A Word of Hope

We need some hope right now. And who offers it but the "weeping prophet" Jeremiah, who is better known for his predictions of doom and gloom! God will not abandon us, he assures us. The darkness doesn't get the last word! Read on to find out more about it.

Jeremiah was never known as the life of the party. He was one of those folks who not only saw the glass as half empty; he would take a close look and announce that a dead fly was floating in the water! He has become known as “the weeping prophet,” because he was always predicting disaster for his fellow Israelites. Jeremiah was the prophet who stood outside the Jerusalem Temple on the Sabbath hollering that just going to church doesn’t make God happy, even if it’s the biggest church in town. He warned the people that if they thought they were better than their neighbors just because God had chosen them… well, they had another think coming! He finally told them that God was so tired of their behavior that God was going to take drastic action to get their attention once and for all! That made people so mad at him that they threw him into a well just to shut him up!

But it turned out that Jeremiah was right! The Babylonians swooped down on Israel from the north and conquered the whole lot of them; and they dragged all the nobles, the soldiers, and the merchants off into exile. They took the golden candlesticks from the Temple, too, and stripped the ivory beds and purple curtains from the royal palace. You can read about it in II Kings 24. After the Babylonians were finished with Israel, the only ones left there were the very poorest people. Then the Babylonians set up Zedekiah as the king of Israel, telling him that he’d better toe the line or things would get a lot worse! Now, you would think that Jeremiah would rub their noses in it at that point. After all, he had been right all along. God was tired of the Israelites and their talk-a-lot-but-do-nothing religion; and the exile was proof of it. You would think that Jeremiah would have said, “See, I told you so! You got what you deserve!” But he didn’t say that at all. Instead, he sent a word of hope to all those frightened exiles saying, “Don’t despair! Hang on! God has plans for you; plans to bring you back to your own land and get you going in the right direction again. This isn’t the end!” (Jeremiah 29:1-3, 10-14, 20) Old doom-and-gloom Jeremiah turned out to be the one who encouraged the exiled Israelites to believe that doom and gloom might not be the last word, after all!

Does Jeremiah have a word of hope for us today? There seems to be precious little hope to go around these days. Wherever we turn, we hear people predicting disaster just like Jeremiah did over 2500 years ago. Global warming is causing climate changes all over the world; and scientists predict that drought, wildfires, and category 5 hurricanes will become common. The worldwide inequality of wealth keeps billions of people in grinding poverty. Will wars, famines, and epidemics be the result? Some people think so. Even here in our own little church, things don’t look good. We are small and getting smaller, with few visitors and even fewer new members joining our congregation. Are we going to have to close our doors in the future? Oh, yes, things are bad all over! But Jeremiah, in the middle of situations that could lead to despair, offers a word of hope. He says that conflict and oppression and suffering won’t get the last word. God’s unfailing love, says Jeremiah, has the last word! The end won’t be disaster, but renewal.

Now, we need to be careful when we talk about hope. There’s plenty of wishful thinking around today that calls itself hope; but it really isn’t hope at all. We hear it all the time. “I hope that the weather will be nice tomorrow.” “I hope that I lose some weight so I can fit into this dress again.” “I hope that I win the lottery.” But although those statements may use the word “hope,” when we look closely at them, they aren’t really about hope at all. They’re just wishes that we make when things aren’t the way that we want them to be. Hope is something very different. Hope isn’t a wish; it’s a certainty: the certainty that God’s love, wisdom, and power will transform any situation into something good, even if we don’t see any evidence of it right now! Hope doesn’t deny that things are bad; but hope believes that the good will ultimately triumph. When the night is darkest, hope bravely declares, “This will not last forever. Even though I may never see the light, I believe that in the end, the darkness will be conquered.”

One of my favorite descriptions of hope is a poem that was written by the great American poet Emily Dickinson. It begins this way:

“Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.”

Hope is like the birds that come to my feeder in all kinds of weather. Sun, rain, or snow, little feathered bits of hope arrive every day to gobble up sunflower seeds or peanuts and to peck at cakes of suet. They sing their songs even in the most dreadful weather! On some days those songs are very quiet. But sing they do; just as we proclaim our hope whether times are good or bad.

“But,” some folks ask, “how can you possibly have hope? I see no evidence at all that things are going to get better!” And if we’re honest with ourselves, lots of times we have to agree with them. Many situations in our world bring us to despair; all we see is a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end of it. But, you see, that’s why hope is hope. Hope springs from our faith that believes that God can and will redeem any situation, no matter how bad things might be. And there’s no way to prove that. No scientist can find God’s love in a test tube or in a Petri dish or under a microscope. We need faith to believe it. But if we do believe it, then we need not lose hope, not in any situation that we may encounter.

People who have hope are like the boy who always found an opportunity for good no matter what happened to him. When the weather was rainy, he reminded his family that the rain helps the flowers to grow. When he got a low grade on a test, he declared that his mistakes helped him know what to study so that he could improve. When a fellow classmate was rude to him, he said that the experience helped him to learn patience. His neighbor was a grumpy fellow who was annoyed by the child’s unfailing optimism. “That kid needs to grow up,” he declared one day. “I’ll show him that not everything turns out well in the end.” So he ordered a huge pile of horse manure one day, and he had it dumped right in the middle of the boy’s front yard. When the child came home from school that day, his neighbor called to him. “Hey, I’ve got a present for you!” and showed him the enormous manure pile. The boy ran right to the pile of manure and began to dig into it happily. “What in the world are you doing?” the neighbor asked. The boy looked up with a shining face and answered, “Well, with a pile of manure this big, I know there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

Hope believes that the sun will rise no matter how dark the night has been. Hope refuses to surrender to despair. Hope believes that God will redeem everything in his own time.

“Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.”

May you hear that word of hope today – and believe it!

Storm Warning

What would you do if you knew that a hurricane was coming? You'd get ready for it, right? Jesus tells us that sooner or later, a hurricane will blow into our own lives, and we should prepare for it right now! This sermon explains what he meant; and how we can get ready.

There’s a hurricane coming; and it’s a big one! Jesus says that we’re all going to be caught in the middle of a terrible storm, one that will threaten everything that we have and everything that we are; so we’d better get ready for it (Matthew 7:24-27). We don’t get many hurricanes here in Ohio, but we all know what they’re like. We’ve seen quite a few of them on the Weather Channel recently. They last a lot longer than the tornadoes that pop up here every summer. Tornadoes are fast; they can pass by almost before we have time to take cover. But hurricanes can seem to last forever! First the rain falls. It falls in buckets, and it drenches you to the bone. Then comes the wind: wind that is so strong, it’s like a gigantic fist that picks you up and throws you off your feet. And finally, the storm surge: water that floods in and carries you away from every security you thought you had. Oh, yes, Jesus says: there’s a hurricane coming; so we had better get ready for it.

But it’s easy to ignore his storm warning. “That’s no problem,” we think, “we’ll just evacuate when the hurricane threatens! We’ll move to higher ground; go visit our relatives in Tennessee; head for an emergency shelter if we have to. We can avoid a hurricane easily enough!” But the kind of hurricane that Jesus is talking about isn’t one that we can outrun. It’s a storm that life sends us when we are least ready for it. And we usually don’t even see it coming. The rain starts when you hit a patch of black ice on the roadway; and suddenly you’ve careened into the guardrail and the front end of your car is torn apart. The wind starts to howl when your doctor notices a suspicious lump during a routine checkup; and before you know it, you’re facing a whole slew of medical tests. And the storm surge? That’s the midnight phone call from the Sheriff’s department with the chilling message, “I’m so sorry; there’s been an accident.” Rain, wind, and flood. We’re going to have to deal with them. Jesus was absolutely right about that.

But if that’s the bad news that Jesus has for us, he also has good news for us: there is a solid foundation on which we can build our lives so that we can withstand even the worst hurricane that life throws at us; and he even tells us what that foundation is. It’s Jesus’ own words – his teachings about who we are, how we should live, and how valuable we are to God. “These words of mine,” he says “all the things that I have just taught you – they are the solid rock that you can rely on through any storm.” And “these words of mine” are none other than the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ first great teaching in the gospel of Matthew.

Maybe it would be a good idea to review what Jesus said in that teaching. He starts by telling us that everything the world tells us is suspect; and that there’s a better way to live. Then he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Although the proud may be proud now, someday they will find that they have nothing left to be proud about; but the poor in spirit are a part of God’s kingdom forever. He goes on to say, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” We shouldn’t rely on violence to accomplish anything, because it never does; hitting somebody in the eye only makes him want to hit you back. He even says, “Blessed are the ones who mourn,” because if you mourn, it means that you care deeply about something; and not caring about anything is a terrible way to go through life! He tells us not to hate; because if we do, it will infect our whole lives. He tells us not to run after what we don’t have; because if we do, we won’t enjoy the things that we do have. He even tells us to love our enemies, because God loves everyone, even those folks who don’t love him back.

That last teaching of Jesus is the most important one of all. God loves everyone; and that means all of us. That is the solid rock on which we can stand through all the storms that life throws at us. God loves us no matter who we are or what we do! “Don’t worry,” Jesus says. “You are incredibly important to God, more important than anything else!” God’s love is the truth on which we can base our lives. If we base our lives on money, or on status, or even on our own accomplishments, we’re just like that fool who thought that the beach was a good place to build his dream house! When the stock market crashes, or the biopsy comes back positive, or a pink slip is enclosed with the paycheck, all our plans will be washed away just like the sand on the beach. But the love of God that we see in Jesus Christ will never be washed away, not by all the troubles that life throws at us!

Now, I know that it’s easy to lose sight of that love when the hurricane begins. It’s like driving down I-75 in a cloudburst. You know that there are trees and billboards and road signs along the highway; but you can’t see them through the rain. Sometimes you can’t even see the other cars that are on the highway! But you know that they’re there; and you know that when the rain slows down, you’ll be able to see them again. When troubles start raining into your life, the very same thing happens. You can’t see Jesus’ love through the cloudburst of pain and grief and fear that’s all around you. But it’s there. It’s there when a friend holds you while you weep, and listens while you pour out all your built-up anger and sorrow and fear. It’s there when people around you help you without your even having to ask for it. And it’s there when, every now and then, you feel a little bit of the peace that Jesus promises us, even though the world around you may be lying in ruins. Jesus is the rock on which we can stand, the certainty on which we can rely, the foundation that cannot be washed away. When the rain beats down and the wind howls around us and the flood rushes in, the love of Christ is our solid foundation.

So, where are you building your house? Of all the choices that we make in life, that one is the most important. Choose wisely!

Not Like Us

This past Sunday was World Communion Sunday, when Christians all over the world join in celebrating the Lord's Supper. We don't often think about them, especially since most of them... well, they're not like us! And that is the topic of my sermon.

I'm going to begin this sermon with a word association quiz. Don’t worry – there aren’t any right or wrong answers. I just want you to pay attention to the image that flashes into your mind when I say a word. Ready?

The first word is “inventor.” Who springs to mind when I say that word?

The next word is “musician.” Do all of you have someone in mind for that?

The last word is “Christian.” That one should be easy.

Now, I’m going to take a guess that the image that came to mind when I said each word was that of a white, middle-class person who looks a lot like we do. When I said “inventor,” you might have pictured Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers. I’ll bet that not many of you thought of George Washington Carver, the African-American genius who found so many uses for the peanut.

How about “musician”? Who came to your mind for that word? Was it Paul McCartney or Garth Brooks? I wonder if anyone thought of Yo Yo Ma, the Asian-American cellist who makes his instrument sing like the angels themselves.

And what about “Christian.” Who did you think of for that? Did you picture a middle-class American sitting in a church pew? Maybe you even thought of one of us here this morning.

None of those answers are wrong. The point that I’m trying to make is that when we talk about categories of people like “inventor,” “musician,” or “Christian,” we tend to think of people who look, talk, and act just like we do; and we exclude those who are different. The images of white, middle-class people just spring into our minds automatically, even though we all know perfectly well that there are lots of people who aren’t like us. It is human nature to divide people into those who are “like us” and those who are “not like us.” But when we divide people into those categories, it’s only a small step to believing that “not like us” means “not as good as us.” That kind of thinking puts us on a pedestal where we don’t belong; and it doesn’t give other people the credit that they deserve.

“Not like us” can take many forms. Sometimes, “not like us” is obvious: a different skin color, a different language, or different customs. But other times, “not like us” is sneakier. “Not like us” can be people who speak with a different accent, who belong to a different Christian denomination, or who worship differently than we do. “Not like us” can be people use praise bands to lead worship, and sit on folding chairs in gymnasiums instead of in church pews. Why, some of those “not like us” people even worship on Saturday night! Can you see how “not like us” can really drive a wedge between us and people who are our brothers and sisters? We start to get suspicious of people who are “not like us.” We wonder why they do things differently than we do. Are they hiding something? Are they really good people after all? If we’re not careful, we end up tumbling down a slippery slope, and we might end up all the way at the bottom thinking that the people who are “not like us” are absolute good-for-nothings!

Even Jesus’ disciples fell into this kind of trap. The gospel of Mark tells us that one day they came running to Jesus with a story about someone who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name. The trouble was, he wasn’t an official disciple. He hadn’t been with Jesus and the twelve as they journeyed through Galilee. He hadn’t sat at Jesus’ feet as to hear his teachings. Why, he probably didn’t even know the words to the Lord’s Prayer! And so, the Twelve had told him to stop what he was doing. Stop casting out demons! Stop liberating people from the grip of madness. Stop restoring their minds to sanity. Stop giving them a chance to live normal lives again. All they saw was that he didn’t have an official “disciple of Jesus” card. When they told Jesus what they had done, they didn’t get the praise that they expected. In fact, Jesus shook his head in despair. “Don’t stop him!” Jesus said. “He’s on our side!”

We’re just like the disciples. We spend lots of time focusing on our differences; and we seldom think about just how much we have in common with other Christians. But not this morning. This morning is the one day in the Christian year that we focus on how we are alike instead of on how we are different. This morning, instead of concentrating on how other Christians are “not like us,” we focus on how Christians around the world are “likeus” as we all join in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. This morning, all of us Christians, wherever in the world we may live, are remembering the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made on our behalf. We are all celebrating the Bread of Life that consoles us, supports us, and nourishes us. And we are all looking forward to the great banquet at the end of time, when all of us will sit down at God’s table in glory, and all our differences won’t matter a hoot anymore.

Now, the practices of some of those Christians may be very different from ours. They may be sharing rye bread, pita bread, or rice cakes. They may be drinking grape juice, rice wine, or even milk. They may be distributing the elements on plates and in little cups as they sit in church pews; or they may be eating from a common loaf and drinking from a common cup as they kneel at the altar. But all of us are praising the same God, following the same Christ, and filled with the same Spirit. We are all beloved children of God who are in need of God’s amazing grace; and we find that grace right here at the table of Jesus Christ.

So, everyone is invited to come to the table! Come, take your place with people of all nationalities, languages, cultures, and customs. Come, because we are all God’s people who have eternal life through the grace of Jesus Christ. Come, join with our brothers and sisters around the world; because Jesus Christ has invited all of us!