|
|
|
|
|
|
"Sing a Song of Hope" We begin a new year, a new church year, in hope. It’s appropriate to do so. To start the new year and look forward, and while looking forward, hoping. Do you hope? Our Advent theme is “singing the songs” and we are linking the traditional Advent markers of hope, peace, joy and love with songs of our faith. So today, we come to “sing the song of hope.” Do you have a song of hope to sing? Just as the radio stations add “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” and “Jingle Bell Rock” to their play lists, the church keeps the carols at arms length. No, not yet, we say. Advent. Watching. Waiting. Hoping. That’s it. Hoping. No “Silent Night,“ not just yet. No “Away in the Manger.” “Hark the Herald” will just have to wait. We sing other songs.
These are the songs of Advent. Songs of promises. Songs of the future, anticipated, but not yet arrived. These are the songs of desire. These are songs of hope. We ought to stop for a moment of definition, right now. For by the word hope, I do not mean mere wishful thinking, such as “I hope this sermons is okay," or "I hope this works,” or “I hope she gets me that digital camera for Christmas.” And by hope I do not mean the way we use the word when we say “I hope, God willing and the creeks don’t rise, to be home next weekend.” Hope is a biblical word. In fact, Scripture is filled with hope, for it is impossible to talk about the relationship of the human with the divine without invoking hope. The hope of a motley crew of former slaves wandering in the desert: that this talk of a promised land flowing with milk and honey is more than just talk. The hope of a people in need of powerful leadership that this boy of Jesse’s isn’t about to embark on the world’s first suicide mission going out to meet the Giant Philistine. Hope, of a people defeated and marched away into exile that one day they would return to Jerusalem, and rebuild God’s temple there. Hope, that one day, a king of kings, a king like no other would come and deliver them from foreign rule and the oppression that came with it. Biblical hope. Pastor James DeLoach, tells the story of seeing a picture of an old burned-out mountain shack. All that remained was the chimney...the charred debris of what had been that family’s sole possession. In front of this destroyed home stood an old grandfather-looking man dressed only in his underclothes with a small boy clutching a pair of patched overalls. It was evident that the child was crying. Beneath the picture were the words which the artist felt the old man was speaking to the boy. They were simple words, yet they presented a profound theology and philosophy of life. Those words were, “Hush child, God ain’t dead!” DeLoach writes, “That vivid picture of that burned-out mountain shack, that old man, the weeping child, and those words “God ain’t dead” keep returning to my mind. Instead of it being a reminder of the despair of life, it has come to be a reminder of hope! We need reminders that there is hope in this world. In the midst of all of life’s troubles and failures, we need mental pictures to remind me that all is not lost as long as God is alive and in control of His world. Hope is the sense that the future is brighter than the present, because it is in God’s hands. By hope, I mean the small flame that enables us to believe that in the end, things will turn out all right. Hope. Always facing forward. Always future oriented. For you see, hope by its very nature cannot look back. Hope does not rely on history. It reaches out toward possibility. The school system in a large city had a program to help children keep up with their school work during stays in the city’s hospitals. One day a teacher who was assigned to the program received a routine call asking her to visit a particular child. She took the child’s name and room number and talked briefly with the child’s regular class teacher. “We’re studying nouns and adverbs in his class now,” the regular teacher said, “and I’d be grateful if you could help him understand them so he doesn’t fall too far behind.” The hospital program teacher went to see the boy that afternoon. No one had mentioned to her that the boy had been badly burned and was in great pain. Upset at the sight of the boy, she stammered as she told him, “I’ve been sent by your school to help you with nouns and adverbs.” When she left she felt she hadn’t accomplished much. But the next day, a nurse asked her, “What did you do to that boy?” The teacher felt she must have done something wrong and began to apologize. “No, no,” said the nurse. “You don’t know what I mean. We’ve been worried about that little boy, but ever since yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He’s fighting back, responding to treatment. It’s as though he’s decided to live.” Two weeks later the boy explained that he had completely given up hope until the teacher arrived. Everything changed when he came to a simple realization. He expressed it this way: “They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?” This hope, the hope the dying boy realized, is the same hope Paul writes of in Romans. A hope that is recognized as new, life-giving, and for those who were thought to be without hope--namely, the Gentiles, the non-Jew, the unchosen. Paul writes, ‘‘Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him’; and again Isaiah says, ‘The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.’ May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Abound in hope. Live in hope. Be shaped by hope. One of my favorite stories, comes from a tiny booklet of very short parables by Herbert Brokering. Brokering writes: “Once when a truck was pouring a sidewalk, a man planted a seed in the wet cement at night. When the foundation was laid and the building was finished, he went to work there. It was dedicated in the Spring when the apple blossoms were out. He looks at the sidewalk every morning.” It’s silly. His head tell him so. If he dared share with anyone what he’d done, and why, they surely would think he was crazy. Deranged. Or at the least, simple and quaint. But there is something else...in his heart. No bigger than a small flame of a single candle. It’s what drives him to walk by every day. It’s what turns his head to look. It’s what makes him strain his eyes to see. And it’s called hope. And this hope, nothing more than a seed. Just a flickering flame. Just a small, almost insignificant amount of hope--is enough. It will help us to keep watch. Movie us into future‘s grasp. And as we do. As we wait, and watch, we remember: Hope does not disappoint us. Hope does not disappoint. This Advent, we need a song. We need a song of hope that will help us keep watch. Will make the waiting bearable. We need a song of hope that will hold the darkness back. We need a song of hope.
Thanks for dropping by:
Guest # |
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
