A Meditation on Living Hope
June 21, 2026
4th Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Psalm 42: 1-5; Romans 15: 4-6, 13
“A Meditation on Living Hope”
by Rev. David J. Wood
4th Sunday after Pentecost, June 21, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden, Maine
Psalm 42: 1-5; Romans 15: 4-6, 13
This past week has been a convergence of days:
This past Friday it was Juneteenth,
Today is Father’s Day & the Summer Solstice!
My sermon will be a riff on the way the melody of hope plays through each of these days…at least to me.
I’ll begin with Father’s Day.
One of my pastoral colleagues used to preface any reflection from his personal life in a sermon with the phrase, “I’m going to invoke a point of pastoral privilege…” On this Father’s Day…I’m going to follow his lead and invoke a “point of pastoral privilege.” One of the great joys of fatherhood is watching your children become their own persons. To watch with with deep gratification as they go on to exceed all our efforts to shape them into our own image!
I want to honor my son Jordan today. It’s been a tough week for Jordan…and for us his parents as we stood by and with him. As most of you know, he lost the four-way race for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Congressional seat in the 2nd District of Maine. He lost it by some 300 votes. It’s a mixture of being disappointed with him and for him. In my unbiased opinion, he ran an amazing race.
It is right that I speak of him in this place…his politics was incubated in the church and by the church and people of faith.
Jordan always had a strong sense of justice and he regularly reminded his parents of their failure to be fair and just in their governing of the household!
I would characterize Jordan’s vision of politics as a politics of hope…by that I mean, he believes (to quote the poet Robert Browning) that our “reach should exceed our grasp” or we will never forge the pathways essential to a more just, merciful, equitable, world.
If you were here on Thursday night, you heard me share a quote that is attributed to St. Augustine: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
Jordan is a witness to a politics of hope.
So, above all on this day, I am a proud father today. What greater gift can a father ask for on Father’s Day?
~~~~~~~
Today is also the Summer Solstice…the longest day of the year. When such a pivotal astronomical event happens on a SUNday…I feel compelled to speak of it.
Several years ago I visited a church in Florence: Santa Maria del Fiore…where the Summer Solstice is treated as nothing less than sacred occurrence..the church building itself functions like an astronomical observatory.
The church was built in the last 1200’s. In 1475 a tiny brass instrument was installed some 300 feet high by a small window in the top of the dome. On the Summer Solstice, the sun shines through a hole in this bronze plate….the hole Is about the size of a golf ball.
When the sunlight shines through that tiny hole it sends a beam of light that moves across the floor of the Chapel of the Cross..and on the Summer Solstice that beam of light aligns perfectly with a circular marble slab on the floor of the Chapel of the Cross. They say it measures the position of the sun in the sky within 1/2 a second.
Crowds gathered today in sanctuary of the Santa Maria del Fiore.
It’s as if the whole church was constructed to interpret the heavens to the earth…make the connection…to make it possible for all who came through it doors to follow the light.
What else are churches for? All churches should be places designed to align us with the light of the heavens…and make the the sacred connection of heaven and earth.
So every Sunday we gather to bear witness to that light, and we join our hearts and voices and pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Every Christmas this place resounds with that great hymn, Hark the Herald Angels Sing. As we prepare to sing the third and final verse, Matt swells the organ to a crescendo and let us loose!
Hail heaven-born prince of Peace…
Hail the sun of righteousness
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings.
That’s a hymn for the Summer Solstice!
We have a hope as sure as the sun.
~~~
Speaking of hope…I want to say a word about Juneteenth.
Juneteenth honors the memory of June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers rode into Galveston, Texas and read General Order Number Three, which informed the public about President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. President Lincoln had signed the document on January 1, 1863, but it took another two and a half years for news of freedom to reach the nearly quarter of a million slaves in Texas.
As one black historian recalled: “The General took that and nailed it to the door of what's now Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. And when the enslaved came in from their work and somebody read that to them, they started celebrating, and we've been celebrating ever since.”
That brings me to the story of Opal Lee…the Grandmother of Juneteenth.
Opal Lee was born and raised in FT, Texas. In 1939, when she was 12 years old in 1939 when a mob burned down her family’s home. She remembers how, that night her father, Otis Flake, grabbed his shotgun to protect his wife Mattie and three children from the angry crowd. But when the sheriffs arrived, they told him that if he fired, they would turn the mob loose. So Otis Flake and his family left the smoldering wreckage and never looked back.
Opal Lee earned a college degree, became a schoolteacher, social worker, food bank coordinator, and much beloved pillar of the Fort Worth community who, at age 93, was still delivering meals to disabled and elderly residents.
Opal Lee still lives in Fort Worth, Texas. Two years ago, she was handed the keys by the local Habitat for Humanity chapter, to a newly built home constructed on the exact lot her family’s childhood home stood before it was burned down by the racist mob in 1939.
Opal Lee will turn 100 in October of this year.
At age 89, Opal Lee made a symbolic walk, in 2.5 mile increments, from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C.,. That distance was to make the time it took for word of Emancipation to reach Texas. The aim of her walk was to petition the Federal Government to make Juneteenth a National Holiday.
Her grassroots movement started in September 2016 with about 8,000 signatures in Fort Worth. By the time she arrived in DC with the petition to Congress in January 2017, she had 1.5 million signatures. She was present in D.C. on June 17th, 2021 when President Biden signed the Legislation that made Juneteenth a national holiday.
A reporter asked her, “When did you start thinking about taking up this cause?” “When I turned 89! “ She said. “I decided maybe a little old lady in tennis shoes walking from Fort Worth to Washington DC….maybe someone would pay attention.” She went on: ”I’m a Christian, and my bible tells me that the people who came before me went through a whole lot of things, and I figure we’re on the same road. We’re gonna go through struggle after struggle until we come to the Promised Land. You gotta have some hope, because hopelessness wears you out, it drains you. And Juneteenth reminds me that even when there’s struggle, you can still have hope.”
I’m reminded of a quote from G.K. Chesterton: “Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.” Circumstance of hopelessness are the conditions in which hope does it most important work.
Hope is how we hold the line between truth and reality…when reality lags behind the truth…hope holds the line…
Hope is not wishful thinking: that somehow, God is going to take care of things, everything is going to turn out fine…
Hope is rooted in a sense of anticipation that there is a goodness that endures…a goodness that requires and makes possible our participation…that calls us to stand up with and for one another in the face of injustice in the midst of circumstances that feel hopeless.
Opal Lee reminds us that it’s often a slow walk…but it’s a hope that is as sure as the light moving across the chapel floor in Florence…and how it gathers strength as it moves across the land…
Juneteenth is not a celebration of a past achievement as much as it is the reminder of what remains for the good news of Emancipation to reach every corner of our land…
~~~~~
History tells us that HOPE is a dangerous thing.
Not because it seduces us into a false narrative…but because it was keeps the true meaning and purpose of our existence alive…in us and for the world. And that is dangerous to the forces at work that seek to destroy hope…
You can’t incarcerate it
You can’t arrest it..
You can’t silence it
You can’t legislate it away…
You can’t outlaw it…
You can’t entomb it…
You can’t kill it…
Hope rises again and again…and when it does, the world is raised by it.
The future is not foreclosed…we are not bound to fate.
We are bound by a hope that calls us to participate in the unfolding of God’s future for the world.
~~~~~~
In closing, I want to come back to the melody of HOPE. With Bruce Cole with us, it only seemed right to end with a trumpet story!
It happened on the night that the great jazz trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis was playing with a small, little-known combo in a New York basement club. A few songs into their set, he walked to the front of the bandstand and began an unaccompanied solo of the 1930s ballad, "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You." The audience was spellbound.
Stretching the mood taut, Marsalis came to the final phrase, with each note coming slower and slower, with longer and longer pauses between each one: “I…don’t....stand…....a…....ghost........…of............…a..............…chance—"
Then someone's cell phone went off.
It began to chirp an absurd little tune. Attention shattered, heads turned, irritation murmured across the room. The man with the phone jumped up and fled for his life! The spell was broken.
But then, without a pause, Marsalis played the cellphone melody note for note. He played it again, with different accents. He began to play with it, spinning out a rhapsody on the silly little tune, changing keys several times. The audience settled down. Around and around Marsalis played, weaving glory out of chaos.
Eventually, to their surprise, the audience found themselves back to where they had been. Nothing had been lost after all. He had tied it all together. He never lost the melody. He wound down his solo seamlessly with the last two notes: "…with…you."
The audience exploded with applause.
Jazz musicians tell us that the capacity to improvise comes from countless hours of practice—it is not simply about playing off the cuff. At the center of improvisation is the discipline of being wholly in and present to the moment.
HOPE KEEPS US IN THE MOMENT…responsive, open and awake to the moment…to not be thrown off its melody, to not lose our sense for the through-line of meaning and purpose and possibility that draws upon the past and anticipates a future that is still in the making.
It’s not accidental or incidental that Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks…Opal Lee…all possessed the capacity for improvisation…all were people of a resilient hope.
And so, on this day in our life together, I leave you with the words Judy read to us a few minutes ago…words of encouragement that Paul wrote to a christian community living in the shadow of the colossus that was the Empire of Rome. He didn’t want them to forget what they were made for…
Let these words speak to you wherever you are in your life at this moment…however strong the temptation to hopelessness may be…
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.