What Do We Hope for?
Sermon
Daring To Hope
Sermons For Pentecost (Last Third)
The theme that we hear over and over in these closing Sundays of the church year is hope. Our attention keeps getting drawn to the promised fulfillment of our expectations. God is going to do something to resolve our human predicament, to relieve our despair.
But what is it? What is God going to do? What do we dare hope for?
There was a story in the news not too long ago of a 13-year-old girl dying of a degenerative brain disease. Her doctors wanted to end life-support and let her die, to release her from her unrelievable pain. Her parents refused permission, because they were praying for a miracle. The doctors hoped for a merciful death, the parents hoped for a miraculous cure. Nobody got what they hoped for: the girl died, but her parents' insistence on waiting for a cure prolonged her suffering and denied her a quick end to her pain.10
Most of us have shared the joy of members of our congregation who have experienced impressive cures, and the pain of members who have watched hope flicker out. Sometimes instead of a cure we have hoped for spiritual healing, for patience, for courage, for acceptance. What's right? What can we legitimately expect from God? What do we dare hope for?
Do we dare hope for a job when we're unemployed? May we hope for reconciliation in a strained marriage? Can we pray to God about our hopes and plans for our children during the rest of their lives?
We've learned something about hope from our readings in Job this fall. Job hoped for all kinds of things: for physical healing, for an explanation for his suffering, for the return of his good name, for patience. But he never got quite what he asked for. Instead, he got a visit from God, an assurance of God's comforting presence and a stern reminder that what he wanted wasn't necessarily what God wanted.
Today's lesson in Isaiah 25 is about hope, but it's a different kind of hope. Job's hope was for himself, for an end to his own troubles. It was also limited to solutions in this life. Job doesn't seem to have had any vision of a new life, a fresh start, a better existence beyond death, so his only hope was for a reversal of suffering in this world.
But Isaiah's vision shows us hope in its largest dimensions. Isaiah hopes for an end to the suffering of all people, for all times. Isaiah hopes not just for an end to misfortunes but for an end to sorrow itself - even an end to death. Isaiah hopes for a day when all people will be reunited with God and one another and share a great feast to celebrate God's victory. Isaiah hopes for nothing less than a whole new world.
We believe that the new age Isaiah was hoping for has already begun, in the life of Jesus. Jesus called it the kingdom of God - the perfect fulfillment of God's rule. We have all entered that kingdom through our baptism into Christ. Today, on All Saints' Sunday, we celebrate our sainthood, our citizenship in God's kingdom. We celebrate the sainthood of all our fellow believers, past, present and future, and we celebrate our hope for the new age, the great feast of rich food and well-aged wines that God is preparing for us on his mountain.
In Isaiah's vision the new age is inaugurated with a feast. That's understandable - we're entering the time of the year when we celebrate holidays with big feasts. Feasting and banqueting have always been an important form of celebration, especially of family and religious occasions. The Israelites celebrated their deliverance from slavery in Egypt with a Passover feast. The Christian church celebrates deliverance from sin and death with the Lord's supper. Weddings, baptisms and confirmations are usually occasions for feasting. So the Bible often describes the ultimate celebration of the kingdom of God as a feast or a banquet.
One thing that makes feasts enjoyable is the fellowship that banqueters share over their meal. After all, it's the gathering of family and friends around the table that makes Thanksgiving dinner a highlight of the year, more than it is the quantity or variety of food on the table. That's true of the feast Isaiah is hoping for, too. At God's feast all people will be united with one another and with God. Today we are celebrating the "communion of saints," the community of God's people, the family that expects one day to sit down together at God's table for his feast.
One early Christian theologian said the church is like a wheel. All the members of the church are spokes of the wheel, and God is the hub. When you look at a wheel you notice that at the end of the spokes where they get closest to the hub they are also closest to each other. The church is the same way - the closer we get to God, the closer we get to all the other saints who are moving toward union with him. The more intimate our fellowship with each other, the more complete our union with God. At God's heavenly banquet both of those relationships will be perfected.
"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast," Isaiah writes. "He will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.... The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces." All peoples, all nations, all faces. This is a wide open feast. Everyone is invited, not just the chosen few.
I'm sure you've heard the old joke about the new arrival in heaven being given the grand tour. When he passed the hall of praise reserved for Lutherans, he was told to be quiet so they wouldn't hear him, because they thought they were the only ones there. (Of course, depending on who is telling the story, that might be the Baptist hall or the Catholic hall or some other denomination's hall.) Throughout the history of God's dealings with people there have been those who believed God's blessings were only for them, that they would be the only ones in heaven, but Isaiah says that the new world is for all people. Hope is for everyone. In the kingdom of God distinctions don't matter. It's more important to be a citizen of God's kingdom than to be an Israelite, a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Catholic, an American, a bishop, priest or deacon, or anything else.
Well, that all sounds great, doesn't it? A heavenly feast with God and all the saints, a new day when there won't be any death or sorrow or tears. The problem is, we don't see it. Where is it? When is it going to happen?
When Isaiah wrote this passage, God's people had been waiting a long time for God to fulfill his promises to them. We've seen how Job waited and waited for God to answer his cries. The Christian church has been waiting 2,000 years for our Lord to come again. Life, it seems, is more waiting than anything else: waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for Christmas to come, waiting for a doctor to bring life-or-death news, waiting for health to return, waiting for the safe return of a loved one who's far away, waiting to meet the right someone, waiting for our hopes to be realized.
"It will be said on that day," wrote Isaiah, " 'Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.' " The life of God's people is a life of waiting, but it's a unique kind of waiting, because we're waiting for a future we have already seen. We've seen the future fulfillment in Isaiah's vision of the heavenly feast. We've had glimpses of the future in the fellowship of the Lord's Supper, which we call a "foretaste of the feast to come," a sample of God's banquet. In the community of Christian people here on earth we've experienced something like the communion of saints in victory. On this day we remember all the saints who have already entered their heavenly celebration, and we see in them an example of the victory that's waiting for us.
Waiting for a future we've already seen, I call hope. May we hope for healing when we're sick? Sure we may. May we hope for companionship when we're lonely? Of course. May we hope for world peace? May we hope for wisdom, for answers to our questions? May we hope for the relief death brings to sufferers? Yes, all those things. But we don't know that we'll receive them. Job showed us that it's possible to hope for the wrong thing and be disappointed.
One hope, though, will not be disappointed. When all earthly hopes die, when all earthly things die, when you and I ourselves die, then there is still the thing we've waited for the longest. Only then, in fact, do we really experience the perfect fulfillment of our hopes. It's the kingdom of God, the final joy that God has promised to all saints. "It will be said on that day, ... 'This is the Lord, for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.' "
But what is it? What is God going to do? What do we dare hope for?
There was a story in the news not too long ago of a 13-year-old girl dying of a degenerative brain disease. Her doctors wanted to end life-support and let her die, to release her from her unrelievable pain. Her parents refused permission, because they were praying for a miracle. The doctors hoped for a merciful death, the parents hoped for a miraculous cure. Nobody got what they hoped for: the girl died, but her parents' insistence on waiting for a cure prolonged her suffering and denied her a quick end to her pain.10
Most of us have shared the joy of members of our congregation who have experienced impressive cures, and the pain of members who have watched hope flicker out. Sometimes instead of a cure we have hoped for spiritual healing, for patience, for courage, for acceptance. What's right? What can we legitimately expect from God? What do we dare hope for?
Do we dare hope for a job when we're unemployed? May we hope for reconciliation in a strained marriage? Can we pray to God about our hopes and plans for our children during the rest of their lives?
We've learned something about hope from our readings in Job this fall. Job hoped for all kinds of things: for physical healing, for an explanation for his suffering, for the return of his good name, for patience. But he never got quite what he asked for. Instead, he got a visit from God, an assurance of God's comforting presence and a stern reminder that what he wanted wasn't necessarily what God wanted.
Today's lesson in Isaiah 25 is about hope, but it's a different kind of hope. Job's hope was for himself, for an end to his own troubles. It was also limited to solutions in this life. Job doesn't seem to have had any vision of a new life, a fresh start, a better existence beyond death, so his only hope was for a reversal of suffering in this world.
But Isaiah's vision shows us hope in its largest dimensions. Isaiah hopes for an end to the suffering of all people, for all times. Isaiah hopes not just for an end to misfortunes but for an end to sorrow itself - even an end to death. Isaiah hopes for a day when all people will be reunited with God and one another and share a great feast to celebrate God's victory. Isaiah hopes for nothing less than a whole new world.
We believe that the new age Isaiah was hoping for has already begun, in the life of Jesus. Jesus called it the kingdom of God - the perfect fulfillment of God's rule. We have all entered that kingdom through our baptism into Christ. Today, on All Saints' Sunday, we celebrate our sainthood, our citizenship in God's kingdom. We celebrate the sainthood of all our fellow believers, past, present and future, and we celebrate our hope for the new age, the great feast of rich food and well-aged wines that God is preparing for us on his mountain.
In Isaiah's vision the new age is inaugurated with a feast. That's understandable - we're entering the time of the year when we celebrate holidays with big feasts. Feasting and banqueting have always been an important form of celebration, especially of family and religious occasions. The Israelites celebrated their deliverance from slavery in Egypt with a Passover feast. The Christian church celebrates deliverance from sin and death with the Lord's supper. Weddings, baptisms and confirmations are usually occasions for feasting. So the Bible often describes the ultimate celebration of the kingdom of God as a feast or a banquet.
One thing that makes feasts enjoyable is the fellowship that banqueters share over their meal. After all, it's the gathering of family and friends around the table that makes Thanksgiving dinner a highlight of the year, more than it is the quantity or variety of food on the table. That's true of the feast Isaiah is hoping for, too. At God's feast all people will be united with one another and with God. Today we are celebrating the "communion of saints," the community of God's people, the family that expects one day to sit down together at God's table for his feast.
One early Christian theologian said the church is like a wheel. All the members of the church are spokes of the wheel, and God is the hub. When you look at a wheel you notice that at the end of the spokes where they get closest to the hub they are also closest to each other. The church is the same way - the closer we get to God, the closer we get to all the other saints who are moving toward union with him. The more intimate our fellowship with each other, the more complete our union with God. At God's heavenly banquet both of those relationships will be perfected.
"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast," Isaiah writes. "He will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.... The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces." All peoples, all nations, all faces. This is a wide open feast. Everyone is invited, not just the chosen few.
I'm sure you've heard the old joke about the new arrival in heaven being given the grand tour. When he passed the hall of praise reserved for Lutherans, he was told to be quiet so they wouldn't hear him, because they thought they were the only ones there. (Of course, depending on who is telling the story, that might be the Baptist hall or the Catholic hall or some other denomination's hall.) Throughout the history of God's dealings with people there have been those who believed God's blessings were only for them, that they would be the only ones in heaven, but Isaiah says that the new world is for all people. Hope is for everyone. In the kingdom of God distinctions don't matter. It's more important to be a citizen of God's kingdom than to be an Israelite, a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Catholic, an American, a bishop, priest or deacon, or anything else.
Well, that all sounds great, doesn't it? A heavenly feast with God and all the saints, a new day when there won't be any death or sorrow or tears. The problem is, we don't see it. Where is it? When is it going to happen?
When Isaiah wrote this passage, God's people had been waiting a long time for God to fulfill his promises to them. We've seen how Job waited and waited for God to answer his cries. The Christian church has been waiting 2,000 years for our Lord to come again. Life, it seems, is more waiting than anything else: waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for Christmas to come, waiting for a doctor to bring life-or-death news, waiting for health to return, waiting for the safe return of a loved one who's far away, waiting to meet the right someone, waiting for our hopes to be realized.
"It will be said on that day," wrote Isaiah, " 'Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.' " The life of God's people is a life of waiting, but it's a unique kind of waiting, because we're waiting for a future we have already seen. We've seen the future fulfillment in Isaiah's vision of the heavenly feast. We've had glimpses of the future in the fellowship of the Lord's Supper, which we call a "foretaste of the feast to come," a sample of God's banquet. In the community of Christian people here on earth we've experienced something like the communion of saints in victory. On this day we remember all the saints who have already entered their heavenly celebration, and we see in them an example of the victory that's waiting for us.
Waiting for a future we've already seen, I call hope. May we hope for healing when we're sick? Sure we may. May we hope for companionship when we're lonely? Of course. May we hope for world peace? May we hope for wisdom, for answers to our questions? May we hope for the relief death brings to sufferers? Yes, all those things. But we don't know that we'll receive them. Job showed us that it's possible to hope for the wrong thing and be disappointed.
One hope, though, will not be disappointed. When all earthly hopes die, when all earthly things die, when you and I ourselves die, then there is still the thing we've waited for the longest. Only then, in fact, do we really experience the perfect fulfillment of our hopes. It's the kingdom of God, the final joy that God has promised to all saints. "It will be said on that day, ... 'This is the Lord, for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.' "
