Sermon: A Rose in the Wintertime – Rev. Eric Banner

Hope, and history.
Sisters. Looking forward.
Looking back.

About a month ago I started this sermon series, and never quite got to the proper end of it. You might recall that I shared the idea of Walter Bruggemann, that too often we jumped to hope without making room for seeing reality as it is, and taking time to grieve. He said, in essence, that if we don’t take into account the world around us, as it is, and come to terms with not only what was and is no longer, but also with what never was, and we only now know, that our hope would crash upon the rocks of reality, again and again and again.

We talked about hope in the context of Dia de los Muertos, but this month I wanted to come back and think through, with you all, the last part of Bruggemann’s message, that the prophetic task doesn’t end with our sorrows, or our reckonings, but when we have done that work, and we remember that hope is our birthright, and that there are a thousand, million, incremental acts that bring forth goodness, and greatness, and love, in this world, and we ignore them at our peril.

But if I’m honest with you, and I suspect I am not alone, I don’t always feel it. Sometimes I look around and I want to throw my hands in the air and give up. I do. Not today. Not this week. But sometimes.

And so I come to church.

I come to church because we live in a world where we are each offered the choice of what we want to choose hope, or hopelessness.

I come to church to tilt the scales with reminders of why hope is called for, when the carefully curated algorithmically chosen doomscroll I carry in my pocket seems to suggest otherwise. I come to church to hear a song of love and to find a rose in the wintertime.

We all need hope. We do.
You do. I do.

A life without hope is a life that forgets the power we all hold, the power to find the meaning in life.
Hopelessness is saying, “There’s nothing to hold on to. There’s no reason to even try.”

It’s not for nothing Dante said the gates to hell bore the words, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

But this church is a Universalist church. We don’t believe in hell. And never have. Descendents of the people who called out, “Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach … kindness and everlasting love.”

I know the sages tell us that we ought not dwell on what is not, and may never be. That they tell us to avoid attachment which leads to suffering.

And hope so often seems to be just that, an attachment and attachment to an idea, an outcome, some future time or place where the grass will be greener, where the land will be filled with milk and honey, and love will prevail.

Choosing hope can be a challenging thing. Especially for those of us who pride ourselves on reason. Hope sounds too close to blind optimism. An unrealistic expectation that things will change, when a solid and sober analysis of the facts gives all kinds of reasons to think otherwise.

In this season of darkness, in this season of cold and darkness, it can feel like the claims to hope are fanciful thinking. Out of touch at best, sometimes even worse.

And yet, I come to church.

I come to this place. The local church, where I would be even if I didn’t work here, I once heard a preacher say that he believed that the local church was the hope of the world, and I think he was right.

Perhaps even more so for those us, who, like me, are temperamentally inclined to what was once described on a personality assessment as “scrupulous honesty,” and not in a good way.

Serious. Straight. Factual.

In accordance with an independent assessment of the available evidence.
And have you seen the facts lately, we ask ourselves, and maybe even those around us, whether they want to hear it or not.

But here’s the thing: I don’t believe the local church has to be the hope of the world. There’s plenty of churches out there that leave me wondering about the reason they keep going.

But this church, and ones like it, they are the hope of the world because they are the places we come to so that we might see one another, and be reminded that it is not in places far off and far removed from our lives that we are given reason for hope, rather in the here and now.

Hope need not be what has not yet come, but what is present already in this place, in these people you share these sheltering walls with for an hour or two each Sunday.

I come to church to hear the stories that help me rest assured, and rise again in the face of adversity, believing, as I say at so many memorial services I do, that there is a Spirit alive in the world over which death has no dominion, a light which no darkness can extinguish.

I come to church to see and hear from you.

To be reminded of the long view, the small and incremental acts that avoid the petty cynicism of hopelessness that says, “It’s all going to fail anyway, so why bother, why do anything at all?”

We come to church to see and hear from one another, and from the pages of history.

We come for reasons for hope.

In our church we sing this hymn from time to time, Come Sing a Song with Me, and it’s a song about hope. A song about hope when hope is hard to find. And in that song we say to one another, “I’ll bring you hope, when hope is hard to find. And I’ll bring a song of love, and a rose in the wintertime.”

This is what our church is about.

It’s about bringing the figurative and literal roses in the wintertimes of our lives, because each of you is out in this world working to bring more love, more kindness, more compassion, in a world that seems always on the edge of reason for despair. More love, more kindness, more compassion, more of the unshakeable faith that if we join together we will have and be and spread hope.

Some years ago I heard an interview with my colleague Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie about her first ministry.

It was in Provincetown Massachusetts, a town with a substantial gay population, and she started there in the mid 1980s right when the AIDS crisis was really breaking open.

She said –

“Sunday mornings were me preaching, and the congregation in the pews and a whole bunch of very sick guys on pallets on the floor in front of the pulpit… it was really important.

 

It was kind of an early ADA moment where everyone needs to have access.

 

This was long before personal computers or skyping or even a way to open a phone line and have people listen to the service.

 

People were literally brought in and the healing circles were in the middle of the week and we’d gather in the parish hall and same thing … We would sing, we would pray, and what was intense was that the circle, the inner circle, the inner part of the circle continued to change.

 

In the very heart of the circle people would die. And everyone was sort of moving toward the center of the circle which was basically death. And none of us was too far out of the circle. It was an amazing spiritual discipline…”

In such times it would have been easy to give up hope. Or to try and spread false hope. That’s what so many people would have expected, but in this faith, where we believe in the power of love to manifest in the moments and connections that happen in ways small and big, that church learned something more. They held one another IN hope, IN hope and love, knowing that somehow, together, they would have a reason to keep moving forward.

Rev. Kim told the story of how it was that one man left her with that lesson for life and living.

She said –

“I can remember motoring far out into Provincetown Bay on a late Sunday afternoon with my parishioner, Paul Richards, a big blond boyish Midwesterner with a Baptist heart…

Paul… had done very well. He was a hairdresser. He had a large salon. He had a large stable of young hairdressers he’d trained. He had a beautiful waterfront condo. He was exuberant. He was extremely handsome. Lots of boyfriends. And very well loved.

 

He used to recruit new church members by inviting groups of six friends at a time to Sunday brunch at his beautiful waterfront home. The hitch was that the invitation started with the church service from 11 to twelve.

 

If you planned to eat, you had to meet Paul in his pew. He was shameless. He was charming.

 

The Kaposi sarcoma that would kill him in a few months had just erupted on his calf. Rocking peacefully at anchor, he savored what unknown to us both would be his last boat ride…

(T)he temptation to drown in sorrow threatened to undo me. It was Paul who separated the pain from the suffering.

‘Even if it kills every single one of us,’ he said, ‘even if there is no one left to tell the stories, it matters that we care for each other in all this madness. It matters that even in the face of death we love each other well.’”

And so it is.

Even in the face of all that is wrong with the world, or with our lives, or our families or our neighborhoods, it matters that we love each other well.

So whether this is your favorite season of the year, a time of unmitigated joy and hope, or a time that had hoped would be like that, and now has you singing “Momma’s gonna boycott Christmas,” or if you came looking for hope and renewal, know that you will find it here.

Not because of this building, but because of these people you sit beside, and greet, and gather with.

That church in Provincetown faced reason for hopelessness daily, but they did not let that be all of the story. They rented apartments for the ill and they cared for one another. They started support groups and healing circles, where they could talk about what healing meant when it was about completion, about making amends, about ensuring your legacy, no matter what else was going on.

They knew, and we know, that in the face of all this madness it matters that we love each other well.

They knew, in the words of our reading this morning, that “If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes…”

It matters that we love the hell out of this world, as I know you all do in so many ways, in so many places, each and every week.

As you prepare to go into the week ahead, we invite you forward to receive from this church, your church, a rose in the wintertime. To carry with you a visible and tangible reminder of what is true.

That for each and every one of us, some days we are the ones singing and inviting others along to brunch and church and so much more, and other days we’re the ones who need a rose in the wintertime.

And whichever is true for you this week, may you find reason for hope, now and in the many days ahead.

So may it be.