A Living Hope (If It Hadn't Been For Easter)
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
A church member read the New Testament and concluded, "Amazing things were going on back then. People converted not just their faith but their lives and values. They were healed, dropped prejudices, crossed ethnic boundaries, and ... and, people were beaten, tried, and killed for their faith." Then she looked at our modern American church and saw little similarity between the early Christian church and our current one. This experience indicates that perhaps it's safer for church members not to read the New Testament. It's not safe to read the New Testament and then to look at our contemporary church. It's disturbing to such a degree that the woman who read the New Testament said that our modern church looks like an extinct volcano.
She read the New Testament and realized that something mighty happened there: world shaking and world shaping. She looked at the modern church and it seemed a gigantic, cold, empty monument to the past.
People comparing our contemporary church to the New Testament church ask, "Why would anyone die for American mainline Christianity?" We never know what we'd do if faced with the decision to deny our faith or to killed, but I suspect few of us would die for our Lord Jesus. Few of us have the certainty that the future belongs to God no matter whether we ourselves are dead or alive.
The New Testament Christians, contrary to our conventional, domesticated, American mainline churches, were ablaze with expectation for what God would do tomorrow. They looked at the future as God's future, a future in which Jesus would return; thus they looked to the future with hope.
In 1 Peter we hear of the "living hope" the early Christians had -- a hope that was alive, even when fellow Christians died or were killed. The early Christians believed that their hope came along with the new life Christ granted them. A living hope. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope."
A living hope is a hope to live on. Norman Cousins was a diplomat under three presidential administrations, an editor of Saturday Review of Literature, and described as a global peacemaker -- having been granted the United Nations Peace Medal. He thought a lot about hope during more than one serious illness. He said that if you have hope, you make plans. Hope points people toward what life can be, despite the uncertainties, disabilities, or suffering of the present. Hope propels people forward in life, even if they must advance on crutches, or on a walker, or in a wheelchair.
Christian hope knows the pain and suffering, the tragedy and injustice in the world, but Christian hope keeps people trying again. The great eighteenth-century writer, Samuel Johnson, said that a second marriage proves to be the triumph of hope over experience. For some people that's not funny. For others, it's dead on. It's something like Christian hope. Hope leaps forward in risk, strains toward tomorrow despite the chance of failure. All kinds of things in this world smash our hope. But Christian hope isn't a natural hopefulness because business is going well, our family is healthy, and our country isn't at war. Neither Christian faith nor Christian hope is automatic. It's tough to hope, especially when facing our death, or a loved one's death. New Testament hope doesn't deny death, but it doesn't stop at death, either. Peter writes about our "new birth into a living hope" coming about "through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Jesus' resurrection is the center of the New Testament.
We live in Easter's wake, that turbulence stirred up across life's ocean by Jesus' resurrection. Our culture has grabbed Christmas and worked its will upon that season. Christmas has been transformed into a midwinter snow, shopping, and family holiday. We need the historical and theological understanding that if it hadn't been for Easter, we wouldn't know about Christmas. Jesus' birth would never have been remembered or recorded if not for his resurrection. Jesus' resurrection demanded the saving of his birth stories as a fact of history. In the New Testament there's no question that Jesus' resurrection is the absolute center of our faith. Jesus' birth receives only four chapters of attention in two gospels. The story of Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection fills a third of each of the four gospels.
In order for our minds to struggle past the marketing propaganda of our culture that hijacks the Christian faith, repeat after me, "If it hadn't been for Easter...." Again, repeat. "If it hadn't been for Easter...." Now, repeat, "We wouldn't know about Christmas...." Okay, speak the entire statement with me, "If it hadn't been for Easter, we wouldn't know about Christmas...."
Our Christian hope isn't just a better attitude than other people have. It's our trust that God's future has intruded into the present. God's future is changing life right now. Jesus is going to return in the future, but God's future is showing up before we expected it. Ours is now a living hope, because in Jesus' birth and life, death and resurrection, God has taken up our lost cause and made it God's very own. Jesus is leading us in hope, leading us all the way to heaven. That's what the early Christians believed, why they were so grateful, and why our text today begins by blessing and praising God. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Blessing and praising God sets hope to music, and music sets people dancing. Hope is something that gets into our bones and into our muscles and moves us joyfully in God's praise and obedience.
In times of social change and especially in times of war, people seek security. Some people who crave certainty leap for a faith that gives them all the answers. So they chatter away saying, "Everything's going to be all right." Many other people turn away from an uncertain future toward the past with a fit of nostalgia. Weren't things better in the old days? Well, yes, if you liked carrying water a mile and spending all of Monday bent over a tub with a washboard. Yes, at the turn of the twentieth century life was better if, contrary to our today's working forty hours a week and living until eighty, you'd rather work eighty hours a week and die at forty. Gosh, weren't those the good old days!
Nostalgia isn't just wishing for the good old days, but it's transferring the sense of a secure childhood into the present. When we were children, our parents protected most of us from the problems of the larger world. Don't we do that with our own children? But, since most people had a secure childhood, they equate their early family experience with how they reckon all things in the world used to be. Nostalgia is clinging to a distorted idea of how we think life was. People who were abused in their childhood seldom have such a sense of the good old days.
The Christians in the New Testament lived on hope. They were like sled dogs in their traces, jumping and excited, ready to get going because they welcome the trail. As Christians we need hope to push up our antennae toward the future, so we listen and look for God's summons to hope and to service. Hope doesn't just whisper to us of expectations for tomorrow, but hope at least suggests to us that what we do makes a difference. The living hope those New Testament Christians possessed was growing and changing, which means they were growing and changing. Jesus' resurrection changed them and they, in turn, changed the world. Are you open to God changing you in these Sundays after Easter -- changing your mind, changing your values, changing your behavior, changing your hope so that you can help change the world with Jesus Christ?
When I meet old friends in the ministry, I always ask, "What's new in your faith? What's God doing right now in your life?" Christian hope isn't about keeping the world the way it is or the way we thought it was or should have been, but making it better. Jesus does it by making us better. That's what Jesus strains toward and hopes for -- our changing for the better. We won't get everything done here, and we won't make life perfect, but if we hope, then we'll try. Hope is active. It makes plans. Hope buys green bananas.
The New Testament isn't terribly interested in the circumstances of Jesus' birth. Paul never mentioned a detail of Jesus' birth, and he'd completed all his missionary work, written all his letters, and was dead before any of the gospels were written. Peter today tells us what the New Testament thought was important: By God's "great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." If you want to celebrate a birth story, celebrate our new birth into a living hope through Jesus' resurrection.
This world isn't always a beautiful or hopeful place. We'd be liars if we said it was -- either in the past or in the present. The New Testament proclaims the eternal good news that God has come here in the past. God is helping us in the present. God awaits us in the future.
We face at least one choice at any season of the year. Will we accept the new birth God offers us through Jesus? Will we let God's Holy Spirit increase our hope? Will we live turned backward, straining toward a past distorted by nostalgia or strain toward the future in God's living hope? Amen.
She read the New Testament and realized that something mighty happened there: world shaking and world shaping. She looked at the modern church and it seemed a gigantic, cold, empty monument to the past.
People comparing our contemporary church to the New Testament church ask, "Why would anyone die for American mainline Christianity?" We never know what we'd do if faced with the decision to deny our faith or to killed, but I suspect few of us would die for our Lord Jesus. Few of us have the certainty that the future belongs to God no matter whether we ourselves are dead or alive.
The New Testament Christians, contrary to our conventional, domesticated, American mainline churches, were ablaze with expectation for what God would do tomorrow. They looked at the future as God's future, a future in which Jesus would return; thus they looked to the future with hope.
In 1 Peter we hear of the "living hope" the early Christians had -- a hope that was alive, even when fellow Christians died or were killed. The early Christians believed that their hope came along with the new life Christ granted them. A living hope. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope."
A living hope is a hope to live on. Norman Cousins was a diplomat under three presidential administrations, an editor of Saturday Review of Literature, and described as a global peacemaker -- having been granted the United Nations Peace Medal. He thought a lot about hope during more than one serious illness. He said that if you have hope, you make plans. Hope points people toward what life can be, despite the uncertainties, disabilities, or suffering of the present. Hope propels people forward in life, even if they must advance on crutches, or on a walker, or in a wheelchair.
Christian hope knows the pain and suffering, the tragedy and injustice in the world, but Christian hope keeps people trying again. The great eighteenth-century writer, Samuel Johnson, said that a second marriage proves to be the triumph of hope over experience. For some people that's not funny. For others, it's dead on. It's something like Christian hope. Hope leaps forward in risk, strains toward tomorrow despite the chance of failure. All kinds of things in this world smash our hope. But Christian hope isn't a natural hopefulness because business is going well, our family is healthy, and our country isn't at war. Neither Christian faith nor Christian hope is automatic. It's tough to hope, especially when facing our death, or a loved one's death. New Testament hope doesn't deny death, but it doesn't stop at death, either. Peter writes about our "new birth into a living hope" coming about "through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Jesus' resurrection is the center of the New Testament.
We live in Easter's wake, that turbulence stirred up across life's ocean by Jesus' resurrection. Our culture has grabbed Christmas and worked its will upon that season. Christmas has been transformed into a midwinter snow, shopping, and family holiday. We need the historical and theological understanding that if it hadn't been for Easter, we wouldn't know about Christmas. Jesus' birth would never have been remembered or recorded if not for his resurrection. Jesus' resurrection demanded the saving of his birth stories as a fact of history. In the New Testament there's no question that Jesus' resurrection is the absolute center of our faith. Jesus' birth receives only four chapters of attention in two gospels. The story of Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection fills a third of each of the four gospels.
In order for our minds to struggle past the marketing propaganda of our culture that hijacks the Christian faith, repeat after me, "If it hadn't been for Easter...." Again, repeat. "If it hadn't been for Easter...." Now, repeat, "We wouldn't know about Christmas...." Okay, speak the entire statement with me, "If it hadn't been for Easter, we wouldn't know about Christmas...."
Our Christian hope isn't just a better attitude than other people have. It's our trust that God's future has intruded into the present. God's future is changing life right now. Jesus is going to return in the future, but God's future is showing up before we expected it. Ours is now a living hope, because in Jesus' birth and life, death and resurrection, God has taken up our lost cause and made it God's very own. Jesus is leading us in hope, leading us all the way to heaven. That's what the early Christians believed, why they were so grateful, and why our text today begins by blessing and praising God. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Blessing and praising God sets hope to music, and music sets people dancing. Hope is something that gets into our bones and into our muscles and moves us joyfully in God's praise and obedience.
In times of social change and especially in times of war, people seek security. Some people who crave certainty leap for a faith that gives them all the answers. So they chatter away saying, "Everything's going to be all right." Many other people turn away from an uncertain future toward the past with a fit of nostalgia. Weren't things better in the old days? Well, yes, if you liked carrying water a mile and spending all of Monday bent over a tub with a washboard. Yes, at the turn of the twentieth century life was better if, contrary to our today's working forty hours a week and living until eighty, you'd rather work eighty hours a week and die at forty. Gosh, weren't those the good old days!
Nostalgia isn't just wishing for the good old days, but it's transferring the sense of a secure childhood into the present. When we were children, our parents protected most of us from the problems of the larger world. Don't we do that with our own children? But, since most people had a secure childhood, they equate their early family experience with how they reckon all things in the world used to be. Nostalgia is clinging to a distorted idea of how we think life was. People who were abused in their childhood seldom have such a sense of the good old days.
The Christians in the New Testament lived on hope. They were like sled dogs in their traces, jumping and excited, ready to get going because they welcome the trail. As Christians we need hope to push up our antennae toward the future, so we listen and look for God's summons to hope and to service. Hope doesn't just whisper to us of expectations for tomorrow, but hope at least suggests to us that what we do makes a difference. The living hope those New Testament Christians possessed was growing and changing, which means they were growing and changing. Jesus' resurrection changed them and they, in turn, changed the world. Are you open to God changing you in these Sundays after Easter -- changing your mind, changing your values, changing your behavior, changing your hope so that you can help change the world with Jesus Christ?
When I meet old friends in the ministry, I always ask, "What's new in your faith? What's God doing right now in your life?" Christian hope isn't about keeping the world the way it is or the way we thought it was or should have been, but making it better. Jesus does it by making us better. That's what Jesus strains toward and hopes for -- our changing for the better. We won't get everything done here, and we won't make life perfect, but if we hope, then we'll try. Hope is active. It makes plans. Hope buys green bananas.
The New Testament isn't terribly interested in the circumstances of Jesus' birth. Paul never mentioned a detail of Jesus' birth, and he'd completed all his missionary work, written all his letters, and was dead before any of the gospels were written. Peter today tells us what the New Testament thought was important: By God's "great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." If you want to celebrate a birth story, celebrate our new birth into a living hope through Jesus' resurrection.
This world isn't always a beautiful or hopeful place. We'd be liars if we said it was -- either in the past or in the present. The New Testament proclaims the eternal good news that God has come here in the past. God is helping us in the present. God awaits us in the future.
We face at least one choice at any season of the year. Will we accept the new birth God offers us through Jesus? Will we let God's Holy Spirit increase our hope? Will we live turned backward, straining toward a past distorted by nostalgia or strain toward the future in God's living hope? Amen.
