CHAPTER 1
First Quarter
Sustaining Hope
SEPTEMBER 7, 2014–NOVEMBER 30, 2014
The thirteen lessons for the fall quarter focus on the theme of hope. Unit 1 concentrates on the hope for restoration that exiled Israel will experience as seen through the eyes of the prophet Jeremiah. The lessons of the second unit feature Bible readings from Habakkuk, Job, and the psalmist, all of whom seek hope from God in times of trouble. The final unit is a five-lesson study of God's glory as Ezekiel and Isaiah envisioned it.
Unit 1, "The Days Are Surely Coming," begins on September 7 with "A Vision of the Future," which reviews God's promise as recorded in Jeremiah 30 to restore the people to their land. We move ahead to Jeremiah 31 on September 14 to explore God's new covenant that not only ensures forgiveness but also promises a renewed relationship between God and Israel. On September 21 we consider "A New Future" as we turn to Jeremiah 32 to hear about the prophet's hopefulness as he buys a field while awaiting an invasion by the Babylonians. "Improbable Possibilities," the lesson for September 28, examines God's promise that forgiveness and restoration will follow punishment.
"Dark Nights of the Soul," a four-session unit that begins on October 5, opens with "Rejoice Anyway," which looks at background Scripture from Job 1, Psalm 56, and Habakkuk 1–3 to discern God's message of patience and assurance that God will act on behalf of justice. On October 12 we will study "Even So, My Redeemer Lives," based on Job 19 and Psalm 57, to understand that Job had an unwavering belief in God's redemption. "Hope Complains," the session for October 19, delves into Job 5, 24, and Psalm 55:12-23 to hear Job's complaint that God appears to do nothing to call wicked people to account for their actions. On October 26 we turn to Job 42 and Psalm 86 to hear the conclusion of the conversation between God and Job and become aware that "Hope Satisfies."
The third unit, "Visions of Grandeur," begins on November 2 with "God's Divine Glory Returns," which glimpses the vision of God's holy and merciful glory in the Temple as seen in Ezekiel 40:1–43:12. We review the instructions that the prophet was given to build a new altar and make offerings as told in Ezekiel 43:10–46:24 in the lesson for November 9, "The Altar, A Sign of Hope." On November 16 we catch a glimpse of Ezekiel's vision of life-giving water, as recorded in Ezekiel 47:1, 3-12, in a session titled "A Transforming Stream." "Transformation Continued," the lesson for November 23 from Ezekiel 47:13-23 and Acts 2:37-47, helps us to hear God's Word about sharing our inheritance with those who live among us. Unit 3 concludes on November 30 with "Let Zion Rejoice," where we hear the prophet's words of hope, good news, and rejoicing from Isaiah 52:1-2, 7-12 and Psalm 33. These words seem especially appropriate on this first Sunday of Advent.
Meet Our Writer
REV. JOHN INDERMARK
John Indermark lives in the town of Naselle, located in the southwest corner of Washington state. His wife, Judy, recently retired from her work as an E-911 dispatcher for Pacific County, Washington. Their son Jeff works on the Quality Assurance team that oversees the counseling programs in the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration facilities in the state of Washington.
John grew up in St. Louis, graduating from Northwest High School, St. Louis University, and Eden Theological Seminary. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, John served as a parish pastor for sixteen years before shifting to a ministry of the written word. He has also served in a variety of interim and extended pulpit supply positions for Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran congregations in southwest Washington and northwest Oregon. In the spring of 2013, he served a three-month associate pastor term at Church of the Holy Cross (U.C.C.) in Hilo, Hawaii.
John's ministry of writing focuses on spiritual formation books and Christian education curricula. Among his most recent books are Way Words: A Daily Itinerary for Lent and Gospeled Lives. John and coauthor Sharon Harding have a new book, Advent: A to Z: Prayerful and Playful Preparations for Families. The curricula projects he currently writes for include The Present Word, as well as The New International Lesson Annual. He wrote the New Testament materials for youth and leaders in Crossings: God's Journey with Us, a confirmation resource published by Logos Productions, Inc., and also did a revision of that resource for use with adults.
In their spare time, John and Judy enjoy walking their region's trails and logging roads and traveling the Southwest, Hawaii, and British Columbia.
The Big Picture: Keeping Hope Alive
What Do You Hope For?
Your answers to that question will rely, to some degree, upon your age. What a young adult, who seemingly has all of life ahead, hopes for will likely differ from the hopes of an elder who has journeyed through many years and experiences. Indeed, those accumulating years of experiences may nurture or suffocate hopes once held. That final point underscores the significance of attaching the modifier of "sustaining" to "hope" in the title of this quarter's sessions. At any isolated moment in life, hope might seem reasonable or even self-evident. But what happens when the passage of days, or years, results in no fulfillment of that hope? Having hope then depends on the more difficult discipline of sustaining hope.
This matter of sustaining hope greatly concerned the writers (and audiences) of the passages explored in this quarter. In the wake of exile, in the aftermath of extraordinary personal and national tragedy, in the face of others who want to blame victims (or messengers) for their suffering, the prophets and psalmists and sages of Israel sought to frame a way for hope to be sustained when hope's possibilities seemed most under siege and out of sight. Sustaining hope is a task and discipline taken up in the New Testament as well. There is, for example, Paul's perspective in Romans 8:24-25, as well as the hope given witness in the prayer Jesus taught to disciples of all times: "your kingdom come." The church and individual Christians have been offering that prayerful hope for two millennia. So after almost two thousand years of waiting, what enables our hope in God's reign to be sustained—and more practically, what enables us to translate that hope so long-delayed into the conduct of our lives as individuals and communities?
Biblically speaking, the question raised at the opening this article ("What do you hope for?") is grounded in an even more fundamental question: "In whom do you hope?" Biblical hope is grounded in the character and trustworthiness of God. The passages that we will consider this quarter largely have to do with God's promises. Whether those promises themselves generate hope—and hopeful living—depends upon the prior determination of whether we trust God to bring the promises to fruition.
So as you lead those who will engage these sessions and texts with you, seek ways to keep hope's horse before its cart. That is, keep before you the primacy of trust in the One who makes such promises (and the purpose of God in their offering). This focus will be especially critical when you reach the third unit of the quarter, where hope's sustaining is linked to some extraordinarily detailed promises related by Ezekiel regarding the vision of a new temple.
The remainder of this article will consider overviews of the quarter's three units. These overviews will not only provide biblical backgrounds for the wider context of the book(s) from which each unit's passages are drawn but also thematic entry points into each unit's emphases. Taken together, these units and their passages witness to vital components for what makes possible the sustaining of hope.
The Days Are Surely Coming
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed in his book Man's Search for Meaning: "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed." Frankl went on to expand that thought, gained from his experience in the concentration camps, to its application to life beyond the camps. Having and sustaining hope are not optional appendages to life. Without hope, despair sets in. Without the promise of better days, the oppressiveness of difficult times can close us off to life, figuratively and sometimes literally.
The first unit in this quarter explores four passages from the prophet Jeremiah. On the one hand, Jeremiah might seem an odd choice to begin a study on hope. Most of the material in the first twenty-five chapters of his book is largely devoid of hope. In those sections, "the days are surely coming" tends to be imaged primarily in texts of national judgment and personal despair. But the Book of Jeremiah, like the Book of Isaiah, has a pivot point. After exile has ended the despair over the immediate future of judgment shifts to the long-range hope of new days marked by God's promises. Understanding the nature of these pivot points in the Prophets is key to making sense of their words—not simply in their original setting, but in applying them to contemporary matters both inside and outside of the church. Simply comparing the first half of Jeremiah to the second half might make it seem as if the prophet has had a sudden change in mind—or worse yet, that the prophet is not consistent in saying contradictory things. Which is it? Judgment or hope, threat or promise? we might ask.
But as Jeremiah and Isaiah perceived, the message hinges on the situation. In an era of prosperity and ease, when justice ignored did not seem to matter, complacency is the enemy. Hope has little or no appeal, because folks are fat and happy, so to speak. In those times, Jeremiah and others sounded calls to repentance, and urgings to turn aside lest judgment fall. When those calls went unheeded, when justice and mercy went ignored by those in power, and when people did not want to be disturbed by such troubling summons to renewal, judgment sounded.
Yet once exile came, and despair set in among a people separated from land and home and a now-destroyed Temple (Psalm 137:1) it was no longer the time to pronounce judgment. It was the time to bring forth hope in the form of God's promises of a new day (Isaiah 40:1-2). As taken up in the passages covered in this unit, God's promises to which Jeremiah witnesses relate to the coming of days marked by restoration and new covenant, by homecoming and healing. What enables Jeremiah and those whom he addresses the ability to trust these promises and the One who makes them? The character of God revealed in commitment to relationship (Jeremiah 30:22), in covenant grounded in forgiveness (31:31-34), and in God's "steadfast love," a word that speaks of God's loyalty to those with whom God covenants.
The church has much to learn from the prophets, particularly when it comes to speaking the truth most needed in our times. Sometimes, both in the church and in the wider culture, we get the order mixed up. In times of prosperity and ease, when budgets are bulging and pews are filling, we presume those are the days to not rock the boat, to speak only of good things that make our comfort even more comfortable. In times of crisis, when conflict arises or threats appear, we take as times to scold and blame (usually others, not ourselves). Yet the prophets remind us of God's call to be contrarian. They announced judgment when all seemed well. They spoke hope when all seemed lost. The likes of Jeremiah understood that the proclamation of "the days are surely coming" needs to be framed in ways, and with a message, that reminds us our trust is not in ourselves or our accomplishments or our power (or the lack thereof): Our trust is in God. The promises of God keep us from confusing good times with the reign of God—and from letting bad times defer our hopes for and labors toward that same reign.
Dark Nights of the Soul
Dark Night of the Soul was originally a poem written by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic known as St. John of the Cross. The poem lyrically describes a spiritual journey that leads into encounter with the Divine. Saint John later wrote a lengthy prose exposition on the poem and more on the spiritual journey described therein. In literature and popular culture, the phrase "dark night of the soul" has come to represent any moment of crisis or deep questioning, spiritual or otherwise, from which we struggle to emerge.
The four sessions in this unit pair a psalm in the background readings with print passages from the prophet Habakkuk (one session) and the Book of Job (three sessions—actually four, as the first session also has Job 1 for one of the background readings).
Habakkuk is one of the shorter prophetic books in the Old Testament. Unlike books such as Jeremiah and Isaiah, where some historical context is provided to "locate" the prophet's work, no such information is given in Habakkuk. While there is an approximate range of one hundred years within which Habakkuk might have been written, most scholars set its composition at the verge of Babylon's initial deportation of Jews in 597 B.C., yet before Jerusalem's destruction in 587 B.C.
Habakkuk's "dark night of the soul" is clearly and powerfully stated in the prophet's complaint to God recorded in the second verse of the book: "O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you, 'Violence!' and you will not save?" Where other prophets open with indictments of Israel's wrongdoing, Habakkuk takes God to task for the ruin he sees overtaking the people in the form of the Chaldeans (another name for Babylonians, see 1:6). Habakkuk does not merely call out to God in the darkness he experiences; the prophet wonders whether God's seeming absence will continue, thus deepening that darkness.
Joining Habakkuk in the focus passages for this unit is the Book of Job. Job may well be a book with which most are familiar, but few have deeply explored. Part of the reason for maintaining a safe distance may be in the difficult questions the book raises. In the first chapter, the background reading for the first session, the flood of tragedies that fall upon Job are said to result from God's willingness to let Satan's question "does Job fear God for nothing?" (Job 1:9) into an allowance for severe suffering to fall upon Job. Indeed, Habakkuk 1:2 could easily serve as a viable response to what befalls Job. He suffers through no fault of his own. That, however, does not stop his friends from presuming Job's suffering is because of his guilt. The second and third sessions are parts of dialogues between Job and those who presume to know the mind of God on such matters. The fourth session is Job's response to the voice of God who speaks to him through the whirlwind in chapters 38–41.
Paired with each session's primary texts are psalms; in particular, they are psalms of lament. The lament (or complaint) psalms have been woefully ignored at times by the church, particularly in liturgical use. Psalms of praise (Psalm 8) or thanksgiving (Psalm 104) are more frequent accompaniments as calls to worship. Good Friday may be the one exception to our flight from lament, when we read Psalm 22:1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," in remembrance of Jesus' own cry from the cross. Even then, we are quick to move to the second half of that psalm, where praise returns. But our avoidance of lament misses a key element of faith, namely, God is to be called upon in all our times, good and bad, including the dark nights of our souls. The enemy of faith is not lament, but silence in the face of what weighs down upon us. Indeed, as the very structure of lament songs teaches us, trust arises out of, not in spite of, lament. For when we bear the whole of our selves and our lives to God, we avail ourselves of the gift of Holy Presence. Faith in those dark nights, as Job and Habakkuk well knew, comes not by denial of the darkness, but in holding on to God come what may.
Visions of Grandeur
"Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18 KJV). The wisdom of this counsel in Proverbs neatly ties together the flow of this quarter's units. "The days are surely coming" relies intrinsically on a vision, an insight, into what those days will bring. Enduring the "dark nights of the soul" requires a vision that draws one forward and upward and lightward. Indeed, the overall theme of "Sustaining Hope" depends on an overarching purpose that gives hope its energy and promises their durability when conflicting or contradictory experiences arise.
And so it is fitting that the final five sessions take up "visions" of those coming days meant to sustain hope that come to us, four from the prophet Ezekiel and one from Isaiah.
While Ezekiel may primarily be associated with his vision of "a wheel within a wheel" (1:16) that opens the book or the later vision of a valley of dry bones brought to life by God's Spirit (37:1-14), the visions of days to come explored in this unit are grounded in God's promises of a restored temple. The Temple stood at the core of Israel's religious practices and identity—but exile stripped it away, first in distance and later in destruction. Ironically, the time of exile produced an institution that much later would provide Judaism with the resiliency to survive after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem after the time of Jesus: the synagogue. But for Ezekiel, the hope of homecoming and restoration was envisioned by an idealized temple clearly defined not only by the rites and rituals within but also by the construction of its precincts and beyond that to the borders of the land that would safely enclose it.
