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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Ordinary Time October 14, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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In the mid-1960s, Martin Seligman conducted a series of experiments using dogs in groups of eight. In the first group of eight dogs, the dogs would be exposed to an electric shock. However, this first group were given the ability to stop the shocks by pressing their noses on a large panel, and they learned to do this fairly quickly. A second group of eight dogs were exposed to an electric shock like the first, only this second group could not stop the shocks. The only way the shocks would stop for a dog in the second group was if a dog from the first group it was paired up with pressed the panel, and thus stopped the shocks for both dogs. So the second group could not stop the shocks no matter what they tried. After becoming accustomed to this situation, both sets of dogs were moved to a shuttle box, where when they were shocked in this box, they had the option of easily jumping over a short barrier to escape the shocks. They repeated this experiment eight times on different groups of dogs. The results were full of significance. In the first group of dogs that had learned to stop the shocks by pushing the panel, all eight of this group easily jump out of the shuttle box and escaped the shocks. However, in the second group of dogs that had learned that nothing they tried could stop the shocks, six out of eight dogs never even tried to escape the shuttle box. They just lay down and whimpered.i Researchers went on to do similar kinds of experiments with people using irritating noises, and got similar results. Seligman and others realized that they had shown that helplessness, and hopelessness, was something that could be learned, and if it could be learned, they wondered if it could be unlearned. The prophet Jeremiah spoke honestly and courageously about the immanent Fall of Jerusalem. He warned of God's coming judgment and how the people would be taken into exile in a foreign land. And then it happened. Jerusalem fell, the people of Judah were conquered, and they were taken away, far away, into the strange land of Babylon. They had been uprooted from everything they knew and trusted. They had lost their temple, and a sense of God's presence with their nation, and seemingly all their hope for any kind of meaningful future. What would they do now? You can just imagine how a sense of despair and hopelessness hung over their lives. You can just imagine the sense of paralysis that gripped them, as they lived with loss and regret, anger and hurt and fear. Perhaps even, at this point, they had lost the will to live in any kind of vital way. Or maybe they just felt stuck and were not sure what to do in this situation. Well, into this time of hopelessness, Jeremiah wrote an open letter to the exiles. Now, it was significant that such a letter came from Jeremiah because his word of warning had been correct all along. He had shown himself to be the true prophet of God. Here's what Jeremiah said to a people stuck without hope: ”Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Marry wives and beget sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters and you may increase there and not dwindle away. Seek the welfare of any city to which I have carried you off, and pray to the Lord for it; on its welfare your welfare will depend.” Isn't this a fantastic message from Jeremiah to the exiles! Build and plant, grow your families and tend the welfare of your cities. He is saying to them: ”I realize you feel stuck and hopeless in this situation, but God is not through with you yet. And hope is not just God's doing, it is a partnership between you and God. So go and make hope happen in ways that you can.” Centuries later, Jesus is walking, teaching, reaching out to people in the regions around Galilee. As he is about to enter a village, a group of ten lepers call out to him for help. Now, to be a leper in that day and time was to be an untouchable. It meant that you were shunned and ostracized from participating in society with others. You were considered not only socially inferior, but also religiously inferior. For after all, as the typical thinking of the day went, if you were not inferior or had done something morally wrong, then why did God give you such a hideous disease? And so lepers mostly wandered from place to place and begged for whatever they could and surely struggled with the twins of despair-helplessness and hopelessness. That's why it says in our gospel story that the lepers were standing far off from Jesus when they called out to him. I imagine they were standing far off from just about everybody. Yet they called out to him, ”Jesus, have pity on us.” And the response of Jesus was an intriguing one. ”Go and show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus says. Now, in that day and time, the only way a leper could be let back into society was to show herself or himself to a priest in order to verify that they were healed of the leprosy, and to receive a blessing from the priest making it okay to re-enter society. So these ten lepers are now faced with a choice, would they believe Jesus and in the possibility of their healing by taking the time and effort of going to a priest, or would they just dismiss his invitation and stay in the place of despair? Well, all ten decided to go, and it says that as they went, they were healed. In effect, what Jesus did was invite the lepers not to hold their hope passively by waiting until someone would change their situation. Instead, he invited them to make their healing possible, to make their hope happen by acting and moving toward it. Making hope happen. We here today are not so far from Babylon and Galilee. Rates of depression in our society, and its corresponding sense of helplessness, have skyrocketed in recent decades, and it is not just affecting growing numbers of people generally, it is also affecting more younger people than ever before. Added to this, many, many people have given in to a kind of quiet despair about their lives. Assuming, like Seligman's dogs, that they cannot really change in any meaningful way, many people just focus on surviving and getting by to the end of each day, drifting along day by day, week by week, year by year. They have no goals, no transforming plans, no intentional change, no real hope. They are the same person they were last week, last month, last year. They stay in a kind of drifting pattern always only moving toward the path of least resistance. I suspect we all of us, sometimes, in certain situations or more generally, feel like hopeless exiles in Babylon or helpless lepers in Galilee. We drift or get depressed or retreat from others or simply feel stuck in a certain place. I think many of us also get frustrated. In our better moments, we want something better and more hopeful for our lives. We dream of better days and even make resolutions about improved living. But somehow things seem to pull us back to the old patterns and soon we give up, only to be perpetually frustrated by it all. We feel the words of the country music crooner: ”Sometimes it ain't easy bein' me.” After 30 plus years of research and helping people, Martin Seligman notes that one of the determining factors which promotes hopelessness and pessimism is what he calls a person's ”explanatory style.” These are the habitual ways that a person tends to interpret their experiences and the events around them. Seligman and others have noticed that a more pessimistic person will explain things in negative ways which encourage depression, reduce resilience and increase feelings of helplessness. He notes that there are three ways you can detect a pessimistic style-the three p's of pessimism if you will. If a person tends to explain events in negative terms that are pervasive, permanent and personalized, then it will affect their sense of hope. Let me take each of these and illustrate how they might work in our thinking. ii A pervasive negative style tends to catastrophize things. That person didn't just cut you off on the way to work, he ruined your whole day. A certain person wasn't just mean to you, all people are mean. When something specific in one area of your life goes wrong, you say ”forget it” or some other colorful phrase and feel like all your life is now negatively affected by that one specific event. You can't seem to let go of it or put it in perspective. It's like you've experienced exile, and you are so overwhelmed by it that you don't know what to do next or how to make hope happen. This is pervasiveness-when one specific thing is blown up into a kind of catastrophe which affects and paralyzes everything else. A permanent negative style tends to use the words ”always” and ”never” a lot. It isn't that ”I am tired at work today,” it's more like ”I never get my work done.” It isn't that ”you haven't talked with me lately in a way I want;” it's more like ”you never talk with me.” It isn't ”my diet doesn't work when I eat out,” it's ”diets never work.” In terms of our gospel story we could say something like it isn't that the ten lepers were not healed so far, its that lepers are never healed. People who tend to be hopeless and helpless believe that bad events are more like permanent patterns that will always be that way in their lives. A personal negative style tends to blame the self for everything negative that happens. If something bad happens around me, then it must be my fault, because I am a general screw-up. It's not just that I say something in ignorance that can be laughed off, its more like ”I'm just stupid.” In terms of our gospel story, it's not just that leprosy is a disease, it must be that I have brought it upon myself. When it comes to making hope happen or not at all, how we perceive ourselves is important. As people of faith, if our explanatory style is pessimistic, our capacity for hope, even if God wants to give it to us, will be low. To be sure, we should be realistic, but as people of faith, we are called to more hopeful ways of thinking and living. And our style can be changed like any other habit, with effort and focus and time. In order to make hope happen and grow, we can use plans, intentions and goals to approach our future with some sense of focus. Now, we all use these to some degree, but what makes them work best. I think there are three things that help.iii First, looking back over the story of our lives and recognizing the strands of hope that run through them. When have we summoned our hope in challenging times? How did we handle unexpected hurdles? If we failed, what can we learn from it? What did it feel like when we accomplished what we set out to do? We can find the seeds of hope in our past and build upon them as a way to propel us forward with more confidence and understanding of ourselves. Second, we need the means, the ways, the solutions, to reaching our goals and making hope happen. Jeremiah gave the people in exile the means-build, plant, grow families, care for your cities. And Jesus gave the ten lepers the means to make hope happen-go and show yourselves to the priest. Both these passages show us that God doesn't do it all for us, but calls us as partners in making hope happen. When we think about the means to our goals, we can be thoughtful and creative and flexible. If your goal looks too big and far off, are there smaller steps you can break it down into. If one way gets blocked, are there different routes for getting there? Are there people or groups or books you can turn to for guidance? Hope needs a way or else it simply becomes frustrated, withers and dies. Third, we need the motivation. What will get us going? Recognizing that our energy and health are connected, what are we doing to make our health as good as possible? Are we putting things in our lives that will motivate us-from inspiring people to music to quotes to prayer? Are we finding things as we work toward our goal that feels good, things that we can enjoy along the way? We need to find our motivation in order to make hope happen. I have heard many of you tell the story of how the church responded when the previous pastor left. People became motivated and stepped up to take on many different kinds of responsibilities in order to embrace a hopeful future for the church instead of giving up on it, and it was a very good thing. Now, crisis motivation is okay in a crisis, but it does not work long term. We need to find sources of motivation from within, regularly and consistently, as we relate to God and to one another. That is the best way to make hope happen in the long run. When I was just out of high school and serving as a part-time youth minister, at one point I fell into several problems at once. My car broke down and my money situation was tight. I was feeling sorry for myself and separated from my family who had moved previously. I was feeling down about how things were going in my life generally at the time. I remember that I just left my car by the side of the road and walk home to my apartment. Well, I don't remember how, but my dad found out and drove the two hours from Dallas to Tyler the next night after his work. He helped me step by step with the car and each tangible problem I had. Then at some point in our conversation he said: ”Son, you gotta put feet to your faith.” That phrase was not original with him; it is actually an old preacher's phrase. But I want to say that I love my dad for saying that. The truth of it resonates in me now more than ever. To make hope happen, you gotta put feet to your faith. One other reminder: when hope does happen, let us give thanks to God, for all hope, even the hope that comes within us, starts with God. We don't want to be like the nine lepers who went on their way after being healed. We want to be the one who came back to Jesus and offered a thankful heart. The gift of hope always starts with God in our lives, and we can give thanks for that, but in our thankfulness, let us also remember that God calls us to make hope happen in our living. i. Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 17-32. ii. Seligman does this in Learned Optimism, 47-70. iii. For these three points, I am indebted to my reading of Hope Theory. Shane Lopez et al, "Hope Therapy: Helping Clients Build a House of Hope," in Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures and Applications, ed. C. R. Snyder (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000), 123-150. |
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