So many things gnawing away at our Eastertide hope. When I read the news headlines, so often I simply have to stop and put my phone down. I just can’t read anymore! We are living in chaotic times right now. It is a chaos that is spreading throughout the world. Just last week a friend of my husband’s, named Gerardo had to appear before ICE…he was facing so much uncertainty. All morning I lifted up desperate prayers, I wondered if this friend would be gone away from our sight or be able to return to his family and to his beloved church.

Where is the hope? What are we to do? How are we called to help? These are questions not easily answered. Easter seems so far away in these situations! And then reality hits me, this is just one person who caught my heart. So many other people are also in need, so many individual people suffering, and the weight is so heavy….where is the hope? Where is the resurrection hope that Christ gave to us that he continues to give to us, this hope that we were reminded up just 3 weeks ago? Oh yes this hope conquered death (and I’m clinging to this promise of life after death as many of you have who have lost a dear loved one.) but what about this hope that comes when facing those things that feel like darkness creeping into our lives and into our world…how are we to let the light come in? Where is the hope?

I think we are fickle people sometimes, we’re inconsistent, changing our ideas, vacillating, unpredictable and this is especially true when it comes to hope, our hope is fickle. I see this in our faith too or maybe more accurately our understanding of God and how God works in this world is fickle, not God now but our understanding of God. One moment, we are sure of God’s presence around us and within us but then in a flash we are questioning where God is. Questioning what we believe, and how it fits into our experiences in real life. We can have the very same experience and yet come up with totally different interpretations of what it means. On a personal note, my brother’s best friend looked at me after my brother died and said, God made a mistake on this one. I’ve thought about that so much but all along I was thinking God has been so present in his dying. Look at our faith in general there are about 45,000 Christian denominations! We have so many because we believe different things about our faith!

In our passage this morning, the Jews that have gathered around Jesus are not much different than you and me. They are trying to figure out how Jesus fits into their understanding of God and how God works in their world. Now there is some question about the intent of their questioning. Are they trying to trick Jesus or truly discover who he is? These Jews are part of the Jewish religious establishment. From my perspective they are trying to defend the tenets of their faith. Here they are questioning Jesus about his authority and yet he has already performed many healings, many miraculous things. Most likely they have either witnessed or heard about these miracles and yet they do not see who he is …they are not able to see through their eyes of faith the truth about Jesus.  In their unknowing they ask him if he is the Messiah.  Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me.” In other words, Jesus is saying see what I do, watch me and you will know who I am and my connection to one he calls “His Father.” Jesus goes on to say that those who know him, hear him, and follow him. Hearing and following are related to the knowing.

How can we learn to hear and know? I’m talking about that deep knowing that helps all of us find hope when hope seems absent. I read this story in a reflection by Glenn McDonald about another dark time in our history. It is a story that shows how hope can be found in darkness. To set the stage I need to share a little history. After the Bolshevik revolution and the reign of Stalin, churches almost totally disappeared. By the 1940s only a few hundred churches in the Soviet Union remained and the number of monasteries went from 1,025 to zero. Some 50 years passed when the doors to Russia reopened, and it was discovered that there was still a warehouse where confiscated Bibles from all those churches had been stored. Some missionaries asked if they could have these old Bibles. They gathered up some volunteers to help redistributing the Bibles. One of the volunteers who helped was a Russian college student who from all accounts was an atheist, with his only goal to earn some money helping the missionaries. This student secretly took one of the Bibles and slipped away to take a quick glance at its pages. He was shaken by what he discovered. On the first page of the bible he had randomly picked, he saw the name and the distinctive handwriting of his own grandmother. Of the tens of thousands of Bibles in the warehouse, he had somehow pocketed the one that belonged to a family member who had never lost her faith.

What a story, a true story that happened during a very dark time in our history, a story about one person, one event that shines pinholes of light into the darkness. It is the light of Christ that restores our hope, the light of Christ that is seen through our stories. These stories give us a vision of how God is still working in this world and even in our individual lives. Even today many years into the future, hearing this story again becomes for us a witness to the truth of who Jesus is through the eyes of faith. Our stories and the stories we share with one another can become a catalyst to fuel our sense of hope.

I turn to Brene′ Brown for her wisdom on this idea of seeing and the lenses we see through. Her work often uses the metaphor of “lenses” to illustrate how our individual perspectives construct our understanding of situations. Brenè believes that our eyes or our “lenses” represent a unique vantage point each person has, each one of us has our own vantage point. Our lenses or our view is influenced by our own experiences, beliefs, and values. When thinking about the Jews questioning Jesus, they are all looking through the same lens, seeing only one perspective. It limits their ability to see Jesus and what he is doing right in front of them. It limited their understanding of God. The young Russian college student needed to experience an unexplainable discovery to see God’s presence in the world. His experience changed his lens and gave him new eyes of faith.

Brenè Brown argues that we often mistake the idea that we can simply switch our own “lenses” to see things from someone else’s perspective. Instead, she suggests that we need to actively engage in understanding different perspectives and acknowledge the limitations of our biases and assumptions.

If we expand her understanding to include “lenses” of faith, we can see how essential it is to actively engage in listening to each other and our stories of faith…stories of faith help us to see God through many different lenses and each story is one piece of the larger puzzle that reveals the mystery and complexity of God’s presence and movement in the world. By the way, Gerardo didn’t get shipped away, he was able to return home to his waiting family. The Russian student’s story reveals how the Holy Spirit works to help one lost person find a way to God. These stories are stories of hope when added together help us all to know Christ better, to hear Christ through others, and follow Christ in our actions. Our stories of faith shared with one another can help change the lens through which others see and our stories shared through the eyes of faith helps keep hope alive. Amen