Of Binary Thinking and Hope – Sermon for Proper 9, RCL Year B

We have had more than enough of contempt,
Too much of the scorn of the indolent rich,
and of the derision of the proud.^[1]

Have you ever noticed how binary a document the Old Testament seems to be? Mike Kuhn, a professor of biblical theology at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut, Lebanon, has pointed out that “the Bible is a book replete with binary categories: dark and light, the broad and narrow way, truth and lies, life and death, Jew and Gentile, etc.”^[2] One could go on listing other opposed pairs described in the Hebrew Scriptures: the righteous and the unrighteous, the poor and the rich, the humble and the proud, us and them, God’s People and all those others. These are the categories we find in today’s gradual psalm, one of the fifteen Songs of Ascent, Psalms 120-134, which scholars believe are songs “the people of ancient Israel [sang as they] went on pilgrimage to the temple to worship … songs they sang as they traveled to express their faith.”^[3] In this psalm, the dualism is between the malevolent wealthy and the faithful (and presumably poor) pilgrims who look to God for protection.

Now, binary thinking can be functional and beneficial; it has its uses. It helps us make fast decisions like those we need when our fight or flight reflex kicks in. Binary thinking clarifies, simplifies, and helps us categorize and analyze; it increases efficiency in reaching speedy conclusions. On the other hand, it can lead to oversimplification, stifle creativity, and foster polarization and division.^[4] “While binary thinking can help us survive, it can, at other times, be deadly. Such thinking blinds us to innovative solutions available outside the binary system we desperately cling to.”^[5] As a citizen, a lawyer, and a priest, I would suggest to you that rigid and erroneous – and frankly deadly – binary thinking is what is displayed in Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that official presidential actions are always unassailably proper, not subject to question, and immune from judicial or legislative scrutiny: despite being over 100 pages, the decision is overly simplistic, non-creative, and clearly polarizing.^[6]

Binary thinking fosters inflexible and unrealistic expectations, stunts opportunities for growth, and limits our ability to see and appreciation alternative outcomes. These expectations then create a sort of feedback loop encouraging further binary thinking. Wellness entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid puts it this way, “These expectations are a like a strait jacket that can create [more] binary thinking, where we are forced to choose between two opposing options that are presented to us. … right/wrong, good/bad, male/female. … [This] results in a warped, hateful and predictable sense of what is right and wrong.”^[7] It makes it impossible, she says, to fully embrace the complexity of the human condition, to appreciate the spectrum of possible alternatives. As psychotherapist Paige Dyer puts it, “If you’re anticipating it’s never going to improve, it never will.”^[8] Theologically, we might say that binary thinking negates hope.

Today’s gospel lesson is another example of binary thinking and limited expectation. The people of Nazareth (Mark doesn’t actually say it’s Nazareth, just that it’s Jesus’ home town so I’m making a possibly unjustified assumption, but let’s run with it) … the people of Nazareth have certain expectations of the young men of their town, and being a prophet (let alone the Messiah) just doesn’t fit. So they reject what they see and ask, “Where did this man get all this?” and the marvel that “deeds of power are being done by his hands.”^[9] They could not believe and would not accept evidence outside their limited, binary-thinking fostered expectations of Jesus.

This is the second time Jesus has been home and surprised these folks. Just three chapters earlier, Mark tells us Jesus went home and the folks there (including his family) thought he was either insane or possessed by demons.^[10] A boy raised in Nazareth learned his father’s trade, spent some time in schul with the rabbis, got married, had kids, and his sons would do exactly the same thing. He didn’t wander the countryside preaching the coming of the kingdom of God and healing people with all sort of physical and spiritual ailments. No, that didn’t fit their binary thinking, so they wouldn’t, indeed they couldn’t, accept who Jesus was. The Nazarenes had different expectations of Jesus.

Expectations are powerful things. According to neuroscientists, “Our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called ‘prior beliefs,’ help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present, based on similar past experiences.”^[11] Our expectations determine how we see and appreciate or interpret the world around us, the actions of others, and the culture within which we live. But so do our hopes, and in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, as well as the follow-on to last week’s presidential debate, I got to wondering about the difference, if there is any, between expectation and hope.

As it turns out, this is a question that a lot of people have explored. Most of the non-theological answers to the question assert a difference based on the degree of certainty of the anticipated outcome. For example, Promova, an on-line English language tutoring site, says: “Expect is a stronger word than hope, meaning that something is likely to happen while hope is more of a desire that something will happen.”^[12] Psychotherapist Naomi Yano similarly asserts: “An expectation . . . is a strong belief that things will be or should be a certain way, and an attachment to the outcome. A hope is a desire for an outcome, a wish with some uncertainty about what will actually transpire. We cling to expectations, and hold loosely to hopes.”^[13]

This is what makes binary-engendered expectations so deadly: “They infect and overwhelm us, like a virus. They consume us like the plague. We are unable to give them up. We are unable to let go.”^[14] Dr. Gerald May, the late psychiatrist and contemplative theologian, defines expectation as a “rigid clinging to unreal belief.” Typically fixed and frozen, expectations are inflexible and rigid, unable to give or to bend or to change. Expectations are not only based on prior beliefs, they are “limited to our previous experiences. We are unable to expect something that we haven’t seen before. We cannot expect something better than what we know.”^[15] And here is where theology and faith enter our consideration of the difference between expectation and hope.

Hope, as we know from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, is waiting with patience for something we do not see, because “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?”^[16] It is the basis not of the rigid certainty fostered by expectation, but of the flexible, adaptable confidence of faith, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”^[17] Hope opens us up to the suppleness and resilience of innovation; it opens our eyes to possibilities outside the binary systems that bind and blind us. “Hope is not limited by previous experience. We can hope for more than what we know.”^[18]

Motivational speaker and author Thane Ringler contrasts expectation and hope this way:

Having hope means you are trusting the process.
Having an expectation means you are trusting the results.
Having a hope means that the future is uncertain.
Having an expectation means that you are predetermining the future.
Having a hope is an action of humility.
Having an expectation can be an act of pride.
Having a hope does not disappoint.
Having an expectation often falls short.
Having a hope helps us acknowledge that God knows best.
Having an expectation often indicates that you know best.
Having a hope produces a life of faith.
Having an expectation produces a life of entitlement.^[19]

We live in a time, a world, a nation where the rigidity of binary thinking is at war with the flexibility of spectrum or alternative thinking, in which the life of privilege and entitlement is at war with the life of faith and participation. In this war, the ostensible binary of “commandment of God” opposed to “human tradition”^[20] is being misappropriated and misapplied to exploit and misuse the apparent binaries found in Scripture. But the Bible is not as binary as it sometimes seems.

For example, there are demands for a rigid, so-called Biblical model of marriage, but there is not one, single model of male-female relationships in Scripture; there are many, as well as models of male-male and female-female companionship. The Scriptures reveal the world as it is: varied and complex, not neatly divided between men and women, nor between rich, whether indolent or industrious, and poor, whether righteous or undeserving. The Bible is loaded with stories of the permeability of economic and class boundaries, of slaves becoming rulers, of rich men becoming paupers, of gardeners becoming prophets and shepherds becoming kings.

And both the Bible and history are full of stories of those kings and other rulers engaging in acts that are unquestionably official but equally unquestionably morally corrupt and criminal, stories which put the lie to former President Richard Nixon’s once-laughable assertion that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”^[21] Monday’s Supreme Court decision seems to validate Nixon, treating “official act” and “criminal act” as the opposing poles of a definitional binary that Scripture and experience clearly show to be erroneous: human government, especially the actions of supreme executives, is not and never has been that neat and tidy.

In like manner, the world has never been neatly divided between ethnic or racial groupings, between Jews and Gentiles. In the ancient world described in the Bible the Jews encountered Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Edomites, Girgashites, Egyptians, Romans, Samaritans, Persians, and many other assorted non-Jews some of whom were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, sometimes conquerors, sometimes liberators. The Jews themselves were divided into the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, the Zealots, the Essenes, and other smaller groups, and they didn’t just come from Judea. As the feast of Pentecost a few weeks ago reminded us, they were

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene; [they came from Rome and Crete and Arabia].^[22]

The world simply is not and never has been black and white, divided neatly between men and women, rich and poor, the “ins” and the “outs,” Jew and Gentile, children who grow up meeting our expectations and those who seem to be possessed by the devil … between “real” Americans and those accused of trying to “replace” them.^[23]

Many of the parables of Jesus challenge binary thinking. It is the greedy younger son rather than his dutiful older brother who is welcomed as the beloved child.^[24] It is the wretched tax collector not the thankful Pharisee who is accounted righteous before God.^[25] It is the despised Samaritan instead of the respected priest or Levite who turns out to be the loving neighbor.^[26] It is the smallest seed which becomes the greatest tree^[27] and the tiniest bit of yeast that leavens the greatest amount of flour.^[28] The Bible it turns out is no more binary than the world it reflects and addresses; neither has ever fit neatly into the rigid, expectation-defined boxes of binary thinking.

And yet, in the culture war in which we find ourselves, the choice actually is binary: there is good and there is evil and we must choose between them. On the side of evil there is the rigidity of binary thinking, the oversimplification of privilege, prejudice, and exclusion, and the disappointing inflexibility of expectation. On the side of good there is the adaptability of alternative thinking, an openness to complexity that fosters innovation and encourages inclusion, and the resiliency of hope.

As people of faith, we know what we must do. Like the Twelve in today’s gospel lesson, we are sent by the One who failed to live up to his neighbors’ expectations but, instead, offered the world hope; we are sent to proclaim the Good News, bear witness to the truth, and call one another and our neighbors to repentance. We are to oppose evil and the binary thinking it promotes. We know that today’s epistle lesson is correct: in taking up the cause of good we will encounter and endure “weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities,”^[29] but as Paul wrote elsewhere “endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope [unlike expectation] does not disappoint.”^[30]

Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 7, 2024, to the people of Harcourt Parish (Church of the Holy Spirit), Gambier, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The illustration is Christ Preaching in the Temple by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Il Guercino), ca. 1625-1627, from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text.

^[1] Psalm 123:4b-5, BCP Version (The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 780)

^[2] Mike Kuhn, The Seduction of Binary Thinking, Arab Baptist Theological Seminary, March 23, 2016, accessed 1 July 2024

^[3] W.H. Bellinger, Jr., Commentary on Psalm 123, Working Preacher, July 5, 2009, accessed 2 July 2024

^[4] Chris Drew, Binary Thinking: 10 Examples And Clear Definition, HelpfulProf.com, September 21, 2023, accessed 1 July 2024

^[5] Ryan E. Long, The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Binary Thinking…, Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, October 21, 2015, accessed 3 July 2024

^[6] Trump vs. United States, SCOTUS, Docket No. 23-939, decided July 1, 2024

^[7] Sharmadean Reid, Practice Non Binary Thinking, Stack World, April 17, 2023, accessed 3 July 2024

^[8] Family therapist Paige Dyer quoted in Ashley Carucci, What Is All-or-Nothing Thinking and Why It’s Important to Manage It, Psych Central, August 22, 2022, accessed 3 July 2024

^[9] Mark 6:2 (NRSV)

^[10] Mark 3:19b-30

^[11] Anne Trafton, How expectation influences perception, MIT News, July 15, 2019, accessed 4 July 2024

^[12] Confusing Words: Expect vs. Hope, Promova, undated, accessed 1 July 2024

^[13] Naomi Yano, What’s The Difference Between an Expectation and a Hope?, Emotional ICU, May 6, 2022, accessed 1 July 2024

^[14] Jeremy Stratton, The Difference Between Expectation and Hope, Living Better Stories, undated, accessed 1 July 2024

^[15] Ibid. citing Gerald May, The Awakening Heart (Harper Collins, San Francisco:1993)

^[16] Romans 8:24-25 (NRSV)

^[17] Hebrews 11:1 (NRSV)

^[18] Stratton, op. cit.

^[19] Thane Ringler, Hope vs. Expectation: A Finer Line Than You Might Think, Thane Marcus blog, November 13, 2017, accessed 4 July 2024

^[20] Mark 7:8 (NRSV)

^[21] Nixon Interviews, Wikipedia, accessed 4 July 2024

^[22] Acts 2:9-11 (NRSV)

^[23] See Robert Greene II, White Supremacist Violence Is All Too American, In These Times, September 12, 2017, accessed 6 July 2024

^[24] Luke 15:11-32

^[25] Luke 18:9-14

^[26] Luke 10:25-37

^[27] Matthew 13:31-32

^[28] Matthew 13:33

^[29] 2 Corinthians 12:10 (NRSV)

^[30] Romans 5:4-5 (NRSV)