The Rev. Kathleen Baskin-Ball
Since duck hunting season has come around again I guess it’s as good a time as any to tell this story. The tale is told about a man who gets a new bird dog and he goes out to train it the first time and he finds out that, lo and behold, this dog can walk on water. He can’t believe how fortunate he is but he knows no one will ever believe it.
So he goes to his most pessimistic friend and invites him out hunting. Doesn’t say a word about what his new dog can do. They’re out there on the marshes one day and it’s a great day for duck hunting. The weather is cold and wet and dark. A great day for duck hunting.
A flock of ducks go by, they shoot, and one of the ducks falls out of the sky. The dog knows exactly what to do. It jumps off the bank onto the water, walks right on over to where the duck is without so much as getting his paws wet, gets the duck and brings it back. This goes on all day long. Every time they shoot a duck, the dog walks across the water to retrieve it. And the man who owns the duck doesn’t say a word about it. Pretends it’s as natural as can be. But the pessimist doesn’t say a word either.
Finally, at the end of the day, the man can’t stand it anymore and he asks his friend, “So, did you notice anything about my new dog today?”
His friend says, “Yeah, I sure did. Your dog can’t swim.”
That story leads me a little ways in the direction I’d like to go today. In this season of Advent as we’re headed toward the coming of Jesus in the flesh, we’re talking about what it means for God to become human and for us to become human. Last week we talked about formlessness and how one of the things that marks us as truly human is the necessity of our being transformed. Like clay before the potter, we have to place the messiness of our lives before God to be remade into the thing God wants us to be.
Today I want to spend some time thinking about hope, and I want to say that another mark of being truly human is to live with hope. To look forward to what God is doing in the world. And to see the miraculous things that are already at work in the world because of the love we know in Jesus Christ. If, like the pessimist, we can only see what’s wrong with the world, we haven’t gotten the eyes that will allow us to see that ultimately something is terribly, terribly right with the universe, because God has come to redeem it.
Last week we spent some time with Isaiah and I want to go back there again today. In the passage we read last week we had those strange images of Advent – the filthy rag and the dried up leaf. Today the passage gives us some images that are a little easier to handle. Remember that Isaiah is trying to bring good news to the people of Israel in exile. They have been carted off to a foreign land. They’ve lost everything they held as sacred—the land, the Temple, and their king in the line of David. Jerusalem, the holy city, has been destroyed. They are being oppressed by the great Babylonian Empire. And Isaiah’s first words are, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” This is a God who is going to redeem them from their suffering.
Isaiah offers a vision of a grand highway stretching across the desert to take the people back home. They will not have to go home the long way following the course of rivers. They will not have to worry about mountains and valleys impeding their travel. They will not have to worry about potholes and detours. This road is going straight through the desert to take them home. And what do we call this road? The highway of God. And when the nations see this caravan going home they will know that our God is a mighty God.
It’s good stuff, isn’t it? Just what you’d want to hear if you were living in exile far from home. But then Isaiah follows it with this strange phrase that doesn’t, at first, sound like hope: “All people are grass,” he says. “They don’t have any more staying power than a flower in a field. Here today and gone tomorrow. Surely the people are grass.”
But before you go start singing “Blue Christmas” let’s think about what Isaiah is saying. Is he really saying that we are hopeless creatures who wither into insignificance? Is he saying that ultimately nothing really matters because ultimately we fade away? Is he saying that God gets a kick out of our humiliation, out of saying “Respect my authority” because you are puny little creatures? Or is he saying something much deeper and much more hope-ful?
Listen to the next verse: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” That’s where he’s going with the grass thing. Our lives have meaning and purpose and direction and hope because they are connected to God’s story… and if we’re going home it’s not because of anything we’ve done…it’s because of what God will do for us and with us and in spite of us…for no good reason except pure love.
Hope for Christians is built on this notion that our gifts and our talents are only of use when they are placed in the service of something larger and we are constantly bumping up against that something larger, which can make us feel small and insignificant. But the response Isaiah calls for is not depression. It’s not to think of ourselves more lowly than we ought to think. It’s not to hang our heads in despair and to approach our lives with downcast eyes. The response he calls for is this: Look at yourself. See that you are limited, that your power to sustain yourself will ultimately fail. But also see yourself in the light of the one who is to come. See that your story does not end with fading flower and withering grass. See that your hope is not placed in your ability to achieve liberation and success. See that your worth is not determined by what you can earn monetarily or by what power you can exercise over others. See that suffering and oppression are not what God intends for the creation. See that you are like grass and flowers and that God loves you for that!
That’s a little bit of a paraphrase but you get the picture. And its because God spoke with tenderness and hope to the downtrodden people of Israel in exile that John the Baptist picks up on his words in the Mark passage. To the people who came to the desert to see this strange prophet, John says, “God is still making a highway through the desert. We still need to be ready for the one who is coming to save the people. God has still not abandoned the people of God. And when God comes, you will see yourself in a whole new light. So get ready. Be baptized. Prepare for the coming of the Lord.”
What does hope look like for Christians? It looks like Jesus. It looks like people who put themselves in the footsteps of Jesus and try to model their lives after him. It looks like people going to Russia through our Children’s Hope Chest program and spending a week with orphans they would never have known and never have had a relationship with had it not been for the love of Jesus. It looks like people who write those same children notes and support them monetarily from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Small things in the grand scheme of things, but how about that hope that it brings and the good news it proclaims.
I’ll tell you what else it looks like for me. It looks like one of my first colleagues in ministry, Kathleen Baskin-Ball. In the summer of 1989 we both went into ministry in the inner city of Dallas. I was beginning my seminary internship as the youth coordinator for a United Methodist-related community center. She was going to start a new congregation in the abandoned church next door.
Neither one of us knew what we were doing or what to expect. Both of us were just learning Spanish and we were working in a heavily Latino neighborhood. Kathleen was single at the time, only about 30 years old. She was idealistic and charismatic and she loved everybody.
Our paths crossed a lot that year. We were working with many of the same youth and they formed the nucleus of her new church community. I remember the meeting in her house when we started talking about a name for the new congregation. Nueva Esperanza – New Hope United Methodist Church. I remember one cold, cold night near Christmas when the two of us were the guitarists as we walked through the streets of West Dallas singing with members of that congregation as we went door to door in a celebration of Las Posadas – a Mexican tradition remembering the journey of Mary and Joseph to find a room in Bethlehem.
Kathleen was never satisfied with doing ministry from a distance. Actually, it was what worried me about her. West Dallas was not an easy place to live. It was the same neighborhood that produced Bonnie and Clyde back in the 1930s and it was still a troubled place with a lot of poverty, a lot of drugs, and a lot of despair. But Kathleen did not want to serve a church in a neighborhood where she did not live, so she moved in.
She bought a house near the church – she was probably the only single, white woman in the neighborhood. She says the experience opened her eyes to realities of life that she could not have seen before that. It took a toll on her. But she was convinced, as she said later, that it was only by loving deeply and opening herself to the pain that comes from loving deeply that she could begin to experience hope. “When it’s not convenient, when it costs us and we still take the time to listen to another’s heart and we love deeply, hope emerges,” she said.[i]
What happened in that neighborhood was hard on Kathleen, but you know what? Hope emerged through her ministry. Youth went to college who would never have gone. People came to know a powerful God in an impoverished part of the city. And 5 years after she came to an empty church building, 130 members were a part of the Nueva Esperanza congregation, most of them Hispanic.
Kathleen went on to many other things. She served two other churches and they both grew, the latest to 1500 members. She married and had a boy named Skyler. She was well-respected in the North Texas Conference and led their delegation to our General Conference last summer.
About two years ago, she got a diagnosis of cancer and the prognosis was not good. I listened to a couple of her sermons this week and in the more recent one from this summer I could still hear her vibrancy and faith and liveliness, but her voice was weakened and hoarse. She didn’t want to pull back from her church family and she didn’t. She kept on preaching hope. She kept on believing that God would be faithful to the promise of life.
Just a few weeks ago she preached her last sermon and last Saturday she was receiving people in her home, just as she had in West Dallas, against everyone’s best judgment. But she was not going to stop loving deeply now. So there she was hugging people and comforting them when they had come to comfort her. Then on Tuesday she died. My friends in West Dallas called me that day and we remembered nothing but joy.
I am grateful for the witness that people like Kathleen offer. They remind me that our hope is not built on everything going right. We don’t look forward to the future because it promises to be Easy Street. We look forward to the future because God is already there and because Christ has promised to come again to help be truly, fully, deeply human.
This period of the year is a rough one for many, many people. We too often use our winter eyes to understand who we are. We feel overwhelmed and perplexed. In the midst of all that you will face in the week to come, remember that God comes to those in need, and when we identify those places in our lives and in our world where we feel that need, we are ready to welcome and meet the God who has chosen us, for no good reason but overwhelming love. Thanks be to God.
Isaiah 40:1-11 (NRSV)
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
So he goes to his most pessimistic friend and invites him out hunting. Doesn’t say a word about what his new dog can do. They’re out there on the marshes one day and it’s a great day for duck hunting. The weather is cold and wet and dark. A great day for duck hunting.
A flock of ducks go by, they shoot, and one of the ducks falls out of the sky. The dog knows exactly what to do. It jumps off the bank onto the water, walks right on over to where the duck is without so much as getting his paws wet, gets the duck and brings it back. This goes on all day long. Every time they shoot a duck, the dog walks across the water to retrieve it. And the man who owns the duck doesn’t say a word about it. Pretends it’s as natural as can be. But the pessimist doesn’t say a word either.
Finally, at the end of the day, the man can’t stand it anymore and he asks his friend, “So, did you notice anything about my new dog today?”
His friend says, “Yeah, I sure did. Your dog can’t swim.”
That story leads me a little ways in the direction I’d like to go today. In this season of Advent as we’re headed toward the coming of Jesus in the flesh, we’re talking about what it means for God to become human and for us to become human. Last week we talked about formlessness and how one of the things that marks us as truly human is the necessity of our being transformed. Like clay before the potter, we have to place the messiness of our lives before God to be remade into the thing God wants us to be.
Today I want to spend some time thinking about hope, and I want to say that another mark of being truly human is to live with hope. To look forward to what God is doing in the world. And to see the miraculous things that are already at work in the world because of the love we know in Jesus Christ. If, like the pessimist, we can only see what’s wrong with the world, we haven’t gotten the eyes that will allow us to see that ultimately something is terribly, terribly right with the universe, because God has come to redeem it.
Last week we spent some time with Isaiah and I want to go back there again today. In the passage we read last week we had those strange images of Advent – the filthy rag and the dried up leaf. Today the passage gives us some images that are a little easier to handle. Remember that Isaiah is trying to bring good news to the people of Israel in exile. They have been carted off to a foreign land. They’ve lost everything they held as sacred—the land, the Temple, and their king in the line of David. Jerusalem, the holy city, has been destroyed. They are being oppressed by the great Babylonian Empire. And Isaiah’s first words are, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” This is a God who is going to redeem them from their suffering.
Isaiah offers a vision of a grand highway stretching across the desert to take the people back home. They will not have to go home the long way following the course of rivers. They will not have to worry about mountains and valleys impeding their travel. They will not have to worry about potholes and detours. This road is going straight through the desert to take them home. And what do we call this road? The highway of God. And when the nations see this caravan going home they will know that our God is a mighty God.
It’s good stuff, isn’t it? Just what you’d want to hear if you were living in exile far from home. But then Isaiah follows it with this strange phrase that doesn’t, at first, sound like hope: “All people are grass,” he says. “They don’t have any more staying power than a flower in a field. Here today and gone tomorrow. Surely the people are grass.”
But before you go start singing “Blue Christmas” let’s think about what Isaiah is saying. Is he really saying that we are hopeless creatures who wither into insignificance? Is he saying that ultimately nothing really matters because ultimately we fade away? Is he saying that God gets a kick out of our humiliation, out of saying “Respect my authority” because you are puny little creatures? Or is he saying something much deeper and much more hope-ful?
Listen to the next verse: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” That’s where he’s going with the grass thing. Our lives have meaning and purpose and direction and hope because they are connected to God’s story… and if we’re going home it’s not because of anything we’ve done…it’s because of what God will do for us and with us and in spite of us…for no good reason except pure love.
Hope for Christians is built on this notion that our gifts and our talents are only of use when they are placed in the service of something larger and we are constantly bumping up against that something larger, which can make us feel small and insignificant. But the response Isaiah calls for is not depression. It’s not to think of ourselves more lowly than we ought to think. It’s not to hang our heads in despair and to approach our lives with downcast eyes. The response he calls for is this: Look at yourself. See that you are limited, that your power to sustain yourself will ultimately fail. But also see yourself in the light of the one who is to come. See that your story does not end with fading flower and withering grass. See that your hope is not placed in your ability to achieve liberation and success. See that your worth is not determined by what you can earn monetarily or by what power you can exercise over others. See that suffering and oppression are not what God intends for the creation. See that you are like grass and flowers and that God loves you for that!
That’s a little bit of a paraphrase but you get the picture. And its because God spoke with tenderness and hope to the downtrodden people of Israel in exile that John the Baptist picks up on his words in the Mark passage. To the people who came to the desert to see this strange prophet, John says, “God is still making a highway through the desert. We still need to be ready for the one who is coming to save the people. God has still not abandoned the people of God. And when God comes, you will see yourself in a whole new light. So get ready. Be baptized. Prepare for the coming of the Lord.”
What does hope look like for Christians? It looks like Jesus. It looks like people who put themselves in the footsteps of Jesus and try to model their lives after him. It looks like people going to Russia through our Children’s Hope Chest program and spending a week with orphans they would never have known and never have had a relationship with had it not been for the love of Jesus. It looks like people who write those same children notes and support them monetarily from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Small things in the grand scheme of things, but how about that hope that it brings and the good news it proclaims.
I’ll tell you what else it looks like for me. It looks like one of my first colleagues in ministry, Kathleen Baskin-Ball. In the summer of 1989 we both went into ministry in the inner city of Dallas. I was beginning my seminary internship as the youth coordinator for a United Methodist-related community center. She was going to start a new congregation in the abandoned church next door.
Neither one of us knew what we were doing or what to expect. Both of us were just learning Spanish and we were working in a heavily Latino neighborhood. Kathleen was single at the time, only about 30 years old. She was idealistic and charismatic and she loved everybody.
Our paths crossed a lot that year. We were working with many of the same youth and they formed the nucleus of her new church community. I remember the meeting in her house when we started talking about a name for the new congregation. Nueva Esperanza – New Hope United Methodist Church. I remember one cold, cold night near Christmas when the two of us were the guitarists as we walked through the streets of West Dallas singing with members of that congregation as we went door to door in a celebration of Las Posadas – a Mexican tradition remembering the journey of Mary and Joseph to find a room in Bethlehem.
Kathleen was never satisfied with doing ministry from a distance. Actually, it was what worried me about her. West Dallas was not an easy place to live. It was the same neighborhood that produced Bonnie and Clyde back in the 1930s and it was still a troubled place with a lot of poverty, a lot of drugs, and a lot of despair. But Kathleen did not want to serve a church in a neighborhood where she did not live, so she moved in.
She bought a house near the church – she was probably the only single, white woman in the neighborhood. She says the experience opened her eyes to realities of life that she could not have seen before that. It took a toll on her. But she was convinced, as she said later, that it was only by loving deeply and opening herself to the pain that comes from loving deeply that she could begin to experience hope. “When it’s not convenient, when it costs us and we still take the time to listen to another’s heart and we love deeply, hope emerges,” she said.[i]
What happened in that neighborhood was hard on Kathleen, but you know what? Hope emerged through her ministry. Youth went to college who would never have gone. People came to know a powerful God in an impoverished part of the city. And 5 years after she came to an empty church building, 130 members were a part of the Nueva Esperanza congregation, most of them Hispanic.
Kathleen went on to many other things. She served two other churches and they both grew, the latest to 1500 members. She married and had a boy named Skyler. She was well-respected in the North Texas Conference and led their delegation to our General Conference last summer.
About two years ago, she got a diagnosis of cancer and the prognosis was not good. I listened to a couple of her sermons this week and in the more recent one from this summer I could still hear her vibrancy and faith and liveliness, but her voice was weakened and hoarse. She didn’t want to pull back from her church family and she didn’t. She kept on preaching hope. She kept on believing that God would be faithful to the promise of life.
Just a few weeks ago she preached her last sermon and last Saturday she was receiving people in her home, just as she had in West Dallas, against everyone’s best judgment. But she was not going to stop loving deeply now. So there she was hugging people and comforting them when they had come to comfort her. Then on Tuesday she died. My friends in West Dallas called me that day and we remembered nothing but joy.
I am grateful for the witness that people like Kathleen offer. They remind me that our hope is not built on everything going right. We don’t look forward to the future because it promises to be Easy Street. We look forward to the future because God is already there and because Christ has promised to come again to help be truly, fully, deeply human.
This period of the year is a rough one for many, many people. We too often use our winter eyes to understand who we are. We feel overwhelmed and perplexed. In the midst of all that you will face in the week to come, remember that God comes to those in need, and when we identify those places in our lives and in our world where we feel that need, we are ready to welcome and meet the God who has chosen us, for no good reason but overwhelming love. Thanks be to God.
Isaiah 40:1-11 (NRSV)
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.
Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.
[i] Kathleen Baskin-Ball, “Longing for More: Hope,” sermon, Dec. 9, 2007, Suncreek UMC, Allen, TX, http://www.suncreekumc.org/worship/sermons.asp.
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