, and fight against the forces that are propelling us toward the end time.
Personally, I do not call those forces Satan. I call them nationalism and patriotism, capitalism, affluence and greed, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the reflexive glorification of high-technology. The problem is not some abstract notion of evil that lives below, nor is the problem simply the devious actions of a few bad people on earth. Instead, the problem is in the nature of these big systems and powerful institutions, and the painful reality that decent people will abandon their stated values -- and, therefore, some part of their own humanity -- when operating in those systems. We know this, because most of us have at some point in our life done it; we have twisted ourselves to fit into those unjust systems and institutions.
Understanding the nature of the struggle in this fashion does give us an advantage. When we can name the systems and institutions that we must resist -- and change, and eventually destroy -- then we can begin the hard work of creating the path toward that change. But that places upon us a burden.
While hope is for the weak, it is not for the passive. Real hope requires humility, a sense of our own limits. But humility need not lead to paralysis because of those limits. At this moment in history, especially for those of us living in the U.S. empire, hope without deeper analysis and action is another form of laziness and cowardice. If we want to claim hope, we must also take on the burden of hope, which is responsibility for our part in changing the direction in which this world-in-crisis is heading. To say that one is holding onto hope but then to turn from one’s obligations in the world is perhaps less admirable than the cynicism I just condemned. At least the cynics are up front about their abandonment of the collective effort; they make no pretense of their disregard for others.
I want to highlight that I am claiming that our hope should lead not only to action but to a keener analysis, which brings me to the second half of the title, “the challenge of a broken world.”
In the face of the vast suffering in this broken world, some people turn away. But others want to rush to action, any action. When there is so much pain around us and in us, how can we not feel that compulsion to act, to do something to relieve what suffering we can, and by that action relieve some of our own pain? Indeed, we should nurture that instinct in ourselves and each other; it is at the core of what makes us human.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
--The problem is not simply George W. Bush and the gang of thugs who gave us the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. The problem is the brutality of empire.
.........The problem is that people who use violence have lost faith and hope, so they turn to violence thinking it is Justice. On the contrary Churches in America believe in violence, something that is beyond the real meaning of religion. When Jesus died on the cross he did not wage war. He won through love and faith. The fact that religion is separate from State is hypocrisy when real Christians work in the USA and pay taxes to build bombs and support a Phosphorus supporting military. It is not a question of Institutions it is about people who support them, and their crazy fantasies that violence begets goodwill.
--The problem is not simply Ken Lay and the bad boys of Enron, but the inhuman nature of corporate capitalism.
.......Making excuses for Ken Lay and their Capitalist greed is the chicken and the egg theory. America is built on greed, its laws are subjected to the conspiracy that getting is more saintly than giving. In fact that is why America since its beginning has always been at war. If I always give I always have faith. If I always take for more in greed I have lost hope. Capitalism is always hopeless.
--The problem is not simply sex and violence on television, but the fact that television is on, always on, in so many homes.
......Sex and Violence is television. Other shows of decency show the hypocrisy of America. If television was always good and was always on I don't think that is a problem.
--The problem is not simply the overt racism of the Ku Klux Klan but the polite ways in which we nice liberal white folks can so easily avoid the realties of how white supremacy is deeply woven into the fabric of this society.
......This is true..one need only see that from George Washington to George Bush II they have all been white men in the Executive Office. The so called Land of the Free names its Capitol Building The White House. Hows that for racism? We have dishonored Black Americans when we made them slaves in the first 100 years of American History and we still discriminate against them. We don't honor them in Society by having Black American Day. We stole Native American Indian Lands, killed and raped them, and live on those lands as squatters thinking we have ownership rights backed by the US governments. American Churches have no thought of guilt to this and participate in the continued hypocrisy... In God We Trust... my middle eye in the forehead we do.
We do not honor the real Americans who are Native American Indians with Native American Indian Day. When we correct and honor those we have hurt in the past, it shows our repetence and goodwill toward real Americans. We in this day are phoney hollywood actors and ignorant ibeciles in powers of change and dignity.
--The problem is not simply the men who rape but the men who let them rape without consequence.
....The idea that there is no consequence is to think there is no God. Native Americans, Black Americans were rape victims for hundreds of years, American prisons keep getting bigger and bigger, when Blacks start to fight back from those injustices in the past. Whitemen in America level illegal consequences while blaming colored races, and padding themselves with more of their fake white essence of purity. I believe those fake white flakes are chipping away, as God watches the gate.
--The problem is not simply the greed and stupidity of Donald Trump but the greed and stupidity of us all.
.....Donald Trump like Bill Gates and other Rich Hogs at the plate, support hypocrisy and impose their aristocratic authority over the lower financial account Americans. They neither give their all, but control their wealth through laws they create, and hide when the poor seek compassion and comfort. Their excuse is without the poor how would people know we are rich? No I don't think the poor are stupid, because if those men of wealth were really rich there would be no poor. Trump and Gates are phoney liars, and have no hope or faith.
Being lovingly ruthless is not easy. For the past decade, I have been slowly trying to come to terms with my own discoveries, and this is hard. They are discoveries of the extent to which this world is broken, why it is broken, and how it has broken me.
.... The world is ruthless, and the key and direction is to stamp out hypocrisy from the good narrow gate way. The answer is to to correct the injustices of the past, go forward with the work of the day, ending the stranglehold of the State and representative government, and allow real nonviolent religion to flourish.
by
Dom Jermano (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 40 diaries, 934 comments)
on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 6:18:25 AM
