Hope, Despair & Helplessness: Singing in the Stocks at Midnight

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday of Easter by the Rev. Holly Huff.

This week we join Paul and Silas in prison in Philippi. After Paul heals the slave-girl with a spirit of divination, she’s no longer of any use to the owners who have been exploiting her gift like she’s a trained monkey. Driven by profit, they drag Paul and Silas (who had been heading to the place of prayer) into the marketplace, where they are judged unfairly, attacked by the crowds, beaten and wounded and thrown into prison. Orders come down that they are to be kept securely, so into the innermost cell they go, surrounded on all sides. Their feet are fastened in stocks, immobilized so there can be no escape. Trapped where they are, kept in chains and behind locked doors, there’s no reason to hope they can change their situation. They are helpless and stuck, and it would be easy to despair. 

It has been for many of us a week of helplessness and grief, in the unbearable face of 19 4th-graders slaughtered with their teachers in the last week of school in Uvalde, Texas. It is the latest in a seemingly endless series of horror, each resounding on and blurring into the next, funerals for the children running into the funerals for the 10 Black folks killed at the grocery store in Buffalo, New York two weeks ago, killed because they were Black. The mind boggles. The spirit quivers. Horrors like this are liable to shake the foundations of our world. Extreme suffering, when deeply witnessed, destabilizes the meaning we have made of our lives, radically exposing us to reality, painful as this may be when we are unprotected by concepts. 

Yet we are most of us afraid to go there, and we are already so drained from the anxious and constrained years of pandemic, ecological dread, and endless war. There’s enormous grief, of course, and our feelings of helplessness to prevent next week’s horror. There is anger, too, and fury, directed at those with power, at the gunman, himself a child, or those who might have intervened, and those who might still act to build a safer world where the good of the community is truly honored and profit doesn’t have the last word. There is rage at the moral cowardice on display. Common, too, I think is the absence of feeling—a blank numbness—a sense that perhaps “I can’t afford to care about this anymore”, overwhelmed and dissociated from our world, unable to summon up any more outrage. It’s all run dry, leaving just this emotionally empty husk, helpless and stuck.

It matters I think, how we relate to this helplessness. There is the frustrated helplessness of us who would be masters of our own fate, captains of our own ships, heroes making life-saving, world-preserving decisions, preventing suffering and protecting our own hearts from being broken open. But Paul and Silas have something to show us, a different way. Remember the slave-girl’s calling card that so annoyed Paul? “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Even before they wind up in prison under maximum security, Paul and Silas do not expect to call the shots in their lives. They are slaves of the Most High God, willingly bound to the God of love who has been made known to them in the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, trusting this God as the source of their being and the purpose for which they were made, Alpha and Omega, their beginning and their end. 

What does this surrendered trust actually look like? Well, at midnight in Philippi, if you’d been a prisoner under Roman guard, you would have heard singing. Paul and Silas, praying and singing hymns to God, at the darkest hour of the night. What sort of unkillable hope is this? Singing and praising God while wounded in the stocks. Are they delusional? No more delusional than Jesus, singing with his disciples at the Last Supper before he’s taken away to his death. That’s a detail I usually forget, but it’s there—they sing a hymn, probably a psalm of praise. Paul and Silas are no more delusional than Etty Hillesum singing in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, dropping her prayer on a postcard between the slats. Or than Fanny Lou Hamer, singing spirituals with another imprisoned activist after having been beaten almost to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail in 1963. Or President Obama and the people of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, singing Amazing Grace at the funeral after that shooting in 2015. 

Where does this kind of resilience come from, this capacity to sing and praise in the face of murder and abuse? From what well does this deep resistance to despair flow up? It’s called hope, hope which is adamantly not optimism or cheery emotional wallpaper, but Christian hope, and it’s shockingly sturdy given how little it claims to know. Hans Iwand (1899–1960), Lutheran pastor and theologian, who was part of the Confessing Church resistance movement to the Nazi regime said,  “Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must be at an end”—and you could say the same of hope. “Our [hope] begins at the point where atheists suppose it must be at an end. Our [hope] begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our [hope] must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness.” Or as Paul puts it, “Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees?” (Rom. 8:24). So hope is not seen. We don’t know quite what we hope for. We can’t imagine what deliverance from gun violence might look like in this country. Perhaps we intuit some outlines, some necessary pieces, but the overall unfolding is shrouded. And in that unseeing, in that powerlessness, continuing to trust in human power leads surely to despair. Or, facing our own emptiness, our dryness and helplessness, we can embrace that poverty of spirit, and find our freedom in being bound to God, like Paul and Silas.

Hope is born out of the same place of helplessness that can also spawn despair. Both start with grief, a confrontation with what is missing, for instance confronting the absence of the unity to which Christian disciples are called. “Father, I pray that they all may be one. As you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” We are meant to be the Body of Christ, knit together in love, but that Body is bruised, broken and bleeding, bullet ridden. “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other” (Mother Teresa of Calcutta). We can’t see a way forward to wholeness, and “Hope that is seen is not hope,” anyway. So what do we see? That same broken Body: Jesus, with us in the midst of the pain and sorrow of this world. As the hymn puts it, “When human hearts are breaking / Under sorrow's iron rod, Then we find that selfsame aching / Deep within the heart of God” (Hymn #379, “God is love”). Jesus is with us, and He will not leave us comfortless. The one who descended below all things has also ascended on high, that he might fill all things (Ephesians 4:10), even death and hell, and every place of terror where blood and fear hang thick in the air. 

Icons of the Resurrection show the Risen Christ standing atop prison doors which have been knocked clean off their hinges. Opened locks and burst chains are scattered on the ground below as Christ reaches in to pull the prisoners free, Adam and Eve and all of us. He has trampled down the gates of hell, having gone even to that furthest place of distance, to fill all things with his presence. And this presence changes what’s possible, in ways we usually don’t see or fully understand. God’s deliverance is very often not deliverance from our suffering but a “song in a weary throat,” freedom given right in the midst of it. As Paul and Silas are singing and praying locked in the heart of that prison, bound in trust and surrender to God, suddenly there is an earthquake so violent that the very foundations of the prison shake, and they do see immediately those prison doors open wide and everyone’s chains unfastened. Because God has come near to us in Jesus, all the forces that hold us captive, as individuals and communities—though we do not yet see how—will eventually fall. “The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.” And we can make an offering of our lives just as they are, our praise and our anguish absolutely as tangled up as they are, in a song that sounds something like, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Amen.