Prisoners of Hope The Right Reverend William Frey Bishop of Colorado, Retired A Sermon preached at The Anglican Communion Institute Christ Episcopal Church San Antonio, Texas 13 January 2006
		I was reminded of the words of Christopher Fry—no relation, he spells it wrong.  “Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us until we take the greatest step of soul men ever took.  Affairs are now soul size, the enterprise is exploration into God, and you thank God for the time you are in.”   We’ve always argued in the Episcopal Church.  When I was ordained fifty years ago we had big arguments – what’s High Church, what’s Low Church, what kind of vestments to wear, and what kind not to wear, how many candles ought to be on the altar, and all that kind of stuff— and we really got kind of hot about it.  It was just harmless ecclesiastic recreation however.  No blood got spilled, no wounds were tendered or anything at all.  It was very simple.   Today things are a little bit tougher aren’t they, and it may be that we are in a time when the arguments are worthwhile.  I mean here we are arguing, are we not, about whether or not the Bible is true and how is it interpreted and—coming to a church near you within the next year or two, who is Jesus, is he really the universal Savior, is he really the universal Lord?  All of that is in store for us, and we do ourselves no service if we close our eyes to it.   Jack Allen, when he was Presiding Bishop years ago, used to tell this marvelous story about visiting a little church in rural Mississippi on a hot summer afternoon, and he walked into the local grocery store and on the counter was a big chunk of Limburger cheese, sort of melting in the heat.  Flies were buzzing around, bugs crawling all over it, and he turned to the shop keeper and said, “Shouldn’t you do something for that cheese, I mean shouldn’t you cover it up or refrigerate it or something?”  And the clerk looked at him and said “Shucks, Bishop, can’t nothing more happen to that cheese.”  That’s my working metaphor for the Episcopal Church.   Although there are times when I feel I need to change it—maybe something more can happen to this cheese, you never know.   The Propers (see below) we heard tonight are things that I was asked to choose.  “What Bible lessons do you want Bishop?”  I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to say so I just picked a few because I thought they might have something to say. I wanted that lesson from Zachariah because of the description of the prisoners of hope.  What a great definition of a Christian.  What else can you be, once you’ve understood the resurrection of Jesus, but a prisoner of hope?  Return to your stronghold.  We live with a hope that is undeniable and immortal.  Return to your stronghold—and where is that?  That is the Lord himself.  And I wanted the thing from Philippians because we on the conservative side in our church sometimes have a tendency to demonize our opponents and just really extend to them a definition of total depravity, which they don’t really deserve.  And it sometimes brings me up short to see one of my opponents, certainly in the sexuality debate, who preaches the Gospel.  And maybe he does it as Paul says, out of envy, maybe just to make other people angry, who knows?  But whether they or we, the Gospel is preached and in that Paul was able to rejoice.   It is dangerous to demonize your opponents. It is bad for your spiritual health.  It is also bad for your spiritual health to ignore the errors of bad teaching and bad preaching, but we do not need to demonize those who oppose us at this moment.
		And I wanted the Gospel, I wanted that passage from John’s Gospel because Jesus said, “I’ve told you all things to keep you from falling away.”  How important that is.  These things, what is he talking about?  Well, he had talked in the previous chapter about the vine and the branches and whatever happens to the branches happens to him.  Ever think about that?  “I am the vine”— and the Father cuts away some of the branches, that means cuts away some of him. The pain of Jesus in that—the divisions in the church and the falling away—must be a great pain to our Lord, and we don’t want to be agents of that.  “I’ve told you all these things.”   And what else did he say, “I’ve told you everything the Father has said to me, I haven’t kept any secrets from you and the Holy Spirit will come and he will remind you of all these things that I have said to you.”  As Christopher said the other night, the Holy Spirit is not divorced, not unattached from the scripture.  It isn’t a kind of free agent wandering around doing things that are inconsistent with the record of what Jesus has given us.   What I want to say to you tonight is that TELEOLOGY IS THE BEST POLICY.  That is about as simple as you can do it in theological language—you know when you have the prolepsis of the Eschaton and things of that nature.  Teleology is the best policy.   One of the things you learn from the Scripture is that history has both direction and purpose.  It is going some place.  It has a goal.  It has an end, and that end is not in our hands, but there is a goal.  The path back to Eden has been blockaded—you have to go forward, there is no other way to go.  There is no way to recapture those golden moments of Anglicanism, if indeed they ever existed apart from the fractured imaginations of some theologians and historians.   You have to go forward, but that is all right because we move forward not into chaos, not into some self-invented future, but into God’s promised future, and there is a difference.  The intermediate steps may seem problematic.  What did Paul say? “We are afflicted but not crushed, we are perplexed but not driven to despair, we are persecuted but not forsaken, we are struck down but not destroyed.”  The intermediate steps are painful, no doubt about it, but what did Paul say: there is a goal—nonetheless all of this, all of this slight momentary affliction— (I love the way he can just dismiss all of the problems and all the pain and call them a slight momentary affliction!) working for us an eternal way to glory beyond comparison, and we forget that at our peril.  God’s timetable is not ours; that is good to remember, especially when you are speaking theologically.
		There is an end, but we don’t know exactly when.  What if, I mean just what if what we call the history of the church—the apostolic expansion, the Christological controversies, the creedal statements, the schism of East and West, the Reformation, the denominational proliferation and competition—what if all of that is just the record of the primitive early Christian church as it has struggled for 2000 years to figure out how in the world to get this treasure contained in these earthen vessels?  What if God has 50,000 or 100,000 years in front of the life of the Church?   What if we are living in the early days and dealing with the early struggles?  We have no idea, do we, about God’s timetable, no idea at all. One of the things that troubles me in our current controversy sometimes is the weight, we on a more traditional side, give to the presence of error and evil.  We look at leadership and the upper echelons of the church and we say, “O my God, we have heretical bishops!”  Big news.  My goodness read your church history!  Don’t wake me up for that.  “We’ve got people preaching error!”  We would miss half of the New Testament if there weren’t problems in the Church, wouldn’t we?  I mean where would all the Epistles of Paul go if it weren’t for problems in the Church?  Problems as we experience them are part of our apostolic succession! —although I sometimes lament the fact that the Episcopal Church seems to try to imitate the church in first century Corinth more than any of the others.  That is lamentable.  But it is part and parcel of who we are.  There has never been a moment in time when we have not had controversies, when we have not had difficulties, and so on.   But there is more to say than just that.  We don’t rest in that fact and enjoy the controversy, enjoy the pain.  I’ve been contemplating, as many of you have, about Christmas, last month, and I was really struck, in a way that I hadn’t been before—perhaps it is because of the atmosphere we live in—by that marvelous passage in Galatians, in the fourth chapter, where Paul says “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.”   “God sent forth his son” into a disobedient nation, a disobedient church.  Lots of error, lots of heresy, lots of difficulties.  The Christmas celebrations, our sanitized Christmas celebrations, make it appear as though Jesus came to congratulate us.  You know, “You are a great bunch of guys doing a grand job for a swell outfit and I just thought I’d stop by to say ‘Hi.’”  He came to save us from perishing. We were perishing.  Read all of John 3:16, not just the first few words— to save us from perishing.   But he came into and was obedient to a flawed church, a flawed theological system, trusting more in the power of goodness and truth than in the power of evil.  Yes, there is a lot of difficulty.  Yes, there is a lot of apostasy.  Yes, there is a lot of unfaithfulness.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story of what the Church can be.  And why we feel we must fold our robes around us and keep our hands clean from dealing with a mixed church, I have no idea.  Why should I be so appalled by the presence of unfaithfulness when the presence of faithfulness is also there?   Where truth is spoken, where love is acted out, where the Gospel is proclaimed—I don’t want to give that much power to the presence of evil when I know the presence of good will far more outweigh it.
		Archimedes wanted a platform outside the world where he could put his fulcrum and lever to move the world.  Jesus says “No, if you are going to move it, you’ve got to move it from the inside, not from the outside.”  You cannot stand outside and throw stones.  You want to get inside.  And so God sends his Son into the world as God sends us into a society, but first into a church, into a community of people who by our very nature are the ones designated by God to do something about changing and transforming the society around us. Where evil rises up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us until we take the longest step of soul ever taken by man. We’ve just gone through a year of tragedies haven’t we?  We’ve had a tsunami, we’ve had hurricanes, earthquakes...all kinds of disasters, and just last week, that terrible mine disaster.   We’ve had our minds focused on disasters and people becoming refugees and wandering about trying to find a place to land and so on.  And I’ve wondered, how do we deal with that?  How do we respond to tragedies?  Tragedy in the church, tragedy in the world, how do we respond to that?  Do we respond by losing our faith as some people have done?  How could God, a merciful God possibly allow this kind of thing to happen?  “I’m going to forget about God,” have said many, or with anger, shaking their fists at the heavens.  Or just weak resignation, capitulation, “Well, that’s just the way things are...”   How do we respond to tragedy?   I first had to deal with that over forty years ago when a seventeen year old head of my youth group went home one afternoon from school and blew his brains out.   I had to do a funeral, and this was a very popular young man in the community and in the church, and the church was packed with all sorts of people.  And what do you say in the midst of tragedy like that, abject evil—you know, “Chalk one up for the devil…”?  Realizing that at a given moment I was going to have to turn and face a congregation of people and say to them, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”   Let us give thanks to the Lord our God?  “Yes it is meet and right so to do,” they had to reply—it’s in the book.  “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty that we should, at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto [God].”  Think about that for a moment.  The sheer audacity of standing in the midst of what looks like ultimate tragedy and saying “No, that is not the last word that will be spoken about us, about our church, about our life, about our world.”   We have an insight that the early disciples did not have.  We’ve read the story.  We know of the Resurrection, but they didn’t.  No one walking away from Calvary was singing “Alleluia”.  But we can call it “Good Friday” because we are prisoners of hope and—knowing the resurrection of Jesus—no situation, no situation, not even death itself, is beyond redemption.  Teleology is the best policy.  God is in control and history has both direction and purpose.  And the purpose is glorious, the purpose is marvelous.   We can’t control all of the events; we can’t control all of the things that will come our way.   Bishop Salmon yesterday reminded us of that marvelous picture on his wall of the ship sailing in the winds and the waves and recognizing that the sailors had no control over the winds and the waves.  You and I have no control over the outcome of a General Convention or of this meeting or of that meeting or this gathering or the other gathering.  But what will we do if things turn out poorly?  How do “prisoners of hope” respond to those circumstances?  Do we sit back and complain?  Do we start a website where we can just write in, day by day, “Ain’t it awful and it’s getting worse?  God save us.”  Do we just become passive victims?   Do we grin and bear it?    Do we ignore it?  Do we—as Philip Turner said not to do this afternoon—just tend to our own little gardens and hide in our own parochialism?  No, that won’t do.   Do we cut and run, as Frank said, “No, it ain’t the Alamo if you cut and run!”  Isn’t it fascinating we remember the Alamo, that great defeat, but we don’t remember the battle of San Jacinto very often around here?  We remember those who were faithful and fought to the death.
		I mean, what do we do when disasters, ecclesiastical disasters strike?  I suggest we let that moment turn us into what we are—prisoners of hope—and let that moment galvanize our resolve to be what we have always claimed to be, members of the Body of Christ who have been called to participate in God’s work.   Think about that:  called to work in God’s work, not our work.  When Jesus invites us to the big game, he doesn’t hand out tickets, he hands out uniforms.  You and I are the players in the game.  You and I are the active participants, and so we go and we do something with our time, we invest our time and our energy, we form a new missionary society to carry the Gospel to one another.  We support one another and we go to those places where we are likely to have a hearing and we share the Good News.  We participate in God’s work.   We return to our stronghold, as Zachariah said, “you prisoners of hope return to your stronghold” and the stronghold is the unshakeable faith of the Lord Jesus, the presence of a risen Christ.  Hope based on the resurrection and God’s faithful promise.  And we don’t know the outcome; we may die in the attempt although let’s—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.  We aren’t going to die in the attempt.  We overly dramatize our sufferings, don’t we?  We talk about martyrdom and all that sort of thing.  Don’t use that language in the presence of an Archbishop from Nigeria!  I mean, we may have a few people complain about us, or say something nasty about us, or fail to smile as we pass on the street, but those folks are facing guns and blood and death on a daily basis.  But we do need to invest and be willing to run whatever risk is needed here, without knowing the outcome, because we live by hope, not by our accomplishments.   Return to your strongholds, O prisoners of hope!  Or, in the words of some of my favorite fictional heroes and heroines—in the words of Peter and Susan and Edmond and Lucy—“Let us go and take the adventure that Aslan sends us!”  In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
		The Propers  Revised Standard Version The First Lesson:  Zechariah 9:9-12 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.   I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.  As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit.  Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double. The Second Lesson:  Philippians 1:12-21 I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the word of God without fear.  Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will.  The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.  What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice.  Yes, and I shall rejoice. For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. The Holy Gospel:  St. John 16:1-11 I have said all this to you to keep you from falling away.  They will put you out of the synagogues; indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.  And they will do this because they have not known the Father, nor me.  But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you of them. "I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.  But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, `Where are you going?'  But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.  Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.  And when he comes, he will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment:  concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.