Chiseled on the doorway to the parish church of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire , England , are these extraordinary words:

 

            In the yeare: 1653

            When all things sacred were throughout the Nation

            Either demolisht or profaned,

            Sir Robert Shirley Barronet

            Founded this church;

            Whose singular praise it is

            To have done the best things in the worst times

            And to have hoped them in the most calamitous.¹ 

 

            In 1653 England was living in the aftermath of its Civil War.  A scant four years had passed since Parliament had beheaded King Charles I.   There was no king on the throne, and the Parliament ruled the divided nation by military force.  The English Puritans who had been persecuted by the Anglicans now began to persecute their persecutors with harsh laws.  Sabbath observance, for example, was enforced by troops of soldiers, and those who were found guilty of violating the Sabbath were punished severely.  Catholic and Anglican churches were vandalized by zealous Puritans.  There was intense bitterness between the royal party and the Puritans, and things looked grim in England .

            What a time to build a church!  Only a fool would attempt such a stupid venture.  Or, alternately, only a person with great hope!

            This morning I’m preaching the last sermon in a series on hope.  My preaching during these first days of my ministry at First Presbyterian of Grants has concentrated on the theme of hope.  My sense is that all of us could use a bit of hope!  In I Corinthians 13:13, Paul says there are three things that last forever:  “So faith, hope, and love abide -- these three -- but the greatest of these is love.”  Next week I’d like to start a series on the greatest of the three things: love.  Maybe later on in the fall I can start a series on faith.  We’ll see about that.

            Peter, writing in a time shortly before his own death by crucifixion at the hand of the Roman emperor, Nero, told his friends who had been scattered by anti-Christian persecution: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.”²  

            Instead of advising his persecuted sisters and brothers to run for cover to avoid the danger of a lunatic emperor who was out to get them, Peter encourages them to live in hope, to enjoy the benefits of hope, to choose hope over despair.

            Why choose hope over despair?  Because Jesus taught us to hope.  Because hope works.  And because we Christians have been born anew to a living hope.

 

JESUS TAUGHT US TO HOPE.

 

            We hope in the midst of a difficult and tumultuous time because Jesus taught us to hope.  Jesus was himself a supremely hopeful person.  Listen to his words:

            “When you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be frightened.  These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away. . . . Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.  But before all this, they will lay hands on you and persecute you. They will deliver you to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. . . .

            “But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves.  For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.  You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death.  All people will hate you because of me.  But not a hair of your head will perish.  By standing firm you will gain life.”³

            Now, isn’t it remarkable after Jesus prophesies these terrible things that anyone would be attracted to follow him!   Who needs hatred, persecution, and death!  Karl Marx called religion the opium of the people.  That is, people smoke  religion in general, and Christianity in particular like a joint of marijuana, because they want a drug to help them avoid the disagreeable parts of life.  Clearly Karl Marx never paid attention to these words of Jesus!  Jesus doesn’t sugar-coat reality!  If Christianity is ever an opium for the people, it is a corrupted version of Christianity, not the teaching of Jesus.

            Jesus lived in hope in the midst of a very tough life, and he teaches us to hope when things seem hopeless.  Hope is, as you remember, a confident expectation based on our relationship with God in the real world that we will experience the goodness of God in both time and eternity.  Even in the midst of the most tragic and painful circumstances, when he was facing torture and death, Jesus told us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God; trust also in me.”⁴

            We hope because Jesus hoped, and Jesus teaches us to choose hope.

HOPE WORKS.

 

            But we do not hope in a vacuum.  We do not hope for hope’s sake.  We do not hope merely because Jesus told us we should.  We hope because hope works.  We Americans are pragmatic.  We want to know what the practical effect of a thing is going to be.  We tend to be impatient with abstractions.  “Does it work or doesn’t it?” is our frequent question.

            So, does hope work?  Take a look at the second main paragraph of our scripture lesson, starting with verse 3.  Peter reminds his Christian friends of the inheritance they have been promised that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for them.  “You greatly rejoice in the thought of your inheritance in heaven, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” 

            What sort of grief has his audience been suffering?  The people he is addressing are people who have been driven from their homes by persecution.  They would correspond to people in refugee camps in today’s world.  Imagine being a refugee in Ethiopia in the midst of the terrible blood letting that’s going on now in Sudan .  Imagine yourself cut off from your homeland, with no means of earning a living, dependent on the charity of hostile people in whose midst you live.

            That’s the kind of audience Peter was addressing!  Refugees!  Hated in their own homeland, resented in the lands to which they have fled.  And Peter is coming on with this stuff about rejoicing even though you have had to suffer various trials!

            Does it work, this thing called Christian hope? 

            Take a look at Christian hope from another point of view.  One of the most eloquent opponents of Christianity in the last century was Lord Bertrand Russell.  I remember reading these words as a high school senior and being tremendously moved and challenged by their eloquence:

            After asserting that “...all the noonday brightness of human genius, [is] destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins,” Lord Russell goes on to say, “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”⁵

            Eloquent!  Fantastically eloquent, but does it work?  I put it to you: does unyielding despair work?  Is despair a genuinely firm foundation?  Could we sing with enthusiasm, “How firm a foundation, you atheists out there, Is laid for your faith in unyielding despair”? 

            On the contrary, we know for a fact that despair does not work.  Despair kills!  Viktor Frankl some forty years after Russell wrote these words was a prisoner in Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.  As a psychiatrist and a scientist, he was not only a prisoner but a keen observer of the behavior of the prisoners.  He learned as he observed the prisoners that one thing motivated them to survive: and that was hope in the future.  If there was even one thing they could look forward to, they could survive.  If they had nothing to look forward to, they died.  “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future -- his future -- was doomed,” said Dr. Frankl.  “With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”⁶

            Contrast the attitude of unyielding despair to the attitude of faith that you find among practicing and mature Christians.  Lisa Beamer, widow of Todd Beamer who died on September 11, 2001 , as he attempted to thwart the plans of the Alqaeda terrorists, writes in her book about the aftermath of learning of his death.

            Listen to her words: “For days I would struggle to deal with the shock,” says Lisa Beamer.  And yet, in that dark moment of my soul, I first cried out to God.  I knew without a doubt that my hope wasn’t based on Todd or any other human being.  Nor was it based even on life itself when I got right down to it.  My faith wasn’t rooted in governments, religion, tall buildings, or frail people.  Instead, my faith and my security were in God.”⁷

            Lisa also noted the dramatic contrast between people with faith in Jesus Christ and people with faith in nothing.  “Never before in my life,” Lisa writes, “had the difference between those who believe in the Lord and those who do not believe been so obvious to me.  Following September 11, I saw firsthand many dear people who were trying their best to cope with loss, hurt, anger, fear, and a host of other feelings.  Some had lost a husband, father, daughter, mother, or friend.  They . . . deeply desired to get on with life.  They wanted to look on the bright side and do the things the cliches recommend, but they didn’t have the strength.  Worse yet, they had no hope.”

            Lisa attended two memorial services in the days following September 11, one a Christian service, one a secular memorial.  The Christian service was immensely comforting, but of the secular service she said, “It wasn’t the people, or even the place.  Instead, it struck me how hopeless the world is when God is factored out of the equation.”

            “My family and I mourned the loss of Todd deeply that day,” Lisa continues, “ . . . and we still do.  But because we hope in the Lord, we know beyond a doubt that one day we will see Todd again.  I hurt for the people who don’t have that same hope, and I pray they will see something in our family that will encourage them to trust in the Lord.”⁸

            Hope in Jesus Christ isn’t a drug that neurotic people take to hide from reality.  Hope in Jesus Christ was formed in the midst of tragedy and loss in the real world, and the reason people continue to build their souls’ habitation on the firm foundation of Jesus Christ is because hope works.

 

WE HOPE BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN BORN ANEW

 

            We hope because Jesus taught us to hope.  We hope because hope works.  Finally, and in conclusion, we hope because we have been born anew.  Someone noted that people may sleep through most of a sermon, but they always wake up when they hear the words, “Finally, and in conclusion.”  So, wake up now and pay attention! 

            Your pew Bibles translate v. 3 to say “By [God’s]  great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope . . .” and that’s an acceptable translation.  I think we’re all bending over backward these days to avoid using the phrase “born again.”  But literally, what the passage says is, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who has re-birthed us into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”   Or, “By God’s great mercy we have been born again into a living hope.”

            What Peter is telling us, bluntly, is that our first birth will get us nowhere, ultimately, but to the grave.  So Bertrand Russell got that part right.  All of us will die.  But the promise of Jesus Christ is that because of his resurrection, we can have a second birth, a spiritual birth, that gives us hope for a life beyond this life, and because we have that hope, we don’t fall into the pit of despair.  We, like Lisa Beamer, can feel hope even when our hearts are breaking.

            There is one reason and one reason only for this hope: Jesus and his resurrection.  So, don’t tell me that the resurrection is a helpful fable that interprets human existence to me.  Don’t tell me that it’s a fairy story like those of Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm.  I’ve never seen anyone recover from despair because they read Rumpelstiltskin. 

            But I’ve seen scores of people coping with death beautifully because they’ve read the New Testament and believe in the resurrection.  My cousin-in-law Earl died a couple of years ago.  Earl was a short little man, quiet as a mouse, and he married Pauline, my first cousin, who is a head taller than Earl, a supreme extrovert, bubbly and exuberant.  They were kind of an odd couple, quiet little Earl and tall, exuberant Pauline.  But they were very much in love, very devoted to each other, and I knew Pauline would miss Earl tremendously.

            I called Pauline up when I learned of Earl’s death to offer condolences. Usually, when you phone Pauline, if you’re anywhere in the neighborhood, you don’t need the phone.  You can hear her without the phone!  But Pauline was uncharacteristically quiet  when she answered the phone.  After we exchanged greetings and she had thanked me for calling, I asked her how she was feeling.  “Oh, I’m fine, Dave, just fine,” she said.  “Earl lived a good long life, and now he’s in a better place.”  And that was it!  She was so calm, so much at peace.

            I contrast Pauline’s serenity in the face of the loss of her husband to the times when I’ve seen pagan people in the midst of grief.  I remember an unchurched family at the bedside of their mother who clearly needed to die begging me to pray for her recovery and then urging her whenever she would come out of her coma, “Come on, Mom, you’re going to be O.K.  You’re not going to die!”

            But of course she did.  As we all must.  Death is only the ultimate tragedy when we’ve got nothing to look forward to.  And if you haven’t experienced the second birth, death does produce despair.  Woody Allen speaks for all non-believers when he says, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.  I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.”

            Now, there are two people in the congregation this morning who need to pay attention.  One of you is an unbeliever who wants to be a believer.  The other is a believer who is living in defeat.

            So, hear the word of the Lord, you who are not a believer.  “How long are you going to put me off,” says the Lord, “complaining that you haven’t got enough evidence to believe in me?  You make other important life decisions on the basis of much less evidence!  And isn’t it true that your life has a huge emptiness without me?  I invite you now,” says the Lord, “to open your life to me and let me occupy that empty place.”

            And to the other person who needs to pay attention, the person who is a believer who is living in defeat, hear the word of the Lord Jesus: “Why are you, a believer, allowing yourself to be pushed around by the world, the flesh, and the devil?  All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, and that power is available to you.  Why are you living with a low grade depression when you could trust me more fully and live in joy?  You have been born again not to live in defeat but to live in hope.  So, I invite you, trust me more fully, choose me again, and live in hope rather than in despair.”

            Are either of these two words the word of the Lord for you?