By Reverend Laurie DeMott

The dream of a society where all people will live in peace and plenty is a dream that has been passed along through the generations of the faithful. At the end of the book of Genesis, it seems that Joseph’s work has finally brought that dream to fruition.

But then we turn the page and read Exodus 1:8. “And then a King arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph,” and suddenly everything begins to unravel for the Hebrews.

Joseph had spent a lifetime building a reputation with those in authority in order to win a place of peace for his family, yet the respect that he had garnered and the things he had accomplished were suddenly made meaningless by the coronation of a new King who had no memory of Joseph or his work. We turn the page from Genesis to Exodus and the hope of Joseph’s work turns to the despair of the Hebrew captivity. One minute the dream feels realized and the next minute everything comes undone.

Hope has always battled with despair for primacy in the heart of the faithful working to bring the vision of God into reality. Through 1500 years of captivity, wilderness wandering, nation building, and exile, the people of Israel struggle constantly with the sense of the “almost” and still “not yet” realization of a land of peace and plenty. And when Jesus comes onto the scene, he too shakes the dust off of the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah and declares the hope once again: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me. God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19) “The covenant God created with the Israelites that called them to establish a just society grounded in compassion for all people is the same covenant that will inform my ministry,” Jesus proclaims. “The Kingdom of God – the Realm of God is upon you,” he declares.

And so as Christians, we have all learned that following Jesus means following that vision of relief for the suffering and justice for the oppressed. We are called to somehow leave the world better than we found it. Some live out Christ command to care for others by showing kindness to neighbors and strangers alike. Others throw themselves vigorously into broader goals that pursue great structural changes -- they agitate for universal health care or seek new initiatives designed to decrease childhood poverty. Some work with the mentally ill; some research ways to combat global warming. We may argue about how best to relieve poverty or hunger and we may debate how the church can be most effective in creating change, but none of us here would ever suggest that it is acceptable for a Christian to ignore the needs of others. We know that relieving suffering is part of our Christian commission and so we try in small ways or large to ensure that the world is a better place for our having been here.

And so, Exodus 1:8 is a most discouraging verse. Joseph had achieved great success in his work to move the people toward a society where their dreams of peace and plenty were realized, but then suddenly a new Pharaoh who couldn't tell Joseph from Adam and didn't care to learn the difference, began undoing everything Joseph had done until the next thing you knew, the people were right back in the captivity Joseph had worked so hard to claw his way out of.

There are days when we feel that despair of Exodus 1:8, days when we hear the harrowing statistics of infant mortality or of the growing number of working poor in America or the continuing extinction of species and think that for all of our work, the world remains far from the fulfillment of God’s dream. We are tempted to wonder if the moral of Joseph’s story is, "Why bother because nothing is ever going to change?”

Vaclav Havel defined hope as "that which one must summon without knowing the outcome.” If hope, then, is "possibility without promise" , that means that while we are called to work for the possibility, we must do so without the promise that we will actually see the results of our work. What Christ is calling us to is a lifetime of putting our energies and commitment into hoping and working for a world of peace and justice all the while accepting that the work we do might not have any kind of permanence in the world. Christ is calling us to live in hope while accepting the possibility of our stories becoming the story of Exodus1:8. It is no wonder that hope and despair live side by side in the hearts of many of the faithful.

In the early 1900s, Walter Rauschenbusch, a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, my alma mater, wrote a book entitled “Christianity and the Social Crisis”. Rauschenbusch’s first pastorate had been in the economically depressed area of New York City known as “Hell’s Kitchen” and he had come to believe that the private pietistic faith of his childhood was inadequate to meet the needs of the suffering. He developed a new theology called the Social Gospel which urged Christians to challenge the structures that keep people in poverty and peace at bay. He encouraged his readers to build the Realm of God through their moral commitment and spirit of cooperation, love, and justice. Rauschenbusch’s book inspired a generation of pastors who led their churches into work on behalf of the poor and, combined with the prevailing sense of humanistic optimism at the turn of the 20th century, the Social Gospel proclaimed that God’s Realm could be established on earth. All it would take was faith and elbow grease.

The Social Gospel had a profound impact on the church and for a while, its adherents enjoyed the heady enthusiasm of working together with people sharing their vision of a perfected future, but in 1914, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo and the war to end all wars began. When America entered the war in 1917, pastors became rabidly patriotric, often spreading false stories about the atrocities of Germans from the pulpit, and talk of social justice gave way to feverish support of the war. "The assumption [of the Social Gospel] that people might be so broadly motivated [that they would voluntarily want to] more equitably distribute [wealth] came to be seen as naïve, if not quaint... Walter Raushenbusch died in 1918, and it is said that he died of a broken heart. He, who had the greatest hope grounded in the Christian call to change the world for the better, saw his hope turn to the profoundest of despairs when World War I undid the work of his lifetime.

Rauschenbusch is not the only person ever to be overwhelmed by a sense of failure and futility as he tried to live out the call to create a just society. I have seen optimism turn to pessimism and felt the cynical despair of too many of the frustrated faithful. And while many of these workers in God’s realm know that Christ reminds us that God’s realm will forever exist only in part in our lifetimes, it is still hard to overcome a sense of meaninglessness about work that is so easily undone. I watched my own father, who spent his life teaching in prisons, working with children in an area of Dansville known as Shanty Town, and teaching conflict resolution to hundreds of people, develop a heavy sense of discouragement toward the end of his life. My family has even wondered if his death in October of 2001 wasn’t hastened like Rauschenbusch’s, by the events of 9-11.

And so, I have to confess to you that the question of how to maintain hope in the face of the ongoing struggles of the world, has become a personal one as I have thought about my father’s theology, and I have come to wonder if some of his despair wasn’t a result of the language and imagery that he and others of his generation were taught to use in reference to the Realm of God. From the beginning of the Social Gospel movement, the most common language used to describe our call to bring our Christian compassion to bear on society at large has been the language of construction. Pastors cited scriptures about cornerstones, and building houses on solid rock, and laying strong foundations, and placing stone upon stone. “We will build the Kingdom of God on earth,” they asserted.

The problem with this imagery is that no one can live in an unfinished building. Up in the 1000 Islands, you can visit Boldt Castle, a magnificent castle-like house that George Boldt in the early 1900s constructed to demonstrate his love for his new wife, Louise. Unfortunately, before the house was finished, Louise died unexpectedly. George ordered all construction stopped and never returned to the island. The house stood empty and unfinished for over 70 years when it was turned into a tourist attraction where today people can wander the cavernous rooms and try to imagine what it would look like had it ever been completed.

So too, if we say that Christ calls us to build the Realm of God on earth, then every set-back means that our efforts feel futile because we are no closer to living in that house than 3500 years ago when the Hebrews languished in Egypt. An unfinished house is useless! No wonder we risk falling into despair.

Jesus, however, employed another metaphor much more often for the Realm of God than a metaphor of building houses. When he preached about God's realm as a place of justice, compassion, and peace, he most often used agricultural images to describe its nature. “The Realm of God is like a mustard seed that grows into the largest of bushes. The Realm of God is like a man sowing seed that springs up overnight and yield a hundred-fold.”

The language that Jesus gave us to describe our work in the Realm of God is not the language of construction and builders but the language of gardens and gardeners.

I read a quote recently that said, "From the earth we came, to the earth we will return, and in-between, we garden." Gardeners know that there is no such thing as a completely finished garden. There will never be a spring when you get up to find the snow melted and say, "This year I won't need to do a thing to my garden.” Maybe you won't be adding any new plants but the weeds are not going to heed your desire for a year off. Gardeners understand that their work is never nor will ever be done; it is part of the inherent nature of the job. There may be good years when everything flourishes and there is less for you to do, but they may very well be followed by other years when disease or drought undoes the work of a decade when all you can do is plunge back in and replant. The best thing about gardening is that even if your dream is to turn the whole place into one great glorious blooming delight but all you’ve managed to do so far is till and plant one small corner, you can still put a chair there and enjoy the beauty of its peace. A garden is never finished but it is doesn’t have to be finished to still be able to bring beauty to our world.

It may have looked to Walter Rauschenbusch like the Social Gospel was a failure because it didn't build the Realm of God in permanent stone. And yet forty decades after Rauschenbusch's death, a young seminary student named Martin Luther King, Jr. read Rauschenbush’s writings and from them derived the theology that would inspire the Civil Rights movement. A lot of weeds had grown up in that garden in the intervening years but King got down in that dirt and tilled the soil anew.

We are called by Christ not to builders but to be gardeners. We are called to care for the poor, feed the hungry, bring wholeness to creation, and free the oppressed, to bring the vision of God’s realm into reality by planting again and again, by weeding and tilling, until we create a place of beauty in even one small corner of our world.

"From the earth we came, to the earth we will return, and in-between, we garden."