“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all, according to Emily Dickinson. There can be miracles when you believe/ Though hope is frail, it’s hard to kill, according to Whitney Houston. When Jesse Jackson was running for president in 1988 he had as his campaign slogan “keep hope alive” and in 2008 when Barak Obama was running for president Shepard Fairey designed a poster with the stylized picture of the candidate and underneath in large letters was the word HOPE. It seems our species needs hope. Because of her hopes for her child, an expectant mother endures all of the difficulty of pregnancy. Because of hope for his family, a father will work two or even three jobs. Because of hopes for the future, a student will burn the midnight oil studying instead of going to that party. Hope, the ability to envision of better future, drives the human race.
Which explains why dashed hopes can be devastating. Think of the line in the Langston Hughes poem: What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun? We need hope to survive. That is what makes the comment by Cleopas and his companion (Mrs. Cleopas?) on the road to Emmaus so poignant: “We were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” We were hoping, but that did not happen. We were hoping but now the future looks bleak. We were hoping but all we are left with is our shattered dreams. The unrecognized stranger answered the Cleopases: “Oh, how foolish you are!” You don’t know the first thing about hope. St. Luke in the gospel text says then he proceeded to unfold the story of hope in the Scriptures beginning with Moses and all the prophets. The gospel doesn’t give us the content of this mini-bible class but you can imagine that it went something like this. Abraham was hoping that he would be able to settle down and raise his flocks in peace. God had a better plan in mind and made in the father of many nations, the father of the faith. The Hebrew children were hoping that Egypt would be a secure home away from the famine but that didn’t work out. Moses gave them a better hope by leading them out of slavery into the promised land. The Israelites were hoping that their nation was secure after the triumph of King David but that hope was shattered by unrest, civil war, and, eventually, exile. God gave them a new hope by helping them to understand they were not just for themselves but to be a light to the nations. The Jewish people were hoping for freedom from Greek and then Roman domination. That hope did not come about but a better hope was given – liberation from fear, forgiveness of sin, conquering of death due to a suffering Messiah. The hopes that we have are often too small for God – God’s hopes for bigger things for us including life, life to the full.
Among the many strange features of this time that we are going through is that we possess a common hope, a hope that the stay-at-home order will be lifted soon. This is a good hope to have. We have many related hopes. We hope we don’t get sick. We hope no one that we knows get sick. We hope that the money lasts till everyone is back at work. We hope that the kids really are learning something studying on-line. We hope that forced isolation for some and forced togetherness for others doesn’t drive us batty. We hope that the health and government officials are making good decisions about testing, about developing a vaccine, about treatment options. We hope that we can all get together again soon in Church to praise the Lord for getting us through this. All of these are good hopes. But I wonder, are our hopes too small? Does the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus challenge us to hope for bigger things?
Let us hope for burning hearts. That’s what happened to the Cleopas family when they heard the story of God’s eternal plan of salvation explained to them on the road to Emmaus. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way?” We should hope for similar hearts. We know what makes for a burning heart – every song in every genre for the past thousand years has told us. It’s love. “Love is a burning thing and it makes a fiery ring. I fell into a burning ring a fire.” Our hearts will burn within us when we love God and love our neighbor. We love God when we get the focus off of ourselves and what we want and onto what God wants for us. We love our neighbor, all of our neighbors, those that look like us and those that don’t, those that think like us and those that don’t, those that are as capable as we are and those that aren’t. The bigger thing we should hope for us that our hearts will burn with love, compassion, generosity and forgiveness.
Let us also hope that we can recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Being forced to fast from receiving Holy Communion creates a hunger in us, a hunger for intimacy. We ordinarily take the gift of the Eucharist for granted. Not being able to receive makes us aware that Jesus yearns to be with us, to share life with us, to live deep in our hearts. The bigger thing we should hope for is to experience that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.
Mostly in this Easter season, let us hope that we can join with those first Christians and exclaim, “The Lord has truly been raised.” Since the Lord has truly been raised there is no reason to fear death – and consequently no reason to fear life. We live each day, not just during the pandemic, in the face of death with no fear because of the promise of God is that all will be well, all manner of things will be well. Resurrection is the biggest hope of all.
