Hope Is Something We Do
Rev. Joan Deming
August 10, 2025
Text: Luke 11:32-40 (NRSVUE)
32 “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
33 Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Watchful Slaves
35 “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; 36 be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. 37 Blessed are those servants whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. 38 If he comes during the middle of the night or near dawn and finds them so, blessed are those servants.
39 “But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he[1] would not have let his house be broken into. 40 You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
Will you join me in Prayer?
Gracious God, open our hearts and minds to your Word for us this day. Renew and re-energize us. Let the light of your love shine through us to be a blessing for your world. In your holy name. Amen.
Since the start of this year, I’ve found myself nearly every morning, with my first cup of coffee, turning to a few online newsletters to gain perspective on current events that otherwise scare me silly. In one newsletter called “Today’s Edition,” Robert Hubbell consistently urges Americans of conscience to keep showing up publicly and loudly for democracy. Yesterday he issued a plea for discouraged people to hang in there, even when reasons for optimism are scarce. He wrote: “In the last six months, I have repeatedly offered the same advice: Whatever you do, don’t quit. Take a break, if necessary. Go on a news fast. Reduce the number of newsletters you read or the broadcasts you watch. Just don’t give up. Come back as soon as you can.”
The Gospel of Luke gives us a similar message in today’s reading, except maybe for the part where Hubbell says, “Take a break if necessary.” The essential message is “Whatever you do, don’t quit.” Jesus told his listeners to be like servants keeping watch overnight for their master to return from a wedding feast. There is an urgency in his directive about waiting and staying ready: “Be dressed for action,” Jesus says. “And keep your lamps trimmed and burning.”
His audience included his disciples and the local crowds who followed Jesus in his teaching ministry. They lived in historic Palestine under the heavy thumb of Roman Occupation. And the Christian audience that Luke wrote for some 50-80 years later also lived under persecution, a tiny minority subject to oppression. They all waited and watched for a better time, and many of them expected Jesus to bring that better time – and soon.
In the first part of today’s text, Jesus has already urged listeners to get their priorities straight – to treasure moral values more than property, and serve others rather than build up wealth. What I love about this story is that when the master does return in the wee hours of the morning, when sleep and inattention would have been most tempting to those left waiting, the servants who are still alert and actively watching get a completely surprising gift. The master girds up his own loins, sits them down at his own banquet table, and serves them a feast. Jesus seems to be saying, “This waiting promises something so good, it’s worth staying alert and ready.”
And has there been a time in our lifetime when we needed a message of hope and promise more than now, when the very fabric of our government and community feel like they’re being torn apart and we don’t know what to expect, when the time being feels urgent, with no assurance of when or how relief might come?
For at least the last ten years, I have to admit, in those times when nothing about current reality has looked hopeful or promising, I have looked to my friends in Israel and Palestine for clues about how to keep it together to work for a better day.
Many of you know that I have traveled frequently to Israel and Palestine. For ten years before I retired in 2018, I worked for an American nonprofit called Pilgrims of Ibillin that supports a set of excellent schools in northern Israel for Palestinian students. I had never been to the Holy Land before I began that job, but since 2007, thanks to that job, I have visited Israel and the West Bank at least 30 times. I’ve taken close to 20 groups of American travelers there for what we called Living Stones tours — visiting biblical holy sites, but also meeting local Christian, Muslim, and Jewish peacemakers in both Israel and Palestine. In October of 2023, twenty-five of us from Plymouth Church were preparing to fly to Tel Aviv for our own pilgrimage, but the horrific October 7th attacks by Hamas on Jewish communities around Gaza, and the start of Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza, cancelled that plan.
By a half year into Israel’s war on Gaza, I desperately wanted to travel to Israel/Palestine to check in with friends and offer solidarity, even though bringing pilgrimage groups was still pretty much impossible. So for 3 weeks last May I did go back to the Bethlehem area to volunteer on a farm owned by Palestinian Christian friends. The farm is completely surrounded by Israeli settlements that are aggressively expanding. Jesiah Ahlemeier from our Church and 2 other friends went with me. We had 2 purposes for traveling there: first to work as volunteers on the farm, and we did work long and hard. But we also went to be a protective international presence, to help keep Israeli settlers from attacking the farm to turn it into yet another illegal Israeli settlement.
During our time on the farm, we witnessed radical settlers from the closest settlement begin to plant a new illegal outpost just outside the fence-line of the farm’s eastern boundary.
It was easy to see that international guests on the farm are actually essential to keep the farm from being lost to aggressive settlers. So I went back for another three weeks last fall, and again for three weeks in May of this year.
About 6 months ago in a sermon here at Plymouth, I got to share some of our experiences visiting the Tent of Nations, and tell stories of the Lutheran family whose guiding principle is, “We Refuse to Be Enemies.” I also described some of the extreme difficulties imposed by Israel on Palestinians throughout the West Bank through practices and policies that a Jewish Minnesotan, Jeff Halper, has described as a “Matrix of Control.” Jeff grew up in Hibbing, graduated from Macalester, and got a PhD from UW-Milwaukee, but he has lived his adult life in Israel where he founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. In several books and through his work with ICAHD, Jeff describes how life for Palestinians in the West Bank is circumscribed by check points and restrictive travel permits and ID’s, by the isolating 700-kilometer-long Separation Barrier also known as the Apartheid Wall, by severe limits on access to water and electricity, and by separate sets of roads: excellent highways for Israeli-plated cars going to and from settlements, and inferior, often inconvenient Palestinian-only roads for white-plated West Bank cars. In the name of security, Israel’s military conducts frequent night raids on Palestinian homes to arrest people, often teenage boys, whom they suspect of harmful plans. And in an ironic twist on security, the military often protects violent Israeli settlers as they attack Palestinians to steal and destroy land, homes, cars, and animals. The goal is clearly to drive Palestinians to abandon their homes and go anywhere else, as long as it is not still in Palestine.
During 2025 things in the West Bank have gone from very bad to truly terrible. As just one recent example, during the month of July the only remaining 100% Christian village in the West Bank, Taybeh, has been brutally attacked at least three times. A 1600-year-old church in Taybeh was set on fire, and when the fire failed to destroy the church, settlers brought cows to graze inside the sacred walls of the church. On July 28 settlers returned and burned two young local Christian families’ cars and houses, destroying not only their homes and security, but their livelihoods as well.
Palestinians live with daily anticipation that even the most mundane details of their lives can, and often will, go badly awry. The setbacks they endure can range from inconvenient to humiliating to life-threatening. I’ve never seen my Palestinian friends have to dig so deep for hope. They share stories almost every day of things that seem so degrading that nothing worse could happen. And then it does.
More times than I can count over the years, I have been with tour groups where someone asked our Palestinian hosts, “How do you keep going? How do you stay hopeful?” Our hosts have consistently responded, “I don’t have the luxury of not hoping.” As people of deep faith, despair is not an option.
One of my best teachers about hope has been the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb. Mitri was the pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem when I first met him. He’s now the president of a highly regarded and fully accredited university in Bethlehem, Dar Al Kalima University, a school that grew out of his church’s outreach ministries after the 2002 siege of Bethlehem. Mitri’s motto since I’ve known him has been, “Hope is Something We Do.” He’s also the author or editor of more than 30 books on theology from a Palestinian perspective.
I turned this week to one of my favorites, his 2004 book titled Bethlehem Besieged: Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble. In it, Mitri makes the case that “True hope is a powerful and critical concept for those living amid conflict…. Hope moves us into a state of empowerment, where one starts planning and strategizing, reflecting on how to resist effectively [and creatively].” In a chapter titled “Building Walls or Planting Olive Trees,” Mitri writes, “Holding to a hopeful vision in the context of war gives hope a new meaning. It is no longer something we see but rather something we practice, something we live, something we advocate, something we plant…. If we plant a tree today, there will be shade for the children to play in, there will be oil to heal the wounds, and there will be olive branches to wave when peace arrives.”
Had our Plymouth group been able to travel to Israel/Palestine in 2023, we would all have come home with a new close friend, Usama Nicola, who would have been our guide over the 2 weeks of our pilgrimage. I’m lucky to count him not only as a dear friend but as family. We’ve led nearly 20 pilgrimage groups together over the last 15 years. In the last month, Usama has launched an online newsletter on a platform called Patreon, to share his reflections on life in Bethlehem and the challenges he faces as a Palestinian Christian. Because life in the West Bank is so hard and jobs are so scarce, Usama has watched as dear friends and even his brother’s family have emigrated to live elsewhere in easier parts of the world. Usama uses his “Updates from Bethlehem” to share heartfelt reflections on why he stays and where he finds hope. He wrote this on July 14th:
God Is Not the Creator of Evil and Suffering
Here in Bethlehem, where hope and heartache walk hand in hand, I often hear the question: Where is God in all this pain? It is a question whispered by mothers burying sons, by children standing at checkpoints, by communities living under siege.
But let me be clear: God is not the author of this suffering. God did not create evil.
The God I believe in, the God of Bethlehem, is not distant or indifferent. God is in the weeping, the resisting, the rebuilding. God is with the family whose home has been demolished. God is in the priest in Taybeh, the mother in Gaza, the youth planting new olive trees where old ones were burned. God is not causing the suffering; God is enduring it with us.
There is evil in this world, yes. But there is also an unshakable presence of grace. God moves through compassion. Through courage. Through the global voices demanding justice for Palestine. Through every act of solidarity that says, You are not alone.
Let us remember: God is not behind the bombs. God is in the brokenhearted who still choose to love. God is not the destroyer. God is the healer, the comforter, the one who still whispers: “Do not be afraid.”
Usama concludes, “Thank you for standing with us. Your presence, your prayers, and your support remind us that even in the valley of shadow, we are never alone.”[2]
My heart is broken nearly every day as I read news coming from Gaza and the West Bank, and then again as I turn and watch news of distressing developments in our own country. But my heart is also lifted every day if I remember to stay alert and watch for signs of God’s presence – in family and friend relationships, in this Plymouth community so persistently seeking a faithful way forward, in music that lifts my soul, and in nature, literature, and so many other surprising sources of grace. My prayer is that even when God seems “absent,” when waiting feels hard, and hope feels distant, we too will find opportunities to practice Hope in all we do. Amen.
[1] Mitri Raheb, Bethlehem Besieged, 2004, Fortress Press, p. 153-157
[2] Usama Nicola, Updates from Bethlehem, https://www.patreon.com/c/BethlehemUpdates/posts
