the need for hope
In the 1820’s, the slave trade was senselessly alive and well in the United States. There was not enough political support to outlaw the practice at this time, though a few called for its eradication.
But in this decade of widespread slavery in the U.S., an unremarkable slave woman named Harriet Tubman was born. She became a runaway slave later in life, and went on to steal other slaves to freedom using the Underground Railroad; she was an abolitionist that inspired others to escape. She helped the north during the Civil War.
Here, an example of hope coming from within something senseless.
I was visiting with one of my best friends this past weekend. I was reminded of a crucial time about five years ago, when my employer suddenly shut down the company where I worked. I was laid off. If you’ve ever lost a job, you know how traumatizing this can be. I then spent some time trying to figure out where life was taking me. I ended up crashing at this best friend’s apartment in Des Moines for almost a solid week, six hours away from my home. He had a third floor view from his deck that looked across the serene Iowa landscape. Cornfields, sunsets, trees. Relaxing. Most every night I sat out there into the night with a cup of decaf coffee, praying, thinking, watching time go by. Mornings were spent sitting on that same deck, since the early sunlight allowed for journaling. Through that senseless time of unemployment came hope for my future, and where life was going. That time was crucial. I’ll never forget it, and I thank God that He led me there.
Here, my example of hope coming from within something senseless.
A fair look at the world would show this seems like bleak times in a lot of places. Much like the bleakness that abolitionists must have felt in the early 19th century, when slavery was firmly anchored in the U.S. and British economies.
Where is this conflict going? We’re not the first generation to ask that. Why is everything so jaded? Where do I go from here? Where is the hope? This world looks like it’s a mess.
I come back again and again to an excellent sermon about Ruth. If you haven’t read the book of Ruth in the Old Testament, you should (this is the sermon, and you should check this out as well). Ruth is a quick read (four chapters!), and a great story of what happened to a widowed woman (Naomi) and her widowed daughter-in-law (Ruth).
But this sermon spends some time focusing on the first few words from the opening verse in Ruth: “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land…” And then a jump back to the book that precedes Ruth, the book of Judges, the last verse (21:25): “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
A senseless situation without hope. Famine. No one obeying the laws of the land.
And from within that senseless time is this story of Ruth. A story of God at work, giving hope. Ruth is a woman with no social standing due to being widowed, she is not even an Israelite. She travels with her mother-in-law to Bethlehem, and a man named Boaz provides for her well beyond the customs of the time. And you’ll have to read the rest of the story for yourself, because the details are a beauty. A woman behaving honorably as well as somewhat scandalously (for the time), and a man doing what he should. A woman and her mother-in-law restored. A marriage between Ruth and Boaz, and a baby born to them.
And from this lineage comes Jesse, who was the father of King David. This continues to the lineage of Jesus Christ, which we see in Matthew 1 with his genealogy.
The situation in the time of the judges seemed pretty senseless and bleak. But from this came the story of Ruth, a widow restored and a baby born to her. A lineage that led to David, which led to Jesus. In Bethlehem, of all places.
Hope in this senseless time.
We all could use more of this hope nowadays. Sometimes these days seem hard, and senseless.
But I for one trust that hope is out there.
After all, history is full of these examples.
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Mikhail Bulgakov said in The White Guard that everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. And he uses that as an example of why humankind hopes against odds: because he sort of knows that the universe is infallible. And that reminds me of what you are talking about. Hoping against reason. Or finding hope among a lack of reason.
Then again, playwright and professional jerk Bertolt Brecht wrote often against hope, saying things like, “Hope gives man much to yearn for, but it is all the more crushing when the weight of the world says, ‘Np,’ and man is denied his vision. Indeed, it kills.”
Kyle, I’ve never read that book, I hope to run across it someday. My point was not to place hope against reason at all; in fact, it is by reason through taking a longer view of history that we can have hope, at least Biblically speaking. I hope that my imagination is not the limits of what I define as “reason,” though reason has its own limits anyway.
Maybe it’s knowing that hope is present regardless of our sensory abilities to detect it. Again, our limits are not THE limits, thankfully.
Maybe it has something to do, then, with finding reason among a lack of it…..or something like that. Because surely slaves had no visible REASON to believe they could be free, except for rare occurrences and the general underlying belief that maybe white people aren’t evil, and maybe they’ll realize how dumb they are being. Is that reason?
I suppose I meant more like finding hope in a time where there seems to be a near-total lack of reason.
Do you think hope is present if we don’t “detect” it? Can you elaborate on this a bit?
The Zack Eswine sermon on Ruth somehow got enclosed as a podcast when I read this post in Bloglines. That’s a cool trick!
Agkyra, I’d love to take credit for that trick, but I have no idea how that happened. Like a crap shot in pool that happens to go in, so go the links in my blog posts.
Kyle, I have a response for you coming! You ask really good questions.