The Main Reason Hopes Fail

-Rev Melissa Fain-

3 “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8 Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”
Mark 4:3-9 NRSV

Watching people hurt sucks!

When it comes down to it, we don't want people to feel pain. I believe if most of us could take away pain with a push of a button, we would. No more tears. No more heartache. 

There's a catch- there usually is.

Pain serves a purpose. Pain let's us know our body needs help. Pain also serves as a warning that something bad is happening, and if not reacted to immediately would continue to happen.

Many are now probably amending their idea, and push the button to end senseless pain but not all pain.

I get it. I'm right there with you. But we tend to lump unhealthy and healthy pain together, and avoid them both equally. If we embraced healthy pain, we'd all be healthy. (Well, many more of us would be healthy. Never speak in absolutes. Crap, that's an absolute. Try not to speak in absolutes.) You get what I mean. 

​Planting hope is easy, but growing hope is a painful process. 

Play-Doh

Back in my youth ministry days, I used to do this activity. We'd sit in a circle, and I would pull out brand new Play Doh from a container. I'd announce the Play Doh was God's plan. God wants us to build something. I'd mention something it was supposed to be. A heart. A cat. Just something that would be relatively easy for the group to make. Then I would pass the Play Doh around the circle. My only rule was everyone had to touch it as it went by.

I feel it's important to add, this was always with middle school youth. You can tell them to make a ball, and two people in you have this perfect ball that would make Leonardo Di'Vinci proud, just to have the third in the circle squash it. I found it hilarious, while almost all the youth in the circle were in mental anguish. (See, I didn't use absolutes.)

The point of the activity was two-fold. First, our fingerprints are necessarily all over God's plans. It's part of the activity. Unless we're willing to take hold of what God gives us, it simply sits as an unrealized idea.  Nothing can happen unless we're part of what's happening. Second, being part of anything naturally means failure and failure almost always hurts.

"Saving" us from eminent failure

There are two levels of pain here: There's the pain of the person you see with the hope, and there is your pain in helping that person.

Don't be mad at the animals in the Little Red Hen, because most of us are those animals. We live in an immediate culture, and that immediacy has made us lethargic and took away our desire. Our intelligent selves have streamlined life, took away pain, and destroyed passion in the process. This was the piece I was missing every time I talked about immediate gratification: the death of passion. 

Now I'm back to Brueggemann and the Prophetic Imagination. (If you've been following over the past few months, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, go back and read January and February's posts.) Comfort is the killer of God's call.  Comfort are the birds, path, rocky ground and thorns. Under the guise of ease, God's plan, or hope, is often destroyed:

• The Birds: I'm all to familiar with the birds. This is when God's hope is planted in good soil and begins to grow. The birds are others who like what they see so instead of asking God for their own hope, they steal someone else's. Welcome to the internet! It's filled with birds! I've personally seen what God has asked me to plant in someone else's soil. It shut me down at first. I work my butt off for nothing! As in, notice there are no ads, and no one is paying me to be here. Then somebody swoops in, takes my content, and gets paid to deliver it in their own way. What was meant to be grown in this soil, is now being thrown away in someone else's garden. I had to realize that some day it will be known, mostly because the internet has an eternal memory, and it will be clear the seed fell among this soil first. I had to let it go if I were to do what God has asked me to do.
• The Path: I have been destroyed online. Not decimated. Obliterated! Oh, and it was a good experience. It was important to be torn apart and destroyed. Sometimes you need to just allow things to sit on the path and see how it holds up. Unlike the rest of these, we need this one. Seeds don't plant without being digested or cut up a bit. The shell is supposed to be worn down some first. I needed to hear some of my theological ideas were stupid. Yeah, stupid. What seminary didn't do, that random guy on the internet who cared nothing for my well being did. We don't want to be trampled, because trampled means it hurts. Many don't understand why they haven't been spiritually growing. Well! They haven't had their shell worn down a bit. How is the hope to break through without it? The path, in moderation, is good.
• Rocky Ground: We are terrified of deep faith, y'all!  We are only comfortable with shallow faith, that pushes us superficially. We can start something new, as long as that something is exactly like the something old that is dying. I'm over shallow faith. It's all fun and exciting until something difficult hits. Then you're spiritually dying because no one taught you how to go deep. Why?! Because their institution planted themselves over shallow rocky ground. You'd have to leave to get deep, and they don't want you to leave. You're a number!  Almost nothing lasting can grow on the rocky ground.
• The Thorns: Here is where most hope dies. There is a reason why fruitful growth always seems to happen in the wilderness. God's change is scary. The very people you love will attempt to stop it. They will think they are trying to help. They will see where you are going and see the pain that is coming with it. They will attempt to stop you in two ways:​​​​

1. They will try to "save you": Before I continue, God's salvation and their salvation is different.
   Their salvation is immediate, It could be a quick fix, or a redirection, but either way it's for immediate gratification. They usually see the heartache that goes with hope, and want to protect you from that heartache. 
   God's salvation is lasting.  It's the long game. It plays for lasting change, that affects groups, not just specific people. It often hurts getting there because it require systemic change to take root.
   Thorns salvation is to offer you an out. We love these people. Job's wife was a thorn: "Curse God and die." Basically, kill yourself and find immediate peace in death. When you are on Job's side that sounds unspeakable, but part of this journey is seeing the misdirected compassion in characters like Job's wife. That statement can be said in love. She was trying to say that statement in love through immediate gratification, only doing what she said would have immediately killed God's plan and Job.
   
2. They will try to kill you. I do not use those words lightly. If you have God's Word, you are not out planting more thorns. That makes you a threat. Your success signals their destruction. Once again, I don't want you to be angry at the thorns. Yeah, it sucks! God knows how many times I've been taken out by the thorns. There are those that do it on purpose. Be angry at them, intentional destruction is something we should rage against. Most are those who can't see beyond themselves. They see their own death, not countless new life. Put it this way, Moses didn't change Pharoah's mind with "Let my people live." That phrase was why Pharoah didn't let the people go. His concern was his people, and letting God's people go killed his people. Thorns will kill God's call not because it's God's call. They can't see God's call, they just see death. That's what comfort gives you; a view of death. Yeah, don't be angry with them, be sad. 
   
3. They will deeply wound you if you try to pull them out of their false theologies.
   

Let me say it: It's not fair. It's healthy to name the truth in this case. 

It's not fair that anyone who is writing about taking God's plan are all telling these bouncy stories of success, where their only trial involved praying for a week and everything magically appearing in front of them. Those books and stories are used as ammunition to destroy those who don't just magically get everything they pray for. They're used to further demoralize those who have had their words stolen by birds, trampled by strangers, and strangled by thorns. 

It's not fair that all the power is held by thorns. It's not fair that God is calling those with no power to change a broken system that has all the chips. When the thorns offer power it's only to further the growth of more thorns. You can't take their power, because they ask you to leave God's hope at the door. Taking  a piece of their power turns you into a thorn grower. So you sit in the wilderness with nothing, completely demoralized, and lost.

God can work with nothing. Back when I first began, I knew what I had. I didn't have a single thing. Nada. Ziltch. I was ashamed of this fact, and didn't know how to verbalize that deep inner call with the nothing God gave me. It often left me speechless when people would ask what this whole Fig Tree thing was. In reality, I should have been excited by the void. It was fertile ground for God's' plant to be whatever it was supposed to be. What was Fig Tree? A seed. A tiny hope. An unknown that has the potential to be anything God wanted it to be. I didn't trust God enough to express this desire, because I kept waiting for something. Anything. That's my failure. I couldn't trust. What am I doing now?

I'm at a place where the story hasn't reached it's best selling conclusion. I feel when I've reached the end of a chapter to Fig Tree's epic story. The Zombie Church section was one of those moments. Now I'm just sharing the awful truth: Hope is painful. Hope is work. Hope if filled with heartache and loss. I'm sharing because all of these things are healthy and someone, anyone, needs to say it. We are a sacred remnant. Hope comes from the ashes of the refining fire. What I love about Jesus' parable is the mass of it all was never considered. Yes, some of what God has given has been gobbled up by greed. Yes, some of what has been given has been planted in shallow graves. Yes, some of what has been given has been destroyed by those who fear it. But that sacred remnant still remains. God gave so much, so something would still remain to save us all. 

That hope has been secretly growing in the wilderness away from everything else.
That hope has been growing deep roots that are years old in the making.
That hope might not be Fig Tree Christian when it's all said and done, but that hope will save us all.