Chronic Hope

Sermon at 9:30 on Sunday, November 2, 2025

Rev. David R. Collins

Lamentations 3

Verses 1-2, 7-9, 16-18, 21-29, 31-33 (NRSVUE)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about chronic conditions.

I have a friend who suffers from face blindness. He literally has no idea what I look like. He said that one time at a party, his wife went away to get another drink, and another woman came to talk to him, and he just picked right back up with the conversation he had been having with his wife. Hopefully that never gets him into a bad situation.

I read that some people suffer from “Auto-Brewery Syndrome” where the body ferments carbohydrates in the gut, producing alcohol and people get drunk without ever downing a drop. They can never operate heavy machinery.

Some people have something called synthesia, where they see colors when listening to music, or shapes when they smell certain scents. Without taking any drugs at all!

I read about someone who tasted words. Which is a completely different condition from eating paper. That’s called pica. That one gets more serious though. Sometimes people with pica want to eat things that can make them very sick, which isn’t funny at all.

But some of them also have indestructible GI systems, like Michel Lotito, also known as "Monsieur Mangetout" (Mr. Eat-All). From 1978 to 1980, he consumed an entire Cessna 150 airplane.

I have a few chronic conditions.

I have ADHD. Which back in the 1980’s, on all my report cards, they just called, “Has great potential but trouble focusing” and at home they just called it, “Why won’t this kid stop talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”

But my most troubling chronic condition is probably one that many of you share with me: Hope.

Hope

Hope is such a liability sometimes, isn't it? Sure sometimes, it’s the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. But more often than not, like on the show Ted Lasso, it’s the thing that kills you, which the fans of the Richmond Greyhounds like to say.

In our country right now, hope is a really difficult condition to live with.

As I’ve been watching the news, especially about 42 million people losing their food assistance, but also about what this administration is doing to Chicago and Portland, and I fear what’s going to happen next…hope is there like a… a holy infection. Like a cough I just can’t get rid of. What color is the hope today? Oh it’s green? Gross.

Because it would be simpler to just not have hope right? Or to just have hope that applies to me and mine, and go with the flow and see what I can get out of it all, but this nasty lingering hope just won’t let me.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s hope at all…or just a glitch in the system. Because social science tells us that we were wired to believe things will get better, even when there’s no real reason to. Maybe what I’m calling hope is just that irrational optimism we all carry around by default.

Scientists have a name for it. They call it “Positivity Bias”. Turns out that a lot of our mental biases come from living modern lives with caveman brains.

Positivity Bias

Positivity bias might’ve evolved to help us survive. Imagine if you were one of our ancient ancestors when life was short, and full of predators. If you believed that every rustle in the grass was a tiger, you'd never leave the cave. If you believed you could never win the hunt, you wouldn’t even try. Positivity bias gave early humans just enough optimism to keep going, and step out again, even after yesterday’s failure. The ones who didn’t have positivity bias didn’t become our ancestors did they?

So now we’re wired to believe it’s all going to be okay, even when we’re in danger. That kind of wiring got us out of the caves, but it’s not always helpful anymore. Sometimes, it keeps us from seeing the real problems, let alone naming them. But that’s not hope.

We suffer from chronic hope, it’s a condition we live with, because we really do believe that God is here…not just as wishful thinking, but as the truest thing we know. Even when we doubt everything else, we believe God is really here. But the question is, where?

Where is God?

That’s the question that bubbles up in hospital rooms and war zones. Where is God when the poor are deprived of food, and the wicked become exponentially richer?

Where is God when a nation is on the brink of losing everything that made it special?

That’s not just an important question for us right now, but it’s one of the central questions in the Bible. That question might just be the catalyst for how the Bible came to be in the first place.

Before we go on, I want to give you a quick preview of a project Megan and I are going to begin next year as your preachers. You know, when we went to seminary as wide-eyed evangelicals, one of the first things we learned (that was very hard to hear) was that the Bible didn't come to be in the way that we had imagined it to.

It didn't fall out of heaven. God didn’t sit down at a typewriter and write it from beginning to end. It's more like a quilt, made out of very very special fragments of stories that needed to be protected and preserved, through the generations.

And one thing we learned back then, which didn’t make much sense at the time, but makes a whole lot of sense now, was that a great deal of the Old Testament was written during, and in response to the exile which began in 586 BCE.

Exile

The exile wasn’t just the lowest point in Israel’s story…it became the defining one. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and carried much of the population into captivity. Everything they thought was permanent: their temple, their land, their government …was ripped away.

But then, through the lens of that loss, the Old Testament began to take shape. Scholars, archaeologists, and theologians believe that it was during and after the exile that the Hebrew scriptures were gathered, edited, and canonized. Not in a time of triumph, but in a time of deep disorientation and despair.

When the people had every reason to stop believing…they started writing.

So starting in January of next year, we’re going to start at Genesis 1 and start working our way through the Bible, in light of what we’re living through, because it’s also closer to the heart of the Bible than we’ve ever really been before.

Also, many of us grew up with assumptions about the Bible that failed to prepare us for the complexity of the real world, and what’s worse, some of those assumptions have actually helped create the world we’re in now.

A world where scripture is used to justify cruelty, both here and in Gaza. Where Jesus is draped in the flag and stripped of compassion. Where people believe that if you can find just one verse that seems to support what you already wanted to do, then God’s on your side and no one can tell you otherwise.

That’s the kind of world bad readings of the Bible have helped build. And it’s time we started reading it better. It’s also time that Christians like us knew the Bible better than the ones that make us look bad. It will be a multi-year project, and don’t worry, we’ll take breaks for the holidays. We won’t be talking about Lamentations on Easter.

But we are going to look at it today!

Lamentations

Lamentations is five poems written in response to the destruction of Jerusalem. The temple’s gone. The city’s in ruins. The people are broken and scattered. And yet…in the middle of all that, someone starts writing. Not to tie it up with a bow, but to bear witness to the truth of what was lost, and also to the hope that is still within them.

So I want you to hear these words, not like a sermon, but like a journal entry. Like someone sitting in the rubble with dust and blood still on their face, trying to make sense of what just happened. Because that’s what this is, and what hope can look like for us too. I encourage you to read all five poems in their entirety, especially the third one that we are going to look at today. It begins like this:

Lamentations 3
: 1 I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath; 2 he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light;

I’m usually the first one to say, “Hey, God didn’t do this to you.” This person did. Or you did. Or it’s these broken systems we’ve inherited and kept propping up. But Lamentations doesn’t go there. Not right away.

It puts all of it at God’s feet over and over again. All the loss. All the grief.

And maybe that’s not because God really caused it…but because when you’re actually standing in the ashes, there’s no one else you can really trust enough to hold your disappointment. No one else you believe could actually do something about it. So the writer doesn’t censor the anger, or insist on correct theology. They just give it to God.

This chapter is really long, so let’s skip down to verse 7, which feels like a panic attack in slow motion.

7 He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has put heavy chains on me;

8 though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer;

9 he has blocked my ways with hewn stones; he has made my paths crooked.

The writer feels trapped, unheard, cut off in every direction. It’s not just that life is hard…it’s that even God feels like part of the problem. The writer doesn’t pull any punches. Look at verse 16.


16 He has made my teeth grind on gravel; he has made me cower in ashes;

That’s not a poetic image, it’s a picture of violence. That’s someone who’s been assaulted, not just emotionally but physically. I saw a video this week of a masked ICE agent doing exactly that to a real person. Teeth on pavement. That’s not a metaphor. That’s real. And it’s happening now.

And the verse doesn’t say, "They did this to me." It says, "He did." God did.

Which begs the question: 
How is this God doing it, when it’s clearly some misguided person with too much power and too little accountability?

That’s the tension the writer holds without resolving.
We know who signs the orders, who pulls the trigger and who builds the cages.


So why put this on God?

17 my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;

18 so I say, “Gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.”

Maybe the point isn’t about blame. Maybe it’s about hope.

Because when evil is in charge…when the people doing the harm are the ones holding all the power, you don’t waste your breath begging them to do better.


Here the poet cries out to the only one who might still be able to undo it.
They take the weight of everything that’s been done, and they throw it at the feet of God.

That doesn’t mean that God caused it. But that God is the first one we turn to, to make it right, because God is the one who sees what no one else wants to see.

So the first shift isn’t from suffering to joy, but from silence to speech. The first act of chronic hope is telling the truth about what we see and what we feel. But then the poem moves from truth telling to remembering.

21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;

23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

The writer reaches back…not to make sense of what just happened, but to grab hold of what they still know to be true. The way that you would grab your photo albums from a house fire.

But memory isn’t enough by itself. The writer doesn’t just remember, they talk back to their own despair.

24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”

25 The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.

This is what real hope requires sometimes: a sort of inner dialogue. Coaching yourself. Preaching to yourself. Which is what I do every time I get up here, and just hope you’re feeling the same way.

Because I know that there’s part of me that wants to give up, and another part that says, God is still here. Keep going.

That conversation we have with ourselves is part of the healing. That’s what hope is.

But it’s not all about words, next there’s a pause. A quiet. Because hope isn’t always loud. Sometimes it shows up like stillness.

26 It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

27 It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth,

28 to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it,

Stillness is a kind of hope too. A choice not to run from the pain or distract from it, but to sit with it… and let it work something in us. To look and not turn away. To remember and not seek distraction.

And that line about youth tells me this poem wasn’t written in real time. It wasn’t live tweeted. Some things just don’t make sense in the moment. The waiting matters. Reflecting on suffering leads to insight like this next verse, which has entered my top ten favorite Bible verses.

It is good…

29 to put one’s mouth to the dust

(there may yet be hope),

To put your mouth to the dust is the ultimate posture of defeat. It’s humiliation and surrender. But right there…in the lowest possible position…the parenthesis opens: (there may yet be hope). And I love that they put it in parentheses in this translation.

If I was a tattoo guy, I would combine this verse with an illustration of George Orwell’s quote about fascism, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” And the picture would be the face with the boot pressing the guy’s mouth to the dust, but underneath it, in parenthesis, it would say (there may yet be hope).

That’s what hope looks like to me. It’s not an answer for how every horrible thing that happens is somehow good. It’s not magical thinking. It’s not everything happens for a reason.

Hope is knowing the truth about God even when it’s not reflected in the truth of the world.

Lamentations puts it like this.

31 For the Lord will not reject forever.

32 Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love;

33 for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.

God is not cruel. While yes, with the writer of Lamentations, we lay ultimate responsibility for everything that happens at God’s feet, we also remember that those feet bear the marks of nails.

God may be guiding history, but God is guiding it in a way that includes the destruction of two temples and the death of the his only begotten Son.

Maybe that’s why as the people of God, we don’t just have hope, we suffer from it.

We’ve got an intractable case of chronic hope, and we’ve had it since at least 586 B.C. when Jerusalem was sacked and our spiritual ancestors lost it all.

Our hope is found in the fact that God’s not done.

So if you’re here this morning and you feel like the world is falling apart, or your own life is, you’re not crazy. You’re not broken. And you’re not alone. So check in with each other. We’re all going through the same thing and we all share the same chronic condition.

We are part of a people who’ve been sitting in the ruins and telling the truth for a long, long time.

And we don’t always understand it. We don’t always see how it ends. But we remember. We wrestle. We wait. We reach for mercy that is new every morning, even when the night still hasn’t ended.

Because hope is not a strategy, or a mood. It’s a condition. And it’s incurable.

And maybe that’s the good news:
 That even when we feel abandoned, we are still contagious.


Even when everything is broken, we still believe it can be healed.


Even when our mouths are in the dust…we still whisper:


(there may yet be hope)

Amen.