I left the All Saints staff 23 years ago, so for the vast majority of you who have no clue as to who I am, let me introduce myself. I’m Gary Hall, and I served here for 11 years, from 1990 to 2001, first with George and then with Ed. I left then and served in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan and Washington. Kathy and I moved back here when I retired in 2016. When I got the job in Washington, Susan Russell described me to a reporter in her pithy way as the “Joe Biden of the Episcopal Church”. Joe Biden was younger then than I am now and went on to greater things. I moved back to the Valley. These days, it’s probably more accurate to describe me as the Ben Matlock of the Episcopal Church. I’m old. I’m grumpy. I’ve lost a couple of steps. But that won’t stop me from telling you what I think.
I’ve been doing this priestly work for close to 50 years now, and maybe because it’s the beginning of Lent I’ve begun to reflect on what got me into this racket in the first place. I did not grow up in the church. Both my parents left their churches when they moved to Hollywood, so my first experience of church was through my college participation in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements. The 1960s were a complicated time—polarized and contentious as now, but also characterized by an exuberantly hopeful spirit. Many of us did think then that we could make a better world.
If I could go back now and tell my 20-year-old self the state of things in America and the world today he would be horrified by the resurgence of racism, sexism, and xenophobia long dormant in our culture. Who could have thought then that 21st century would bring an epic of mass shootings, the repeal of voting rights and the basic rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, and the real possibility of repressive, dictatorial leadership in the United States? The death of Alexei Navalny this week at age 47 in a Russian penal colony makes it hard to look at the current state of affairs with anything like optimism.
This is kind of a bummer way to start a sermon, but it is the beginning of Lent, which my 1968 self might have described as a 40-day bad trip. Our Gospel this morning [Mark 1: 9-15] does not mince words. It pushes us right out into the flow of the action:
And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. [Mark 1: 12-13]
For centuries, we Christians have patterned this 40-day period before Easter as a reenactment of Jesus’s 40-days’ temptation in the wilderness. Mark’s version of this story is stark in its outline and sparing in details.
We’re not really sure what Jesus did in those 40 days, but for me the important thing about today’s Gospel is what he does when he comes out of them.
Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
In Mark’s stark view, Jesus comes on the scene and goes right into the wilderness. He emerges from his desert experience ready to take it to the streets. His message: “The kingdom of God has come near.” Let’s not be Romantic about conditions then or now. Jesus lived, healed, and taught in a time of social and personal suffering and political repression. And yet, as Mitch McConnell might say, he persisted. Looking around him, Jesus could not possibly have been optimistic. But he was hopeful. And there’s a difference.
For some reason right now I’m reading a lot of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate Irish poet who died in 2013. Like Jesus and like us, Heaney lived through a time of violence and struggle, especially the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was once asked if he was optimistic about things. He replied that he was not optimistic, but he was hopeful. As he now famously said,
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
This tension between optimism and hope is at the core of what this Lent-Easter process is all about. We prepare ourselves for Easter by reminding ourselves of the reality of human sin in all its forms. We Americans tend to think of sin as something personal, but for Christians sin has always had a range of expressions. It is cosmic. It is social. It is institutional. And yes, it is personal, but we cannot easily untangle our individual actions from the larger contexts in which we live and are ensnared. Try as we might to be virtuous, we are enmeshed in sin. If you don’t think so, take a minute and consider the clothes you’re wearing or how you got here this morning. Something or someone was violated in the process. Unless you eat fallen fruit and wear rope belts, none of us has absolutely clean hands.
So much for optimism. And yet:
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Look as I might want to at the world around me and throw up my hands in despair, the Gospel always brings me around to the example of Jesus, who after his 40-day wilderness experience immediately came forth to proclaim not despair but Good News: “The Kingdom of God has come near.” We do not observe Lent as a time of mindless self-flagellation. It is not a 40-day bad trip. We observe Lent as a time of preparation for Easter. Lent is not about itself. It is about Easter, and Easter is about hope.
Early on in my time here, George Regas brought Desmond Tutu to All Saints to celebrate the end of apartheid in South Africa. His visit then reminded me of an earlier time when Tutu had been on the Today Show, and he was asked if he was afraid of death.
“There are things worse than death,” Tutu said.
The host was incredulous. “What on earth could be worse than death?”
Tutu replied, “If I got up some morning and said to myself, ‘You know, Desmond, apartheid isn’t so bad.’ Thatwould be worse than death.”
What Tutu knew is what you and I will come to know during this 40-day Lenten journey together with Jesus through death and the cross to life through resurrection. Alexei Navalny knew what Desmond Tutu knew, and they both knew what Jesus knew and you and I are continually called to learn. Hope is “rooted in the conviction that there is good worth fighting for”. Accommodating ourselves to oppression in all its forms is worse than death.
When I heard about Navalny’s death early Friday morning, I was shocked and saddened, but I was not surprised. Navalny was a prophet, and as my late friend Harvey Guthrie used to say, prophets show us how things are. The church itself is a prophetic community: at its best, it shows the world how things are, that there is a way to live through generosity, compassion, and respect. The strong men who pretend to power by means of repression and hate will not have the last word.
“The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.” As we contemplate the realities of life in 2024, we do so not with optimism but with hope. There is a good worth working for. We see that good in the lives of those who work to resist oppression and violence. We see that good in the one who goes to the cross because there are things worth than death. We see that good in the way we respond to God’s call to work together to build the world that naïve optimists thought would naturally come along with the march of science and reason.
We face enormous challenges. Evil and oppression will not go away simply because we want them to. Our emergence from Lent at Easter will be meaningless unless it is marked by our renewed commitment to hope, our willingness to give ourselves to the things worth working for. That means: we will put our lives on the line in service of God’s vision of peace, justice, compassion, and love. God’s work in the world is only done through us. We must be God’s agents of liberation and change in a broken world.
The events of this year—not only our elections, but also the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the assaults on rights, the continuing depredation of the planet—these events can only be addressed by hopeful people ready to take them on. Lent is upon us, but Easter is coming. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. A suffering world needs the witness of those who know that there are things worse than death and a good worth working for. That is why God has given us Jesus and each other. Our task, as his companions, is to take up his struggle with gratitude, with joy, and, yes, with hope. Amen.
