Sustained By A Hope Unfulfilled
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series I, Cycle C
In his newest book, The Good Life, Peter Gomes tells of the two times he invited Billy Graham to speak at the Memorial Church at Harvard. In 1982, Gomes invited Graham to conduct a "mission" at "godless" Harvard -- a term Gomes attributes to Yale graduates in 1886 because Harvard abandoned compulsory attendance at Chapel! Graham was advised by many evangelicals not to accept the invitation. Gomes was criticized by many of his colleagues for extending the invitation. But the great Baptist evangelist accepted the great Baptist pastor's invitation.
Billy Graham preached on "Peace in a Nuclear Age." Even those in the Kennedy School of Government expressed an interest in hearing the man who had been a close friend to every president since Eisenhower, especially since he had just returned from the Soviet Union. But Graham preached not on the peace brokered in the corridors of political power, but on the peace that only Christ can give, the peace that passes all understanding. After one session, Dr. Graham entertained questions, some rude and hostile. "Why had he not used his influence with Johnson and Nixon to move quickly to end the war in Vietnam?" Graham silenced his critics by confessing the sin of not being a better friend to the two presidents and also confessed his sin of dragging his feet during the beginning stages of the Civil Rights Movement. Whatever was expected of the evangelist, the confessing of sin was probably not on the list.
Billy Graham's second visit to Harvard Yard occurred seventeen years later on Sunday, September 16, 1999. Showing the scars and wounds of fifty years on the front lines for Christ and the ill effects of Parkinson's disease, the aging preacher looked tired. Here I wish to quote Gomes directly: "To be certain of a place in the pews, students in great numbers had camped out all night on the entrance porches of the church, and by half past nine in the morning every seat had been taken for the three o'clock service."1 Not only did Graham look tired, but his body did not seem totally under his control and his golden mane was now white. But when he began to speak, the years seemed to roll away, that liquid magic in his voice began to flow and his eyes sparkled as of old.
His opening words were, "I know I am going to die soon, but that doesn't scare me. Does it scare you?" Then he preached his confident message of hope upon which he had built his entire life, the message of hope that had sustained him and millions who had heard him gladly for so long. And, as always he does, Dr. Graham extended an invitation to "make a decision for Christ." But it was more than an invitation to accept Christ; it was a decision to hope, even when everything else seems hopeless. It is to this hope that people give their lives. It was in this hope that students slept outdoors all night to be invited by hope to hope in the morning.2
It was G. K. Chesterton who said, "As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable."
I think that we all can agree that hope is, indeed, indispensable. We cannot live without hope. Life without hope is meaningless, leads to despair, and is headed nowhere except to self-ruin. The most tragic biblical example of this was the disciple of Jesus named Judas. Possibly, Judas loved Jesus and was filled with the hope that Jesus would free his people from the hated Roman yoke. But, impatiently, he took matters into his own hands, tried to force Jesus' hand, and betrayed our Lord into hostile hands. Realizing that his plan had gone astray and that Jesus was going to die, he recoiled in horror, sunk to the depths of despair, and destroyed himself. Hopelessness leads to despair and self-destruction.
Dante places over the door to the Inferno, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." This is a life without God. This is a life without hope. This is a life of hell. As Gomes comments, "To deprive a person of hope is the ultimate punishment."3 Hope is indispensable.
Just as hope is indispensable, it is also unreasonable. Hope just does not make sense according to the world's reasoning. It was Archie Bunker who said of faith, the twin sister of hope (sometimes I cannot tell the difference between the two), that "faith is believing what any fool knows ain't so." As unreasonable as sometimes it seems, we believe and we hope, even when empirical evidence deems otherwise. Why?
Many remember that before Phil Donohue gained national, even worldwide fame, he began as a talk-show host in a local station in Cincinnati. Living in Indiana at the time, I remember when he hosted his then soon-to-be famous debates between evangelist Bob Harrington, the "Chaplain of Bourbon Street," and the infamous atheist and political activist, Madelyn Murray O'Hair. The one I remember seeing was a doozy! Ms. O'Hair would rant and rave on endlessly about the general abuses of religion and Christians in particular. She would posit her confident position that the Bible was full of fairy tales and the stance of faith was folly from any point of human reason. Reverend Harrington would patiently wade through her diatribe and then respond succinctly to her with his own views and then remark, "I believe it because I want to." We believe it because we want to. We have hope because we cannot live without it. If life is to have any purpose, any meaning, any direction, we must have hope.
Personally, I must have hope. I have to believe that I am God's child and an heir to God's promises. I have hope that when I put my faith in Jesus Christ as a nine-year-old boy, God promised that all of my sins would be forgiven and removed from me as far as the east is from the west. He promised that my sins would be remembered against me no more, and I would be restored in the sight of God as if I had never sinned. God promised that he would be in my heart in the form of the Holy Spirit not only in this life but in the life to come. God promised that I would be a part of this counter-cultural colony community we call the church, and if the church is true to its mission, God will use us to transform the world.
I have to have hope that one day I will live in heaven with God and finally have some answers to the questions and problems of life. I believe that, as God's children, we are heirs of all these promises and more. But, what if I die and what if I have to face death without knowing whether these things are going to happen or not? What if mine is a hope unfulfilled, a promise incomplete? I will be a sojourner, an alien in a time not my own.
Well, at least I will be in good company. I will be like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. "These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised" (v. 39 NIV). Theirs was a hope unfulfilled. Yet, they kept on, had faith, persevered, and possessed a hope that sustained them.
And what is this sustaining hope, this persevering faith? To be honest with you, the Bible does not try to define its essential twin sisters; so much as it seeks to illustrate the essence of hope and faith. It is difficult to find a better illustration than Abraham and Sarah. First of all, they left home. To follow the God of hope often means leaving home. Verse 8 states, "By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." The journey of faith begins with the first step. The journey of faith begins as we leave home. I can just see him now. Abraham's neighbor may have looked like Thornie of the old Ozzie and Harriet show. Abraham is packing up everything on the camels and the neighbor comes over and says, "Where are you going, Abraham?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Well, how are you going to know when you get there?"
"I don't know that either."
"Abraham, you're almost ninety years old, a wealthy man, a man of power and influence, and you're taking your eighty-year-old wife and all that you have and don't know where you're going?"
"No, I don't know."
"Why are you going?"
"God made me a promise that if I would leave home and go to a place that he will show me, he would make me a father of many nations. He would bless me and through me all the nations of the earth would be blessed."
"Do you have it in writing?"
"No, I don't need it in writing. I have it on my heart. I'm going because God made me a promise." That's the way it is with faith. It means taking a first step in a different direction. It means making a change. It means doing things differently.
A recent definition of insanity is when we do the same thing over and over and expect different results. We are more often bred for repetition, not self-discovery. Sometimes to indulge in self-discovery means to avoid repetition. It means to take a step of faith. It means to do some things differently. It means to leave home.
Jesus said, "No one can be my disciple who does not love me more than he loves father or mother or family." WOW! Jesus used the word hate. What did he mean? He simply meant that his voice and his call in our life have to be first. It has to be foremost. When we follow that voice, we may have to physically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, or symbolically leave home.
I ran across a statement recently that read, "You are indispensable to no one except God." Isn't that wonderful? God has created us as a special individual to be his person, the person that he created us to be. Faith for Abraham was taking the first step off of his property and not looking back. That's faith. Faith is leaving home.
To follow the God of hope may also include living in tents. Abraham and Sarah made their home in a foreign country and lived like strangers in tents. They went through a time of transition when everything was uprooted. I can just hear them now. "This is such a beautiful oasis here, Abraham. Can we just stop and stay a little while. How long has it been since we've used our best china? Let's drag out the linen tablecloth and napkins and get out the best china and silverware. We can even take a bath, Abraham, two days in a row. Let's stay."
"Well, Sarah, it would be nice, but we're on a journey. Drag out the baloney and let's eat a couple of quick sandwiches. We've got to leave early in the morning." That's what faith is about. It's moving sometimes when we had rather be still. It's going sometimes when we had rather stay. It's leading our lives in a creative tension of transition and change, always moving from one point to the other as God directs us.
Someone recently said that ninety percent of all the inventors, educators, and theorists who have ever lived are alive today. Change may occur even more rapidly tomorrow than it did today. Transition is a way of life. That is not going to change. We all live in tents. And one day even these physical tents shall be destroyed. Until then we travel best, as the aliens and strangers we are, the company with each other, in this counter-cultural colony and community we call the church.
We are a people who share a common life together. The Bible does not say that the church is to transform the world. I thought that for a long time. The Bible says that the church is to be faithful to our mission and God will transform the world through us. It is God's business to transform the world. It is the church's business to be the church and be distinguished by the radically different life that we live, to be a colony of one culture in a larger culture that is not our own. We are to be the church.
We are to be the church even when we don't fully understand. "By faith Abraham, even though he was past age -- and Sarah herself was barren -- was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise" (v. 11 NIV). We are sustained by a hope unfulfilled because we know we can trust the One who made the promise. We believe that God will provide, as Abraham discovered when he went to sacrifice Isaac.
So, we are bound and branded together. Traveling as aliens in a foreign land (v. 13). We are bound together for each other and we are bound together for the world we serve. We are bound together by a common purpose and a common story. In the meantime, we tell our stories.
I love it when the Carver clan gathers on Sunday after church. As soon as we begin to gather, the stories start, usually by our three sons. They begin to remember this tale and that tale, repeating the stories we have heard dozens of time, but relish once more. These are the Carver stories that bind us together as a family, that remind us that God has been faithful. These are the stories that remind us of who and whose we are. We are never more a family than when we tell our stories.
As the family of faith, we tell our stories, because they remind us of who we are. We are Abraham and Sara, David and Bathsheba, Gideon and Hannah. We are Peter, James, and John. We are Magdalene, Martha, and Lydia. We are Augustine and Polycarp. We are Luther, Zwingli, Smyth, and Helwys. We are Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong, Fanny Cosby, Graham, and Gomes. We tell our stories and by them, we are sustained, untilÉ.
I began playing Little League baseball in 1957. The story that year in baseball circles was about a small band of diminutive Little Leaguers from Monterrey, Mexico. They walked across the American border, some wearing shoes for the first time. They were huge underdogs in every game they played. But they won. Against all odds, they won and won.
In the Little League finals at Williamsport, the Monterrey street kids played the highly favored California team which outweighed the Mexicans thirty pounds per person. Led by the switch-pitching Angel Macias, the lads from across the border not only shocked the world by upsetting the California bunch, but Macias pitched a no-hitter, striking out eleven in six innings.
Monterrey won the world championship. A film about the team was called How Tall Is A Giant? The story ended with an answer to the question -- as tall as courage, as tall as faith, as tall as a dream.4
That is hope that sustains!
____________
1. Peter J. Gomes, The Good Life (San Francisco: Harper, 2002), p. 274.
2. Gomes, op. cit., p. 276.
3. Ibid.
4. Morgan Patterson, Professor in the Pulpit (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1963), p. 1.
Billy Graham preached on "Peace in a Nuclear Age." Even those in the Kennedy School of Government expressed an interest in hearing the man who had been a close friend to every president since Eisenhower, especially since he had just returned from the Soviet Union. But Graham preached not on the peace brokered in the corridors of political power, but on the peace that only Christ can give, the peace that passes all understanding. After one session, Dr. Graham entertained questions, some rude and hostile. "Why had he not used his influence with Johnson and Nixon to move quickly to end the war in Vietnam?" Graham silenced his critics by confessing the sin of not being a better friend to the two presidents and also confessed his sin of dragging his feet during the beginning stages of the Civil Rights Movement. Whatever was expected of the evangelist, the confessing of sin was probably not on the list.
Billy Graham's second visit to Harvard Yard occurred seventeen years later on Sunday, September 16, 1999. Showing the scars and wounds of fifty years on the front lines for Christ and the ill effects of Parkinson's disease, the aging preacher looked tired. Here I wish to quote Gomes directly: "To be certain of a place in the pews, students in great numbers had camped out all night on the entrance porches of the church, and by half past nine in the morning every seat had been taken for the three o'clock service."1 Not only did Graham look tired, but his body did not seem totally under his control and his golden mane was now white. But when he began to speak, the years seemed to roll away, that liquid magic in his voice began to flow and his eyes sparkled as of old.
His opening words were, "I know I am going to die soon, but that doesn't scare me. Does it scare you?" Then he preached his confident message of hope upon which he had built his entire life, the message of hope that had sustained him and millions who had heard him gladly for so long. And, as always he does, Dr. Graham extended an invitation to "make a decision for Christ." But it was more than an invitation to accept Christ; it was a decision to hope, even when everything else seems hopeless. It is to this hope that people give their lives. It was in this hope that students slept outdoors all night to be invited by hope to hope in the morning.2
It was G. K. Chesterton who said, "As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable."
I think that we all can agree that hope is, indeed, indispensable. We cannot live without hope. Life without hope is meaningless, leads to despair, and is headed nowhere except to self-ruin. The most tragic biblical example of this was the disciple of Jesus named Judas. Possibly, Judas loved Jesus and was filled with the hope that Jesus would free his people from the hated Roman yoke. But, impatiently, he took matters into his own hands, tried to force Jesus' hand, and betrayed our Lord into hostile hands. Realizing that his plan had gone astray and that Jesus was going to die, he recoiled in horror, sunk to the depths of despair, and destroyed himself. Hopelessness leads to despair and self-destruction.
Dante places over the door to the Inferno, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." This is a life without God. This is a life without hope. This is a life of hell. As Gomes comments, "To deprive a person of hope is the ultimate punishment."3 Hope is indispensable.
Just as hope is indispensable, it is also unreasonable. Hope just does not make sense according to the world's reasoning. It was Archie Bunker who said of faith, the twin sister of hope (sometimes I cannot tell the difference between the two), that "faith is believing what any fool knows ain't so." As unreasonable as sometimes it seems, we believe and we hope, even when empirical evidence deems otherwise. Why?
Many remember that before Phil Donohue gained national, even worldwide fame, he began as a talk-show host in a local station in Cincinnati. Living in Indiana at the time, I remember when he hosted his then soon-to-be famous debates between evangelist Bob Harrington, the "Chaplain of Bourbon Street," and the infamous atheist and political activist, Madelyn Murray O'Hair. The one I remember seeing was a doozy! Ms. O'Hair would rant and rave on endlessly about the general abuses of religion and Christians in particular. She would posit her confident position that the Bible was full of fairy tales and the stance of faith was folly from any point of human reason. Reverend Harrington would patiently wade through her diatribe and then respond succinctly to her with his own views and then remark, "I believe it because I want to." We believe it because we want to. We have hope because we cannot live without it. If life is to have any purpose, any meaning, any direction, we must have hope.
Personally, I must have hope. I have to believe that I am God's child and an heir to God's promises. I have hope that when I put my faith in Jesus Christ as a nine-year-old boy, God promised that all of my sins would be forgiven and removed from me as far as the east is from the west. He promised that my sins would be remembered against me no more, and I would be restored in the sight of God as if I had never sinned. God promised that he would be in my heart in the form of the Holy Spirit not only in this life but in the life to come. God promised that I would be a part of this counter-cultural colony community we call the church, and if the church is true to its mission, God will use us to transform the world.
I have to have hope that one day I will live in heaven with God and finally have some answers to the questions and problems of life. I believe that, as God's children, we are heirs of all these promises and more. But, what if I die and what if I have to face death without knowing whether these things are going to happen or not? What if mine is a hope unfulfilled, a promise incomplete? I will be a sojourner, an alien in a time not my own.
Well, at least I will be in good company. I will be like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. "These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised" (v. 39 NIV). Theirs was a hope unfulfilled. Yet, they kept on, had faith, persevered, and possessed a hope that sustained them.
And what is this sustaining hope, this persevering faith? To be honest with you, the Bible does not try to define its essential twin sisters; so much as it seeks to illustrate the essence of hope and faith. It is difficult to find a better illustration than Abraham and Sarah. First of all, they left home. To follow the God of hope often means leaving home. Verse 8 states, "By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." The journey of faith begins with the first step. The journey of faith begins as we leave home. I can just see him now. Abraham's neighbor may have looked like Thornie of the old Ozzie and Harriet show. Abraham is packing up everything on the camels and the neighbor comes over and says, "Where are you going, Abraham?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Well, how are you going to know when you get there?"
"I don't know that either."
"Abraham, you're almost ninety years old, a wealthy man, a man of power and influence, and you're taking your eighty-year-old wife and all that you have and don't know where you're going?"
"No, I don't know."
"Why are you going?"
"God made me a promise that if I would leave home and go to a place that he will show me, he would make me a father of many nations. He would bless me and through me all the nations of the earth would be blessed."
"Do you have it in writing?"
"No, I don't need it in writing. I have it on my heart. I'm going because God made me a promise." That's the way it is with faith. It means taking a first step in a different direction. It means making a change. It means doing things differently.
A recent definition of insanity is when we do the same thing over and over and expect different results. We are more often bred for repetition, not self-discovery. Sometimes to indulge in self-discovery means to avoid repetition. It means to take a step of faith. It means to do some things differently. It means to leave home.
Jesus said, "No one can be my disciple who does not love me more than he loves father or mother or family." WOW! Jesus used the word hate. What did he mean? He simply meant that his voice and his call in our life have to be first. It has to be foremost. When we follow that voice, we may have to physically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, or symbolically leave home.
I ran across a statement recently that read, "You are indispensable to no one except God." Isn't that wonderful? God has created us as a special individual to be his person, the person that he created us to be. Faith for Abraham was taking the first step off of his property and not looking back. That's faith. Faith is leaving home.
To follow the God of hope may also include living in tents. Abraham and Sarah made their home in a foreign country and lived like strangers in tents. They went through a time of transition when everything was uprooted. I can just hear them now. "This is such a beautiful oasis here, Abraham. Can we just stop and stay a little while. How long has it been since we've used our best china? Let's drag out the linen tablecloth and napkins and get out the best china and silverware. We can even take a bath, Abraham, two days in a row. Let's stay."
"Well, Sarah, it would be nice, but we're on a journey. Drag out the baloney and let's eat a couple of quick sandwiches. We've got to leave early in the morning." That's what faith is about. It's moving sometimes when we had rather be still. It's going sometimes when we had rather stay. It's leading our lives in a creative tension of transition and change, always moving from one point to the other as God directs us.
Someone recently said that ninety percent of all the inventors, educators, and theorists who have ever lived are alive today. Change may occur even more rapidly tomorrow than it did today. Transition is a way of life. That is not going to change. We all live in tents. And one day even these physical tents shall be destroyed. Until then we travel best, as the aliens and strangers we are, the company with each other, in this counter-cultural colony and community we call the church.
We are a people who share a common life together. The Bible does not say that the church is to transform the world. I thought that for a long time. The Bible says that the church is to be faithful to our mission and God will transform the world through us. It is God's business to transform the world. It is the church's business to be the church and be distinguished by the radically different life that we live, to be a colony of one culture in a larger culture that is not our own. We are to be the church.
We are to be the church even when we don't fully understand. "By faith Abraham, even though he was past age -- and Sarah herself was barren -- was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise" (v. 11 NIV). We are sustained by a hope unfulfilled because we know we can trust the One who made the promise. We believe that God will provide, as Abraham discovered when he went to sacrifice Isaac.
So, we are bound and branded together. Traveling as aliens in a foreign land (v. 13). We are bound together for each other and we are bound together for the world we serve. We are bound together by a common purpose and a common story. In the meantime, we tell our stories.
I love it when the Carver clan gathers on Sunday after church. As soon as we begin to gather, the stories start, usually by our three sons. They begin to remember this tale and that tale, repeating the stories we have heard dozens of time, but relish once more. These are the Carver stories that bind us together as a family, that remind us that God has been faithful. These are the stories that remind us of who and whose we are. We are never more a family than when we tell our stories.
As the family of faith, we tell our stories, because they remind us of who we are. We are Abraham and Sara, David and Bathsheba, Gideon and Hannah. We are Peter, James, and John. We are Magdalene, Martha, and Lydia. We are Augustine and Polycarp. We are Luther, Zwingli, Smyth, and Helwys. We are Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong, Fanny Cosby, Graham, and Gomes. We tell our stories and by them, we are sustained, untilÉ.
I began playing Little League baseball in 1957. The story that year in baseball circles was about a small band of diminutive Little Leaguers from Monterrey, Mexico. They walked across the American border, some wearing shoes for the first time. They were huge underdogs in every game they played. But they won. Against all odds, they won and won.
In the Little League finals at Williamsport, the Monterrey street kids played the highly favored California team which outweighed the Mexicans thirty pounds per person. Led by the switch-pitching Angel Macias, the lads from across the border not only shocked the world by upsetting the California bunch, but Macias pitched a no-hitter, striking out eleven in six innings.
Monterrey won the world championship. A film about the team was called How Tall Is A Giant? The story ended with an answer to the question -- as tall as courage, as tall as faith, as tall as a dream.4
That is hope that sustains!
____________
1. Peter J. Gomes, The Good Life (San Francisco: Harper, 2002), p. 274.
2. Gomes, op. cit., p. 276.
3. Ibid.
4. Morgan Patterson, Professor in the Pulpit (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1963), p. 1.
