Hope Leaves

Sermon

Today’s message is divided into three sections, each about a unique facet about hope. And we begin this Advent season with the message of hope that comes much after the birth of Jesus and some time later deep into his ministry. And Jesus’ message to his community has three distinct points:

• There will be signs that their redemption is drawing near.
• There will be signs that the kin-dom of God is both near and coming, transcending individual and human time. And,
• There will be things that Jesus will call them to do when the time comes, so be alert.

And so, Luke 21:25-36 seems to have a very obvious message: The coming of the Son of God will occur, and will happen amidst a cosmic kind of chaos and violence, and the only redemption is to be on guard, stay alert, and pray at all times to stand before the Son of God.

But it is this message and other scriptures riddled throughout what is described as fundamental theology that has been used to control the public behaviors of women, people of color, and any behavior the ones in Christian power have deemed inappropriate.

Anyone outside of this converted and assimilated group will experience the doom and gloom awaiting the “sinners,” while earnest believers only need to await some time in the future because the days of glory and power are surely coming.

Done. Easy theology!

I joke about this, but I am reminded again of James and John, who also fell into the trap of believing in an exclusionary, judgmental, and militaristic kind of kin-dom.

Instead, from these three distinct points, we can discover the meaning of Jesus’ hope that challenges our human understanding of a hoped-for time, some future time away.

First is that hope is more about the present than it is about the future. Second is, as we learn from the fig tree, that hope is relational. And third is that hope should inspire us to be “on guard” and “stay alert” at all times, but to do so means something different for us today than it has over time.

This first section begins with a tragically bittersweet story of hope—appropriate for a day when the scripture begins with, like Eugene Peterson writes in The Message, “it will seem like all hell has broken loose,” feeling like all hope is lost. Because like many of us may have felt just a month ago, hope has left.

But this is where the beauty of Jesus’ revolutionary hope becomes so clear.

Right before this message to the disciples, Jesus is standing in the temple off to the side or back somewhere but definitively not teaching from the central area. He is drawing attention nonetheless, because I mean come on, it’s Jesus. But it’s someone else that draws his attention and prompts Jesus to begin talking about his message of hope.

It is the widow, the “unclean” woman, someone who would have been similarly treated to his mother had she been deemed an unmarried single woman and political refugee.

It is the widow who gives all that she has that reminds Jesus to reiterate this message of hope to his community. And she, both as an individual and as an ambassador for those on the margins, is directly a part of the people for whom his message is.

She is an embodied symbol of hope—completely upturning the “symbol” of ostracization and scarlet letter she has been forced to bear.

And so, Jesus’ message of hope is similarly to upturn the existing “symbols” used to uphold societal inequities, such as marriage or family status, or race or ethnicity, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or even choice of colleges and degrees, anxiety-inducing imposed measures of success and achievement.

Many people, my own brother included, will cast an understandable judgment that this is just some liberal millennial from a hippie college coming up with some inclusive theology.

But this message of hope, however much of a hippie liberal I am, Jesus’ word of hope, is the only thing that seems to have not passed away.

Like I mentioned, this facet of hope is discovered in a tragically bittersweet story of Christian faith. The contemporary Black church is unavoidably and undeniably not monolithic—across the states, Black churches and Black communities look vastly different across representation, internal culture, theologies, and can be often much more diverse than what the very general Black church represents.

What is shared is a history that traces back to the earliest beginnings of African and African American religions in the states.

It’s a tragic and bitter story because of the forced removal of people from their homes, the slavers’ grossly inhumane treatment of what they considered their “cargo” and “property,” and the historic and continued enslavement of a peoples from the incredibly broad diaspora of Africa.

And while having to endure this, many people were then also forced to accept the slavers’ religious tradition—namely Christianity—used to justify the continued enslavement of African and African American peoples. Not only accept but often times even convert them from the very diversely represented but all “heathen” and “primitive” spiritual and religious traditions they practiced.

The sweet half of a half in the bittersweet of this story is the incredible and beautiful intertwining of cultures, languages, and spiritual traditions that bonded together in response to the obvious racialization against people from Africa.

Because of this, the historic institution of the Black church arose; a church that first began in the hush harbors on the docks blanketed by the mist, or in the safe covers of darkness offered by the trees, the Black church did indeed accept the slavers’ religious tradition.

However, they would not accept the slavers’ interpretations.

Instead of the kin-dom of heaven to come, it was the kin-dom of heaven in the now that they were rightfully concerned with given their present conditions. In the Exodus narrative, they found themselves, and in the Gospel, they discovered the promise of a hope made directly for them, and a promise being made to them right then and there.

How incredibly beautiful is it, that even in the midst of being forced to accept an interpretation of Christianity that was being shoved into their families and communities, in a foreign language that they had no desire of learning, and including an extremely wide array of spiritual and religious perspectives, that from it sprung an interpretation in a beautiful hope that ignited this community?

Jesus’ message of hope to the disciples, to the widow, and to the marginalized and hurting communities could not and cannot be about only some hope in the future. It is a hope that is meant to encourage people to prepare themselves as if they are already participants in the kin-dom, a hope that is meant to be realized in the present time.

This seems more obvious when we consider that for the widow who gave all she had, for both the earliest and contemporary Black communities, for undocumented immigrants, for the LGBTQIA+ community, and for some of us, all hell has broken loose.

Climate change, distress among nations, justified fear and foreboding, feelings of spiritual loss are and have been far too real, and far much realer for specific groups of peoples throughout history. And the gift of a present hope in the gospel has sustained and fueled people like Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr.

How this hope fueled them to unimaginable risks and dangers is something that I think deserves a lovely image and one that is found from the unlikeliest of sources, the fig tree. And I think this is a helpful shift from a tragic bittersweet history to a story of resilience, inner strength and beauty, and mutual reciprocity taught to us from this little fruit.

This week in a staff meeting, Director Eliz brought to our attention that figs are one of the most ancient cultivated fruits, and this little powerful fig has not changed much since then. Generations, empires, histories of people have passed away, but this fig has not passed away.

One of the main reasons, and what I see as a testament to the longevity of this fruit, is the relationship figs have with fig wasps—and like many bugs and animals, these bugs serve the incredible purpose of pollination.

And this essentially is their only purpose: eat figs, pollinate figs—so much so that they are known just as fig wasps. That is literally their only purpose.

I don’t know that the people of Jesus’ time were fully aware of the life cycle of the fig tree and fig wasp, but we can guess that they were aware of how important this tree was to the life of the people. Figs were one of the foods that were easily and readily accessible to almost anyone and had been a long-used metaphor throughout the Hebrew Bible. People were more than familiar with the fig tree, and my guess is, very familiar with the many bugs zipping around the air around them.

These wasps are integral to the life and thriving of the fig. And their relationship is the one I want to highlight today.

Fig wasps will build a home for themselves inside the fig; the wasp will stay inside and lay their eggs while the other wasps take pollen and go to other budding figs to begin laying eggs. And all the while they do this, they help the figs out by pollinating for them, zipping from one place to another.

Because their only purpose is to live and pollinate figs, they also live and die inside of the fig. They will feed off the fruit to survive and live their best life, and then pass. Figs then absorb all the good nutrients from the wasps, and don’t worry, by the time the fig is ready to eat, you’re not eating the bug. Instead, the fig with all the goodness of the wasp is like a person with all the goodness of all the helpful experiences in their lives.

What a beautiful relationship of symbiotic mutuality.

“Help me help you,” say the fig and wasp to one another.

There is also another unique thing about this relationship between figs and fig wasps, whose only purpose it is to pollinate figs. Not all of them are pollinator wasps. In fact, almost half are non-pollinators, whose lives entail being born, flying from their home fig, finding a new budding fig, making a home, eating, and then dying inside of their new fig home. They are not able to pollinate the fig, and so must live their life.

And the fig does not care.

Instead, they invite and allow wasps, pollinator or not, to make homes with them, because whether or not that specific wasp is able to serve its purpose, the fig knows that allowing for this wasp to thrive is just as important for the life of this fig and the life of all figs.

This is the facet of hope we learn from the fig and fig wasp: hope is relational.

Like the fig and the fig wasp who give life to one another, we give and receive hope from one another.

Very recently, I was very quickly what millennials call baby-pilled, of course, seeing my own brother and sister-in-law expecting their first baby, members of the church here, it was not surprising to consider that the personal and social pressures of having a family might begin to slowly hit me harder and harder.

However, I noticed this huge wave of hopefulness when I heard my professor talking about his two kids. This was following the election, and as someone only here on a student visa, he had been feeling a sense of urgency to ensure that his family would be okay. In sharing his exhaustion concerning the vocal conservatives’ treatment of the lowest economic classes, he passingly mentioned that his 9- and 12-year-old kids would happily slide open the door of their minivan to start handing out food to the unhoused community in the early morning.

Maybe because this was partly my childhood, I immediately began to sense the needed wave of hopefulness that only comes from trusting that the future is in hands that will continue to improve upon the world we hope to create. And I realized how often it is that hope is given and received from person to person.

In the same way we can feel pangs of hopelessness from seeing how many people in our world can think so horribly about one people group or another or how many people are forced to live so individualistically, we are also meant to experience hopefulness from seeing the people around us thriving in the kind of life that models the kin-dom.

This is how we identify that hope found in the Son of God, “coming in a cloud with great power and great glory.” It is the hope of a kin-dom restored, wherein widows are not marked by their marital status, wherein women are not objectified or generalized in any way, wherein Black and marginalized individuals are no longer pushed to the voiceless side, wherein productivity is not our greatest marker of deserving life.

If we look across the various histories of Christian imperialism and colonialism, what we discover is this unfortunate pattern of enforced conversion. But we also find over and over again, for many communities, like the Black church, the earliest indigenous churches, the earliest Asian American churches, this word of hope is what has stood the test of time. No rules, doctrine, or law that have survived from the earliest church to today.

Except the concern for the most oppressed and marginalized individuals.

There is a sadly common joke that is asked to students in seminary: “And you’re still a Christian?”

Because of the critical lens asked of us to apply to the Word and history of Christianity, many people can become disillusioned with their faith lives.

When I was participating in protests and general activism as an undergraduate student, it was clear I did not fit in as a Christian, given that the predominant story of Christianity told in the public world was not aligned with the goals of justice. More often than not, I was surrounded by a community of secular people.

It was not until seminary that I began to recognize the breadth of past, present, and future lineage of people from faith traditions who were most concerned with how their faith lives intersected with the world that was clearly so irreflective of the kin-dom in the “coming days.”

Knowing that I, too, could be a part of this lineage began to fill me with the hope I needed to persist in my faith, in my call as a theologian and pastor, and as a human being.

I receive hope from youth, I receive hope from elders who have paved the way for someone like me to become a pastor, I receive hope from the many secular people who have fought for justice for people of color in the states. I receive hope from the many people who fight now for my justice, for the justice of people they do not know, and do so believing that what we believe to be the restored kin-dom can be realized in their lifetimes. Not only “can be,” but asking, why not “should be”?

Living as if the kin-dom is and can be actualized in our lifetimes is not some naïve acknowledgment that we live in a perfect world. Rather, it is rejecting the idea that we have to accept the way inequality exists as it does today. It is demonstrably living out the message of the gospel as Jesus gave it to his disciples.

Rejecting that the hell that has broken loose is the way that it should be.

Particularly in these next few years, there may be a sense of hopelessness in some of us, and justifiably so—each of our situations is so radically different and how we might be impacted will vary from person to person—and my hope is that they will be able to seek and find authentic hope in the people and communities who have been called and tasked to specifically fight for their rights.

To be on guard, to stay alert, to pray at all times, then, is to have the ability and courage to seek out hope when we need, and when others seek hope from us, to be on guard, alert, and pray that we have the ability and courage to offer the hope they need.

Sadly, seeking out hope is not always easy.

Unlike the fig and the non-pollinating wasp, it is when we are at our lowest, our least productive, and our most blinding periods that we may feel we actually do not deserve to thrive at all, feel that that our communities will undeniably and rightfully reject us.

So, many people end up turning away from the communities that they might most need.

It might feel easier to live in a world where we expect each other to seek out hope when they need it.

For those of us who seek to model the kind of hopeful community Jesus calls us to create, this charge to be on guard and stay alert is for us to be more like the fig tree, not the fig fruit or wasp, whose leaves sprout hope.

The leaves that make clear to others that the kin-dom of God is near.

They make clear that the word of hope in the generations of people seeking out the restored kin-dom of God will and has persisted.

This is our call. For those of us who are in relatively more privileged positions, seeking to act on behalf of the kin-dom, our call is to be the leaves of hope for the world.

To be the hope leaf that lets people know that the hell that has broken loose is not the way that it should be.

To be the hope leaf to the people who Jesus was THE hope leaf for: widows, the “sinners,” and the marginalized.

To be the hope leaf to one another, trying our best to model the kin-dom way of life that is inclusive, non-judgmental, loving, and compassionate, even when it is only in the kin-dom that we can do so without our human error.

There are countless ways that this community has been a leaf of hope to one another and to the world, and my prayer is that we continue to extend our branches beyond our walls to make clear, not only for ourselves, but as an invitation to others, that the word of hope that sustains our community is one of healing, repair, safety, and harmony.  A word of hope that extends across historical instances of Christianity, generations of individuals and communities and hippie liberals.

By continuing to extend this leaf of hope, we can become the hope for others like so many have been for us in our own lives, particularly when we were at our lowest moments that caused feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Being this kind of leaf of hope to strangers and even our acquaintances can feel impossible. We have our own values, our own opinions, and our own quirks that can conflict and clash with one another.

With those we love, it is often about recognizing which ones are worth staking the relationship over, and with good communication, we try not to take the risk of ruining the relationship because someone forgot to close the toothpaste cap again.

But what if we extended this kind of understanding to one another? Recognizing that the kin-dom of God brings us into kinship with one another such as a family does.

Like the leaf of hope the prodigal son’s father is for him, the many parents have been for their children, like my best friends were for me, and like the clearest hope in the word of Jesus for the most oppressed peoples, our hope leaf should point to a present reality that needs healing, draw people into kinship, and also fuel our own hope for ourselves.

We do this because when we are able to give hope to one another, we receive hope for ourselves now and discover the shared hope in a healed world.