Owned by Hope
Preached at Decatur First UMC
Decatur, Georgia
July 5, 2026
Zechariah 9: 9 - 12, NRSVUE
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
10 He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
11 As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
12 Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
As I prepared for the sermon this week, I kept thinking of a line from the TV Comedy Brooklyn 99. In the second season of the show, Detective Jake Peralta is responding to someone who is giving him a hard time for using a glasses case as his wallet. And Jake responds, “Stuff can be two things!”
This is an occasional catch phrase at my house. Recently I was helping three adorable teens pack for a week at Camp Glisson. I asked two of them if they were going to pack pajamas. They said no, they would just sleep in their clothes. Because, after all, stuff can be two things! I did request that at the end of each day they change out of their dirty sweaty clothes into clean ones to sleep, but whatever. What happens at camp either stays at camp, or it comes home and I wash it.
So, “stuff can be two things” is a great line, and it’s also a fundamental truth. Our therapists might call this a “dialectic” and being able to grasp it is a key to mental health. A mind that can hold two things together when they are different, or even contradictory, is a flexible mind.
For example, it’s possible to be a smart and capable person, who also needs support and help.
It’s possible to be grieving, while also feeling gratitude and even joy.
It is possible to be angry at someone, and still love them.
It is possible to love the flexibility of summer break, and still long for the structure that August will bring.
When we are not able to do this, when our minds are rigid and we insist that it is either one thing, or another, but not both, we tend to suffer. So stuff can be two things, and, we can feel two things, at the same time.
If you’ve never heard a sermon based on the prophet Zechariah, you’re in good company. I don’t think I’ve ever preached one. Scholars tell us that the person named Zechariah was active as a prophet following Israel’s exile and captivity in Babylon from 520 - 518 BCE. The focus of his prophecy was rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. Three other books in our Bible tell that story as well - Nahum, Habakkuk, and Haggai. The Temple was rebuilt and dedicated in 515 BCE, so as prophets go, they got the job done.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the prophet named Zechariah did not write the part of the book that Laura read for us this morning. The first eight chapters of the book are a narrative of the prophet’s visions related to the rebuilding of the temple and what that would mean for the people of God. Zechariah wrote those eight chapters.
Chapter nine is different. It covers a different topic, and rather than a narrative, chapters nine through fourteen are in poetic verse.
Why do we care? Because when interpreting scripture, genre matters.
Imagine that you are watching a documentary on the Salem witch trials, and after a commercial break when the show resumes you are suddenly, and without explanation, watching the musical, “Wicked.” The topic is the same - witches. But the genre shifts and unless you also shift the way you receive the information, you won’t understand what you are watching. In fact, it could be dangerous. Watching Wicked as if it is a documentary would be terrifying. Trying to watch a documentary as if it is a musical will leave you bored and confused and you’d likely give up on it. Both documentaries and musicals can tell the truth, sometimes deep and profound truths, but we receive those truths and process them differently depending on the genre.
I like that our holy scriptures contain different ways of telling the story of God, and when you think about it, we do that all the time. We read the scriptures, but we also sing them, and pray them, and we preach from them. There’s no way that the story of God could be confined to just one way of telling it.
So, about 70 years after Zechariah’s first eight chapters were written and the temple was rebuilt, someone started chapter nine. Someone had another word from the Lord, or perhaps it was a community of people following in Zechariah’s tradition, likely people who also deeply valued the temple and its sacred rituals.
Chapter nine begins by announcing itself as “an oracle.” An oracle is different from a vision or a prophecy, in that it is usually an answer to a question. We can’t know for sure what the question was, because it is not recorded, but we do know a little about what was happening in the world at the time -
The countries around Israel were either at war, or headed toward it. Most unsettling for Israel was the Greco-Persian war. The Persian Empire had been good to Israel and allowed the captives to return home and to rebuild their temple. But seventy years later the Persians were at war and their military was struggling. That would have made the Israelites very anxious.
That’s the historical and political context around Zechariah nine through twelve. And while we don’t know what question they asked God, but we know the response -
Daughter of Zion, rejoice with all your heart;
shout in triumph, daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king is coming to you, his cause won, his victory gained,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
He will banish the chariot from Ephraim,
the war-horse from Jerusalem;
the warrior's bow will be banished,
and he will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea,
from the River to the ends of the earth.
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
This is what poetry is so good at.
Poetry helps us hold the tension between what is and what is hoped for.
Poetry helps us feel the dissonance between two things that shouldn’t really go together, but they do.
Poetry can make everyday words about everyday things feel otherworldly.
For example, a donkey is a farm animal. It is strong and sturdy AND it is slow and short. Kings don’t ride donkeys, they ride horses. A horse will elevate a king above the people and a horse is fast. A horse could help you win a ground battle. A horse makes you look important in a parade. But for ordinary people trying to live life, a donkey gets the job done.
So the oracle says that God is raising up a leader who will be victorious, but who will care more for the everyday needs of the people - like raising food - than they do about military might. It is almost unimaginable, except the poetry gives us the image -
See, your king is coming to you, his cause won, his victory gained,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
It’s such a powerful image that, hundreds of years later, Jesus would follow in that tradition as people waved palm branches and shouted hosanna as he entered Jerusalem.
The oracle’s poetry also gives us the line, “Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.”
A prisoner of hope.
There are lines and verses so powerful that we can spend days, weeks, sometimes years repeating them and pondering them and still not come to the end of what they can mean.
One of those lines for me is from the poet Billy Joel. In the summer of 1977, I would have been just 3 and half, he wrote the line, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun.” Although I’d definitely heard that song as a child, the first time I really remember it sinking in for me was in the summer of 1988 when I ended up with my brother’s cassette tape of Billy Joel’s concerts in what was then the USSR. I was 14, growing up United Methodist but in the south, so there was always some fundamentalist theology in the air. There was a flavor of Christianity among my peers that was fixated on “holy” or “pure” behavior. If you’re imagining the movie Footloose, you’ve got the right vibe. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to be a Christian, and this flavor was compelling because it was simple. There was a right way and a wrong way to be. If you kept yourself from doing “bad” things, and judged people who did them, or just looked like they did them, then you were a good Christian. I liked the idea of clear lines, being able to distinguish who was good and who was bad, but at the same time, I knew it didn’t feel right. Jesus didn’t seem to draw lines like that. And into this questioning time, I heard Billy Joel, singing into my foam headphones attached to my Sony Walkman, telling me that a person can be two things at the same time. I can have my faith without being a jerk about it. What a relief. I still think about these words whenever my faith starts leaning into a place of superiority or judgement.
This week, Zechariah has been singing to me. “Return to your stronghold, O prisoner of hope.”
It’s as odd AND as powerful as a king on a donkey. How can one be imprisoned by hope? Shouldn’t hope set you free? For the original audience, I wonder if the oracle is answering a question about the future, and the possibility of being taken captive again if the Persians lose the war. The Israelites of Zechariah Chapter 9 would not have heard the word “prisoner” as a metaphor. They were descendants of captives and exiles. Whatever hope the oracle is speaking of, it’s not a light hope. This is a hope that owns you.
And so we need to distinguish between hope and optimism, like “I hope it doesn’t rain“ or “I hope I get a good parking spot.” It can’t be optimism, because a hope that owns you cannot be based on circumstances.
It might be based on memory. If we have known God’s faithfulness in the past, then when difficult times arise we might find that we are not prisoners of despair. When we have known and remember God’s provision, we find ourselves owned by hope, even when we are struggling.
This kind of hope cannot be just a feeling or an emotion. If one is a prisoner of hope, then I would expect hope to co-exist with feelings like anger, sadness, boredom, guilt and loneliness. More than a feeling that comes and goes, a hope that takes one prisoner would be a hope that abides and becomes a way of living. If I am bound by hope it would mean that, when given the choice between living as if God is at work in the world, and any other alternative, I would join the flow of God.
This upside down kingdom that Zechariah describes, where kings ride donkeys, and hope takes captives, was ramped up when the God of the universe was born into a meager stable. If anyone was two things at once, it was Jesus.
Given the choice between joining God’s work that had begun so long ago, and anything else, he always joined the flow, and that turned everything on its head. He made women evangelists, ate dinner with sinners, and turned over tables in the temple. He gave instructions like “love your enemies and do good to those who hurt you,” which even a flexible mind finds difficult to grasp.
Like Zechariah’s oracle, the hope that Jesus embodied never denied the reality of the situation. After all, it was Jesus the night before his death, who asked God to get him off the hook if there was any way around it, and if there wasn’t then so be it. That’s not the prayer of someone in denial. That’s the prayer of a prisoner of hope - of someone who desperately wants things to go one way, but is willing to trust God when that does not happen.
The oracle of Zechariah 9 was written thousands of years ago for a specific group of people, in a specific situation. But, stuff can be two things, right?
Maybe it’s the poetry, but it feels like this call is for everyone. How would you live your life if you were bound by hope? Not a light, cheery, hope, but a hope that asks something of you?
I can only speak for myself, of course.
I might accept my conflicted feelings about this holiday weekend. Two things can be true - I can love this country and hold her accountable. I can celebrate her and commit to work for change at the same time.
I might make peace with my failures and missteps as a mom. I can recognize where I wish I’d done things differently, without drowning in shame about it. I can recognize that I’ve done the best I can while still working to do better.
I can feel at home in this beloved sanctuary and give thanks for the saints who went before me who dreamed it, paid for it, built it and cared for it. At the same time, I can recognize its limits and want it to be accessible to everyone, and I can be a part of dreaming that, paying for that, and building that into reality.
I might forgive someone.
I might do something good but stay anonymous about it.
I might limit my social media consumption and comments to only that which builds up others, rather than anything critical, gossipy, or mean.
I might surrender something I have been willful about and then genuinely ask God, what’s next?
I might laugh with the sinners AND laugh with the saints, and I can be both at the same time.
Let us pray.
Oh God, we thank you for the gift of your holy scriptures and for the beautiful variety of ways that you speak to us and through us. We thank you for the faithfulness of Zechariah and his community and the word they passed down through generations. Help us to enter into your hope in such a way that we belong to it. That we become bound to it, so that we choose it and live it. Like Christ, may we be willing to surrender to that hope even when it costs us dearly, for it is in his name that we pray. Amen.
