Encouragement and Hope in Chaotic Times

By Rev. Eugenia A. Gamble

In my congregation I have being preaching a series on the “one another” passages in the New Testament: Love one another, bear one another’s burdens, pray for one another, accept one another, serve one another, be kind to one another, and the like. I am most often a lectionary preacher and find that to be such a rich journey. However, the chaotic and mean spirited rhetoric and action of these days led me to think a bit about advice from the early Christian movement about how we are to be together in times of change, danger, oppression and cruelty. Last Sunday I used a remarkable text from Hebrews in which the author, speaking to a weary, divided and dispirited group of house churches in and around Jerusalem, encourages them to encourage one another. “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Heb. 10:23-25 NRSVue)

Why was this author inspired to give his friends this advice? Obviously, they needed it. They were beginning to experience growing hostility to their movement. Persecution was still subtle but increasing. Neighbors were disappearing and some were beginning to wonder if the faith was either the real thing or worth it. Others were growing bored with worship and even with their relationships within the faith community. They had come to faith on or after the great religious high of Pentecost and the ordinary walking out of faith was not giving them the goose bumps it once had. People were drifting away from the church and those that remained faithful didn’t know where to put their oars in the water to right their ships. They needed some straightforward advice and that is what they got. Hold on to hope, provoke one another to love and good deeds, don’t neglect to meet together, and encourage one another. The author’s flock was both beset and bored and they needed a pathway forward and that path was the way of hope and encouragement.

The week before the 9/11 attack, a periodical came across my desk containing a startling article about a new medical psychological syndrome that was being documented in children in the middle east. The syndrome is called Rattle Fatigue. Rattle fatigue is what happens to people when they are in a situation in which they are chronically threatened or feels unsafe, a situation of violence, surprise, and insecurity, in which the so called rules of life for how to go along and get along simply do not consistently apply.

What happens with Rattle Fatigue is that the person who suffers from it begins to numb out. It is simply too exhausting to feel what would be so normal to feel. What should not have happened has happened, and it wasn’t a one-time thing. Anything can happen and it does, and one feels increasingly helpless to do anything substantive about it. So, oh well. Apathy and numbness replace all else.

I thought of that life numbing thing called Rattle Fatigue again last week when three different after football game parties in Mississippi left 8 dead teenagers and another 20 people wounded. I felt myself go a little numb as I remembered all the shootings before: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde and, and, and all the ones whose names and faces somehow drift into one like a Halloween mask of evil. I was already feeling a bit of Rattle Fatigue when I heard about the Mississippi tragedies, I believe the 340^th mass shooting in our country this year. What had already started my numb discouragement, however, was the story and the images, of the ICE attack on our colleague, The Rev. David Black, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Chicago.

I was rattled nearly numb when I saw pictures of US secret police on a roof top in Chicago laughing as they shot an unarmed minister of our own denomination with chemical weapons as he prayed in the streets. Here is how he described the attack, “I extended my arms, palms outstretched toward the ICE officers, in a traditional Christian posture of prayer and blessing. Without any warning, without any order or request that I and others disperse, I was suddenly fired upon by ICE officers. In rapid fire, I was hit seven times on my arms, face and torso with exploding pellets that contained some kind of chemical agent. It was clear to me that the officers were aiming for my head, which they hit twice.” A young, PCUSA pastor, standing on a public street with others of his flock protesting ICE violence, as was his constitutional right, and praying, was shot with chemical weapons while the officers laughed as he fell to the ground.

That was when I felt it. Rattle Fatigue. I thought, “I’m done. How was I to preach on encouraging one another when I had gone numb? How was I to preach on anything when, at that moment, all I really wanted was to work a jigsaw puzzle and get a foot massage. It was right then with my “I can’t do this anymore. Send somebody else, Lord” thoughts floating like a bubble over my head, that the Spirit brought the week’s text to the front of my mind. I realized that the advice there is timely medicine for the church in these days.

“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

The pastor who wrote the long sermon/letter we call the book of Hebrews knew a bit about rattle fatigue, and a bit about a congregation that was both bored and numb in the face of the challenges they all faced. He knew a bit about how hard it is on some days to keep going in this thing we call the walk of faith. He knew that his people mostly just wanted to feel better. When the lives they lived didn’t help with that, they wanted sweet sermons with puppies and happy love stories. I get that. But the problem is that sweet platitudes are mostly anesthetic and the last thing we need to add to our already rattle fatigued lives is more Hallmark card delusion.

The Christian faith is not easy, nor is the life into which it thrusts us. It never has been.

But we are not without guidance for the sacred journey of our lives, a journey in which, like Queen Esther, we were made for this moment. So think these days are the advice from Hebrews

1. Don’t neglect to meet together.

The pastor of the Jerusalem churches who writes Hebrews for us, sees that folk are falling away from worship. It is not just discouraging to him about his ministry or even the churches future, I would submit. I don’t think that is the crisis he feels. He knows the sovereignty of God will never allow the faith to finally falter. He knows Jesus’ promise that if they fall silent the stones will shout out loud. For him, I think, the crisis is more pastoral than that. He knows that without each other his flock will not just fall away,

they will fall apart. It is together in worship that courage arises. It is together in worship that the wily Spirit gives us unexpected inspiration. It is together in worship as we hear the Word read and preached upon that our salvation begins to manifest itself as a growing wholeness, and that growing wholeness makes us both brave and eager to live as Christ for the world. Whether that means taking to the streets as David Black and his flock did,

or supporting missions, or running for public office, or making a cream cheese pound cake for a hurting friend, each of those actions and the myriad others that the Spirit puts into our hearts, is an act of bravery that flies in the face of both our own rattle fatigue

and the me me me and mine values of our aching society. Being together is a fundamental form of encouragement.

• Provoke one another to love and good works.

I do love this one because the word we translate as ‘provoke’ in Greek actually means: to pester, to irritate, to prod or to disturb the apathetic. One of the old saying that is sometimes used to sum up Jesus’ call on us is “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The image that comes to my mind when I hear this verse is of trying to get our dog Bonnie to go outside if it is raining. It is nearly impossible. I have to grab her by the collar and drag her, while she is sitting down and resisting with her entire 60-pound self.

When I finally get her on to the porch, she sits on the steps, with me behind her, getting soaked myself and saying “Go Go Go.” It’s an ordeal and sometimes it doesn’t work, but sometimes it does. When the weather is fair, I can just say to Bonnie, “Want to go out?”

and she is up wiggle tailed and waiting at the door. She shoots out of the house like a rocket and barks down the whole yard. But if it is raining. That is a horse of another color.

That is a picture of ministry too isn’t it? It is our job description, out of love for Christ, to pester the fire out of each other until we head out in the rains of our times and do what is loving and good, not necessarily what is easy and safe.

• Hold on to Hope.

The author tells us, to hold fast to hope without wavering. The word here for hope refers to a kind of pleasurable confidence, or confidence that leads to true peaceableness. If you look at the way this passage is constructed, it is a kind of template for what true encouragement looks like. True encouragement, the life’s blood of any congregation, is grounded in an unwavering hope in God. That is what allows us to keep meeting together when we want to and when we don’t. It is a profound hope that we cling to like drowning people cling to a solid raft. It is an unwavering hope that makes us brave and compels us to get behind our own apathetic selves and shout “Go Go Go.” Or if that fails, to drag each other by the collar to meet the moment for which each one of us was born. It is unwavering hope that the days in which we live are no surprise to God, and that even if we don’t see a way out or through, God does. That is the true encouragement that lies behind every kind word we speak to each other, every sacred listening with each other,

every cheerleader-y moment when we come up beside each other and our whole community and say, “you can do it,” whatever it happens to be. It is hope that makes a lie of our despair and of our negativity. It is hope, this pleasurable confidence, that we exercise like a wasted muscle when times are tough, and that, as we grow stronger, allows us to run with the Spirit in good times and bad. It is hope, sturdy confidence, not a wish, that is the encouragement that sticks, lasts and grows. Holding fast to hope is sometimes a struggle, like holding on for dear life to Bonnie’s leash when she sees a squirrel. But it is the only way not to lose what is most precious to us even if it leads to an uncomfortable face plant or two.

We may hear the words ‘hold fast to hope’ and look around us or within us and just say “How, how, how do we do it?” How do we do it without going numb with rattle fatigue and its companion helplessness? I have rightly been accused in my long ministry of being long on diagnosis and short on cure, so I want to offer a bit of medicine for us if we want to encourage and be encouraged these days.

First of all, it helps to awaken to the humbling reality that what we want and feel is necessary, may not be the straight path to wholeness we assume. One of the most freeing and humbling thoughts we can have is “I don’t know everything and I might be wrong about somethings.” This is not license to do nothing, nor to fall into debilitating self-doubt. It simply makes room in your heart and mind for what you do not yet know in order to help you see new possibilities. It helps me to remind myself that the God of surprises, the God of an 80-year-old woman in the maternity ward, the God of fallen pharaohs and empty tombs is unsurprised by the days in which we are living and still has power to bring light into darkness, and life from death.

Second, Help each other see the small wonders, the often missed declarations of hope,

the consolations along the way. Things like the smell of coffee brewing, the hummingbird at the feeder, the pet dreaming in your lap, the laughter of a shared memory, the only faintly remembered glee of a child, the hints of change in the autumn air. Those small wonders are hope’s favorite food. When we help each other notice them, that is encouragement indeed.

Third, Give more air time to your good news than your bad news. Leave the hand wringing to political pundits. Practice, instead, smiling and doing creative things. Each creative act defies the gray lies of doom and connects you with the God who hovered over chaos and pushed it back, who created salamanders and pandas and poodles and finally people in God’s own creative image. Provoking ourselves and other to creativity is a way of seeing the world in new ways and nearly always perks us out of rattle fatigue and gives us a sense of agency and hope.

Fourth, Remind yourself that this too shall pass, the awful and the wonderful so hold it all with loose arms. Forgive yourself for all the stuff God has long forgotten, and hold fast to the hope of better days that are always, and in all things, promised to God’s children.

Each of those things restores a sense of hope in parched and rattled souls and can change what you see. Small practices give us the energy to help others see more, see differently, see with the expectation of wonder.

Maybe you are tired, numb and cannot see the next steps to take. If that is so, when that is so, you know what to do: meet together for support and worship. Pester each other to do what is right and necessary, even if it means going out in the deluge of chaos just outside our backdoors. And hold on for dear life to the hope that is in you. For it, is indeed, what makes life dear.