“The House of Hope”
Exodus 40:34-38; Matthew 7:24-29
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
March 3, 2013
Last month, on the Sunday after the big blizzard, I co-led a workshop on hope, together with Rabbi Katy Allen. In preparation, I googled “quotes on hope” and “stories about hope.” There were lots of them.
Some were trite and made hope seem too easy. Some were sarcastic and made hope seem absurd. Some were inspiring. One was perplexing, and it kept pulling me back to it. The quote comes from a longer poem by Hafiz, a fourteenth century Persian poet. “Come, for the House of Hope is built on sand; bring wine, for the fabric of life is as weak as the wind.”
At the workshop, the participants were invited to pick a quote that spoke to them and one that didn’t.
“I’ll tell you which one I don’t like,” one person began. “The Hafiz quote. Built on sand? How depressing.” “And then there’s the wine,” someone else added, “in my family it was the wine that made the fabric of life weak.” “Yeah,” the first critic jumped back in, “the ‘bring wine’ line reminds me of ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ As though there’s no point trying to make things better.”
They made very good arguments. Still, I can’t let go of this ancient poem. There’s something more going on there.
At first reading, the opening clause–the house of hope is built on sand– simply names one of the more sobering realities of life. In this last year, we have seen the danger of literally shifting sands–the New Jersey seashore, the Cape, Plum Island. That physical reality mirrors something we all experience in our lives. We plan for a special, important event, a really good thing on which we place our hopes, and the speaker gets sick at the last minute. We rely on a loving and beloved family member to keep our lives steady and solid, and he dies. Love we thought would last forever gets torn apart by tragedy–or just by neglect. A meteor hits a town in Russia; a sinkhole buries a bedroom in Florida. Painstakingly, with great love and care, we build houses of hope, and then the sand beneath them shifts.
The poem names a reality we often experience as negative. Hafiz, though, invites us to turn that around. It’s possible his “bring wine” is a call to become drunk in our despair. But I hear it as a call to celebrate. How does he transform that harsh reality into cause for celebration? How do we?
Two images, both connected with our scripture readings, help me claim cause for celebration in the shifting sands on which our houses of hope are built. The first comes from Exodus. The Hebrew people spent forty years wandering in the desert after God delivered them from slavery. During that time, they were instructed to build a tabernacle where the law Moses received was placed. The tabernacle was housed in what they called the Tent of Meeting. They understood God to reside in that tent in a special way. It was not a temple built of stone; it was a tent pitched in the desert. The house of God–the house where their hope resided–was built on sand.
The forty years in the desert was not wasted time; it was the time needed for a group of former slaves to claim a new identity as a free people, to become community. The tent of meeting enabled them to recognize God’s presence in their midst without mistaking the house of God for God. A house of hope built on sand keeps us from thinking the houses we build are the source of our hope.
The other image comes from our gospel reading. In my small group, as we discussed the merits of Hafiz, one friend remembered the time her church youth group was supposed to lead worship based on this reading from Matthew’s gospel–the house built on rock and the house built on sand. They took it in a direction that surprised the adults.
What is sand anyway? they asked. The teenagers pointed to researchers who have traced the sand that washes up on Massachusetts beaches to the rocky coast of Maine. Massachusetts sand comes from Maine rock, eroded by millenia of waves, pounded by crashing water into tiny pieces. Sand, the youth pointed out, is not the opposite of rock; it is rock at a different stage and in a different form. It is rock that has been shaped by life, rock that takes on the beautiful contours of the wind and waves that sculpt it.
At the end of our service today, we will sing about Christ as the solid rock on which we stand, as the foundation on which our hope is built. The song contrasts that rock with shifting sand–as though the rock of Christ is holy and the shifting sands of everyday life are not. What if, instead, we learn from the wisdom of my friend’s youth group and claim the shifting sand as a manifestation of the sacred rock. What if the changeable, sand-shifting realities of our everyday lives are also holy?
If sand is rock in a different form, then we can claim the fleeting, precarious love between deeply flawed human beings as an expression of divine love–the solid rock of God’s unchanging love in the shape of shifting sand. Then we can recognize our hopes for a better world not as futile pipe dreams but as a sandy expression of the realm of God breaking in. Our love, our dreams, our efforts–they are as changeable as sand. And they are real. They are holy.
The house of hope, Hafiz writes, is built on sand. That means we, its builders, are never done with our work. At any given moment, we can stop and admire its beauty. The next moment we are back to work, repairing the damage after a storm, shoring up the foundation after erosion, sometimes salvaging a few pieces and starting all over again, perhaps on higher ground. The house of hope built on sand can never be a museum piece to be admired from afar; it is by definition a work in progress. Hafiz is right; that is cause for celebraiton.
Our Persian poet has another perplexing line: “the fabric of life is as weak as the wind.” Wind is weak only if we judge strength by what we can see. We cannot see the air, but it enables us to live. We cannot see the wind, but we recognize its power in flags flying and trees toppled. Likewise, we cannot see the Spirit of God–but we recognize its power to give us life and also to turn our lives upside down. The fabric of life may appear weak, as insubstantial as air. But it is as persistent as the breath of life, as powerful as a gust of wind.
The house of hope is built on sand. The fabric of life is as weak as the wind. So bring wine, Hafiz urges. In a few minutes, our deacons will do just that. They will bring forth wine–and grape juice and bread. They will bring wine to help us retell the story of the wine Jesus shared with his disciples. That night, Jesus’ disciples were forced to face the reality that their house of hope was built on sand, and the sand was shifting. Their beloved teacher, on whom they had placed all their hopes, was about to be crucified. The wine Jesus offered was the wine of remembrance and also of celebration, for that night, even as they faced what they knew was coming, they celebrated the Passover promise of God’s deliverance.
The wine we share today is the wine of remembrance and also of celebration. We remember Jesus, who shared in our human living, who walked with his disciples on sandy shores, who works beside us as we build and rebuild houses of hope in this ever-changing world. We celebrate that ultimately, our hope is built on the solid rock of an empty tomb, on the promise that God’s love can never be destroyed–not by storms or erosion, not by hatred or fear or death.
Bring wine, Hafiz exhorts, for the house of hope is built on sand. Drink this wine, Jesus says, for I will be with you always. Let us rejoice that the shifting sand on which we build the house of hope is holy ground, for God created this sandy earth and Jesus walked on it. Let us rejoice in the amazing gift of the human spirit, that sacred part of each one of us that keeps building houses of hope no matter what. Let us rejoice that what we build is only the house, for hope is an everlasting gift from God. Amen.