” The Unholy Power of Pessimism”
Numbers 13:25-14
January 15, 1984
Is the glass half full or half empty?
The way you answer that question says a lot about how you view life. Are you an optimist or a pessimist? In this day and age / the pessimists far outweigh the optimists. The majority opinion usually says that the glass is half empty.
Take, for example, the first time in Scripture that we hear about Joshua, the son of Nun: He and Caleb represented the minority. The pessimists of his day were in the majority.
What happened was that Moses and the Israelites had been wandering in the wilderness for years. They had left Egypt but had not yet settled down. They finally made it to the borders of the Promised Land, and then they sent out some scouts.
Can’t you just hear them ask the scouts to find out if it’s safe, to see if the natives are friendly? Can’t you just hear someone say, .I don’t see any McDonald’s arches; ” is the land of milk and honey all that God said it would be?” The scouts – or spies, as they are called – go out and soon return with a minority and a majority report.
The minority report, by Joshua and Caleb, is prophetic – – full of hope, optimistic, which we can translate as a ‘ passion for the possible. It urges the children of Israel to strain forward to that which lies ahead. ‘ By contrast, the majority report is pessimistic. I suppose the pessimists among us might call it ‘pragmatic. It counsels caution and, I would say, reflects the cowardice of those submitting it. It speaks of “giants in the land11, the “long-necked ones, and the key sentence reads : We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
The story shows that , while optimists like Joshua seek adventure, they are in the minority. Pessimists, the majority, seek safety. There is never a lack of people who line up for caution.
“We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers Isn’t this what pessimists can do for us? They can make us feel like failures. If you listen closely to the pessimists, you are going to end up convinced that you are a grasshopper, unable to cope, without the proper resources, able only to regress to childhood, when you were small and helpless.
Pessimists distort the truth in a clever way. It is not that pessimists exaggerate the ills of the world – that would be difficult given the state the world is in.
The pessimists ‘ strategy is to underestimate our ability to deal with problems. There
may have been giants in the land, but what about the Israelites? Had they no resources?~” “We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers. ”
So watch out; go back to Egypt.
A friend of mine once called this the protective strategy of deliberate failure, and it is the stock counsel of pessimists who seek safety.’ ” The response goes like this: You will never lose any money if you think of yourself as poor and therefore don’t invest anything. ” 0r you will never fall on your face if you consider yourself too weak to stick your neck out. ” 0r “you will never stub your toe if you act like a cripple and don’t take the first step outof-doors.
In therapy, the counselor often asks,
“What does this attitude or stance do for you? We know what pessimism does for us, don’t we? it keeps us from feeling guilty about not venturing forth.
We can feel okay about our cowardliness, and we can extol virtues like prudence and caution.
Predictably, the children of Israel accepted the report of the pessimists, and we read that all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night, and all the people of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron. And later we read that the people were prepared to stone Joshua and Caleb.
Can you see the impact that a pessimist has? Pessimists have a way of exerting great power in the deliberations of religious groups. Over the past few years, I have noticed that the most powerful and most feared persons are the ones who speak with the voice of pessimism
I have also noticed that we spend more time and energy trying to mollify and pacify these people than on anything else — and for some good reasons. Instinctively, we have realized that if you put one thoroughgoing pessimist in a whole crowd of optimists, he or she can switch a meeting from being open and hopeful into one characterized by hostility and deflated negativity.
Next time you are in a church meeting where something difficult is to be decided, watch how the pessimists can frighten people; watch how they can get a whole group to think defensively.
One final characteristic of pessimists is that they have a way of striking a chord within us that makes us want to go backward You will remember that the whole congregation said after the pessimists report, would that we had died in the land of Egypt! ” And they said to one another, let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt. ” I suppose we could politely call this the back to Egypt hangup. Many religious groups are completely filled with people who cherish this point of view – – tlif only we could go back to those good old days, they say, to the days when Ma Bell looked after us all, to the days when homosexuals stayed in the closet, to the days when the clergy were not so politically active, to the days when congregations were much more docile. There may have been problems in the past– Pharaoh may have been a dictator — but at least we were secure in the known.
Roberta Flack made a recording a few years ago called” Let Pharaoh Go”. Basically, what the song was about was that it is not difficult to get out of Egypt, but it is hard to get Egypt out of one’s system. Pessimists have a knack for appealing to the past and making us forget the future. We in the Church are moved by memory, but by God’s grace, we are moved even more by hope.
A few years ago, at the Harvard commencement, Cyrus Vance spoke about our country. He was one of the prophetic voices. I cut out some words from his address; let me share a few:
History may conclude that ours was a failure not of opportunity but of seeing opportunity. a failure not of resources but of wisdom to use them, a failure not of intellect but of understanding and of will. ”
And he might have ended by saying: His tory will conclude that we had a failure to listen to optimists and a readiness to go along with the pessimists.
Well, what does this have to do with -. leadership in the parish? This day of our parish meeting I would declare to you that the road is far, but the future for St Philips is bright. The promised time is ahead. The scouts are back and the Joshuas are saying, ‘t: Enough of this back-to-Egypt talk! ”
Enough of this murmuring about seeing ourselves as grasshoppers. We, too, can become giants, simply by sticking our necks out, simply by refusing to listen to the siren song of the pessimists, simply by moving ahead on the promises of God instead of pining for the good old days.
The other night I was reading an old sermon by Ernest Campbell, and at one point, I stood up and cheered. Dr Campbell was saying that, yes, life is rough, times are bad, and things are not going well. However, Ernie said, in the Hebrew-Christian view of life, history is not a series of problems that cry for answers. History is a series of opportunities that cry for Christian leadership.
The glass is half full, and with God’s help, it will soon be overflowing here at
St . Philip’s
Amen