Confession of a Hopeful Cynic

Confession of a Hopeful Cynic--December 20, 2018

[Mary said:]

"[God] has helped his servant Israel,

    in remembrance of his mercy,

 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

   to Abraham and to his descendants forever." [Luke 1:54-55]

Forgive me for having learned the cynicism of my generation, but I do not trust most big-name important people to keep the big public promises they make.  Not anymore.

I don't believe the promises politicians make--not when they are elected, and certainly not when they are running for office.  

I don't believe the promises institutions make--for example, I sure don't expect Social Security to be around for me when I retire, and I don't think of the money that comes out of my paycheck to fund Social Security as "mine" that will come back to me.  I just assume it is gone and is paying for someone else's retirement now.  But I don't believe it will be there for me when it is my turn.  I don't believe that promise will be kept.

I don't the believe the promises of advertisers that their product--whatever it is--will make my life better, or my outlook happier, or my kids better behaved.  I just assume that advertisers believer their job is to tell me things I want to hear rather than to make claims they can actually back up with evidence.

And, again, forgive me if this sounds especially cynical, but I don't believe the promises we all insist we are serious about when we as a society say things like, "Never again."  A school shooting in Sandy Hook six years ago this past week made everyone say, "Never again," which was a follow-up to the "Never again" after Paduka... and Columbine... and so on and so on.  And here we are six years after Sandy Hook with our "Never agains" thrown back in our faces after Las Vegas and Pulse Night Club and Tree of Life Synagogue and Charleston, and too many more to list.  For that matter, we all said, "Never again" after allowing the Rwandan genocide to happen (which was supposed to be the lesson we had learned after the Holocaust taught of to say "Never again"), and yet the Rohingya people, the starving children of Yemen, and the devastated towns of Syria all reveal that we don't really mean "Never again"--we mean something more like, "We wish this wouldn't happen, but we are not really going to do much to change our current actions in order to prevent other people from facing this same tragedy all over again."

Look, the bottom line for me, cynic that I am, is that we human beings are crooked schemers when it comes to our promises.  We talk a good game, and we may even have the best of intentions, but we are terrible at actually living up to the commitments we make, especially when we realize there will be a sacrifice involved in keeping our promises.  We might do a half-decent job keeping our promises when we are getting something out of them, but that's not really how a promise is supposed to work, is it?  Commitments aren't meant to be fair-weather arrangements that are only valid when we want them to be.  And yet, time after time in my decades of life, I have been let down by the public figures, from government to television to the editorial page, who talk big and do not keep their promises.  After enough disappointment, you just stop expecting anyone to actually do what they have committed to do.  You expect people to bail out when things get difficult--because so many times, that's what they do.

And that is what makes Mary's concluding insights about God from here in her song so powerful.  Mary sees that God is faithful in keeping promises.  Even before her baby is born--which means even before Mary can see what her son Jesus will do and say and accomplish--she sees his very existence as the keeping of a divine promise.  God had promised a savior to deliver God's people, and it had been a very, very long time.  But Mary sees that God is not one to bail out, even when we make it difficult for God.  Even when we keep wandering off and walking away, God does not give up on us or shirk responsibility for keeping promises.  And more than that, Mary knows that God does not back out of commitments just because it gets difficult or we make it more complicated.  God's keeping of promises does not depend on our worthiness or deserving, but simply on God's commitment to be faithful.  

And that, dear friends, is honestly the only thing that keeps me going some days.  I don't have a solid trust in my elected leaders or the institutions and systems they manage to keep their promises.  I don't trust the "better angels" of our nature to stay the course with the difficult commitments we have made, because I have seen us collectively bail out when things get costly or painful.  And I don't even trust in my own ability to keep my own promises perfectly, because I know I am constantly failing to live up to my best intentions and spoken words.  But I do trust God to keep promises.

I trust the God of whom Mary sings to keep every promise God makes, because she saw it in her own baby--the promises made to Abraham and Sarah, to Isaac and Rebekah, to Jacob and Rachel and Leah, to Moses and Miriam and Ruth and David and all the rest.  God keeps promises, and so even when we are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, we can take God's promise to the bank.  We can live now as though God's promises are sure... because they are.  That doesn't mean God is obligated to do everything I want God to do--that was never the promise.  But when God makes a promise, God keeps it.  And when we complicate or confuse things, God does not walk out.  That faithfulness is strong enough to keep us going, even when the talking heads and purveyors of hot air on television let us down.  I don't trust any other big name or important person to keep their word, as much as I wish I could--but God, yep.  

God is faithful.  

God keeps promises.  

Call me a hopeful cynic, but knowing that changes how we wait now for them to be kept.

Lord God, ground us so completely in your faithfulness that we can stake our lives on your promises, even when it is hard to believe.