Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Hope

Transcribed from the sermon preached December 2, 2007

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

office@stjohns.presbychurch.net    http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 5:1-13

Hope, peace, joy, love: These are the themes of the four weeks of Advent. The first is hope. Hope is from God. God is the basis for our hope. We hope for the coming Christ. We hope for the prince of peace, for one to come and bring good news to the poor, deliver sight to the blind, and liberate the oppressed.

          Hope is positive. It is positive about our ability in the present to move toward the good of the future. One of my first introductions to the power of positive thinking was through Roger Crawford. These motivational speakers don't hold all the truth, but they do hold a key part of it. Roger was born with one finger on one hand and two on another and he wore a prosthetic leg, yet he was able to become a professional tennis player. He was a member of Discovery Bay Presbyterian Church where I did my internship.

          When I first met Roger, he stood up and walked forward and extended his hand with confidence. Here he was with what one might think was a debilitating handicap and yet he was powerful, confident and successful. He was a great help to me as I was struggling with my own attitude about my ability to be a minister and preacher. I had my own long list of handicaps, which I counted against myself. Roger has a wonderful saying: "I would rather have one leg and a positive attitude than two legs and a negative attitude every single time.

          He says, "We are not responsible for everything that happens to us, but we are responsible for our response. Optimism transcends circumstance." His tennis coach told him, " You're not the fastest; you are not the most powerful; accept that. Hit the ball over the net one more time than your opponent and you win." Roger says, "My coach taught me the power of simplicity: proper preparation, keep you eye on the ball and follow through. Failure follows those who fail to follow through." Failure follows those who do not hope.

          The power of positive thinking goes a long way to helping us achieve our hopes and dreams, but it isn't enough on its own. We also need help formulating the values, which determine what we hope for.

          Someone making fun of the motivational speakers said, "a pessimist is someone who thinks their book about destruction, violence and mayhem won't sell, while an optimist is someone who thinks his book about destruction, violence and mayhem will sell." It is not only important that we have hope, it is also important what we hope in or what we hope for. The Israelites hoped in God. There is no easy correspondence between the Greek word for hope, "ellipsis/elipizein" and any specific Hebrew word. Kawah is close and it means, "to wait, to expect." Then there is batah, to be full of confidence, to trust. This is used with regard to fidelity to God. From their hope in God came what God taught them to hope for: that decisions would be decided peacefully, that nation would not lift up sword against nation, neither would they learn war any more. In Psalm 42:5 we see the soul arguing with itself, preaching to itself: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God! "

          This is one of the beautiful elements of scripture: despair and lamentation has its place. The reality of hardship and dashed hopes isn't denied or hidden, but acknowledged and then finally overcome, by hope in God. In this sense, even the acknowledgment, the voicing of despair is a sign that not all is lost. Being willing to express despair when we feel it shows that we know something is wrong, and would like it to be different.

          You may have run into those super-positive people who appear incredibly happy and positive and never express any doubt or fear or sadness. We may find such folk in churches. Early in my life I wanted to be like them and wondered why I wasn't. But then I started to see that these folks were hiding from some darkness, some event or relationship from which they feared hope could not escape. They had been taught to hide their negative painful feelings for fear they, or the ones they love, couldn't handle them, or, as Jack Nicholson would say, that they "couldn't handle the truth." I think there is, deep down in such hyper-positive people, a fear that chaos and abandonment will break forth if our negative feelings are expressed. They will then look for control over their environment and seek a god and a faith that is controlling and limiting of the freedoms and of expression and faith.

          But scripture has multiple examples of expression of fear, anger, doubt and despair. Yet these feelings do not have the last word. I believe this is a big part of the reason for the resiliency of Israel, and the hope of Israel both ancient and modern. Before they are a nation, they start in despair as slaves. But God says, "I have heard the cries of my people. Better days are to come." And when they begin to doubt anew, they can look back at the fidelity of God and what God has already done. They have a method of maintaining hope within adversity.

          Better days come and go as greedy kings and the ruling elite exploit the people. Then prophets arise to voice God's anger, to cry out in agony and to call Israel back to a better day. Even when the prophets die as martyrs to hope, their words are incorporated into the national story. Their words and their ways live on.

          There is then reason to hope even in the expression of hope. There is a piece of the dream hoped for that exists now, in the expression of the hope, and in the living toward the hope. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." There is comfort in the hope of being comforted. There is comfort in the Word.

          Jesus is pointing toward a new day, but he is also telling us that there are times when the proper thing, the hopeful thing is to mourn. When people don't feel despair when wrong is done, nothing will change. If the alcoholic doesn't hit rock bottom, if he denies being poor in spirit, and does not call out to that higher power, things will stay the same. As long as people thought slavery was the natural order of things, they did not mourn over the way fellow human beings were being treated. Until we begin to mourn the devastation of the environment, there is no hope that we will change our ways and turn things around. It is possible to have false hope. In scripture this is placing hope in anything other than God. There is trust in war as Hosea points out in 10:13:

You have plowed iniquity,

you have reaped injustice,

you have eaten the fruit of lies.

Because you have trusted in your chariots

and in the multitude of your warriors.

And then the psalmist reminds us

Ps. 59[5] Why should I fear in times of trouble,

when the iniquity of my persecutors surrounds me,

[6] men who trust in their wealth

and boast of the abundance of their riches?

[7] Truly no man can ransom himself,

or give to God the price of his life,

[8] for the ransom of his life is costly,

and can never suffice,

[9] that he should continue to live on forever

and never see the Pit.

          In the presidential debate one of the candidates was addressing the question of America's image abroad. He said, "I will never apologize for America." Never apologize? Unwilling to acknowledge when we make a mistake? That sounded not only arrogant but scary.

          "Blessed are the meek. They shall inherit the earth. If we are able to experience meekness, we can acknowledge when we have made a mistake and change toward a better, ultimately more effective and confident path. If we have not experienced the meekness, why would we care what happens to the planet? Until we mourn the loss of our soldiers and the people of Iraq, there is no hope that the war will end. In this light we might paraphrase Jesus, "Thank God somebody is mourning, or we will never know comfort. Thank God somebody is willing to be a peacemaker or we will never know peace. Thank God somebody hungers and thirst for righteousness, or we may never know the kingdom of heaven. Not only is there a basis for the hopes, the solid rock of God, not only will God fulfill their hope in the future, but they are hope from God for the world in the present tense. They are blessed right now. Blessed are, not blessed will be. Everything may not go their way yet, but they are blessed now. The sense that something is wrong and ought to change is something that is right, right now, already.

          And so in Christian theology we say that Jesus is alive now and Jesus is to come. We have salvation now and yet it is to come. We wait and trust, hope and pray for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, and yet we recognize the eternal grace and peace of God even here and now.

          The key is that the despair and mourning do not keep us from recognizing the presence and power of the good already present, nor keep us from hoping and working for a better day. Once we acknowledge reality, including the sad and evil, then we can apply the power of positive thinking guys. Never give up. Try, try, and try again. We miss 100% of the shots we don't take.

          Hope is a struggle throughout scripture, especially into the New Testament. Israel had hoped for a messiah, one who would usher in the kingdom of heaven, where swords would be pounded into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. When Jesus came onto the scene, he made people feel like their hopes were finally being realized. Then he was killed and all seemed lost.

          You remember the disciples, after the crucifixion, walking on the road to Emmaus. A stranger came along side them and asked them why the despairing faces: "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." (Luke 24:21) They had hoped and now their hopes were nailed to a cross and buried in a tomb. At least that is what they had thought. However, they sat and ate with the stranger, and soon they were proclaiming, Jesus Christ is risen.

          As it says in I Peter, "By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

          So in Advent we look back at the hope of Israel found in the fidelity of God through history, at the hope brought in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection. And this foundation of hope gives us hope in the present tense, and hope for the future reign of God.

          Paul Tillich writes in Do We Have the Right to Hope, "We ask the question of our personal participation in the eternal. Do we have a right to hope for it? The answer is: we have a right to such ultimate hope, even in view of the end of all other hopes, even in the face of death. For we experience the presence of the eternal in us and in our world here and now. We experience it in moments of silence and in hours of creativity. We experience it in the conflicts of our conscience and in the hours of peace with ourselves; we experience it in the unconditional seriousness of the moral command in the ecstasy of love. We experience it when we discover a lasting truth and feel the need for a great sacrifice. We experience it in the beauty that life reveals as well as in its demonic darkness. We experience it in moments in which we feel: this is a holy place, a holy thing, a holy person, a holy time; it transcends the ordinary experiences; it gives more, it demands more, it points to the ultimate mystery of my existence, of all existence; it shows me that my finitude, my transitoriness, my being, surrendered to the flux of things, is only one side of my being and that man is both in and above finitude.