The Sunday Sermon: August 13, 2023 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: John 17:1-11
The Gifts of Community – Hope
We have gathered every week since the first Sunday in June for worship during this hour; for Coffee Chats before this hour and patio fellowship after it. We have gathered every week around the Game Tables in the Parish House and every month for a Book Group and a Community Meal. We had our Annual Church picnic last Sunday and one week of game tables, already, with the rest of August ahead of us. Why?
So we can have fun together, explore new ministries, welcome new people, and discover more possibilities, of course. But also to strengthen ourselves as a community – to get to know each other better and to try to make this “church thing” we do less of an obligation and more like something we look forward to doing – gathering and being together whenever and wherever we do.
But those aren’t the only reasons we gather. We do all this so that “creation itself may be set free from its bondage to decay” and experience what we experience as children of God. That from Paul in his letter to the Romans and from a message shared last month as we examined this community called the Body of Christ. We listen to a different message here in this place. We follow a different Lord. And we lead a different life than that which the world insists we hear, follow, and live into today. We do all that with the gifts given to us in this community of faith, as this community of faith, gifts that we are supposed to share with others not in this community, gifts that may allow them the freedom we experience here.
Last week we talked about our gift of Christian Joy, a joy that is not dictated by external circumstances, but responds to them – whether good news or bad news – with an inner conviction that something more is at work in the midst of all that is wrong. This joy frees us from being bound by, and to, the despair all around us so that we can transform that despair for ourselves and for others. Do you experience the joy that is ours here, when we gather?
I suggested last week that many of us don’t experience the joy that is ours, a joy that we are supposed to engage to help change the world. I suggest this week that this may be so because we don’t understand one of the other “gifts” that is ours for exploration this morning: Hope.
Pray with me … God, you are speaking, you are preaching, and you are proclaiming. We are praying – that the words of my mouth and the mediations of all of our hearts may not only be acceptable in your sight, but may reveal your will and Christ’s Way. You are our rock and our redeemer – the source of our joy. Ground us and make us bold to be worthy of the new life you offer. Amen.
I’ve preached a few sermons on this topic of “hope” on different occasions for different reasons. And in the old manuscripts of mine that I found, I always share the poem by Emily Dickinson pretty early on. You hear it in your head now, if only a line or two. But, I’m not going to begin with that poem, or any part of it, this morning. Rather I begin this message about hope with a quote from Stephen King’s character “Red” in his short story titled The Shawshank Redemption:
Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a (person) insane.
How many of us feel that these days? Hope is a dangerous thing. We have kind of running joke in the church office that began a few years ago as things were opening back up after the COVID shut down. We talk nostalgically about “remembering when” and noting any number of things that we “used to do.” It’s usually me that then jokes, saying, “Well, that was back when we had hope.” We invariably laugh, or chuckle, but it’s the nervous kind of laughter that has a question or two alive in it. How about you?
I can’t quite put my finger on it, mostly because I don’t slow down enough, I suppose. Sunday’s come quickly and all the days in between are filled with distractions, intentional or not, and many of them actually worthwhile. Still … distractions. I have some sense that things are going to change, sooner or later, so maybe if I just ignore this annoying sense of dread – or laugh it off – it will go away until things get better. How about you?
Hope is a dangerous thing … But only if it is masquerading as “wishful thinking” for a desired future, rather than “faithful trust” in an actual present, albeit a present that needs help. Listen to that again, put another way: Hope is not wishful thinking that the future will get better. That’s optimism. Hope is a trust that what is present now can, and will, get better. Optimism and optimists speak about concrete changes in the future, most often based on their faulty or selective memory of the past. A person of hope lives in the present, in the moment, and trusts that life is, ultimately, in good hands and will get better.
Now, our faith tradition makes this very difficult for us in the year 2023, because it has insisted – and still does – that those “hands” are the hands of a God that works outside of the world, and outside of us. It insisted that we believe that when things get bad enough, this God will step in to straighten it all up. That is not going to happen in any “supernatural” way. It never was going to happen that way, but we know it now more than ever in the 21st century … even if we don’t want to admit it … thinking it’s unfaithful somehow. It’s not. It’s one of the most faithful things we can do in our time to confess that GOD does not work apart from us, but through us – beyond us, yes, “more than” us, yes. But not apart from us. That is one of the most powerful statements of faith we can make in our time because it is that belief that frees us gives us our vocation, our purpose, as a people of faith, as a community of faith: To set others free from their bondage to decay, to fear and false optimism, and to give them the hope we possess for the present.
From our opening movie quote, Red’s friend Andy Dufresne, free once again from the walls of Shawshank prison that held him, answers his friend Red who is still imprisoned in his past: Hope is a good thing, he says. Maybe the best of things. And a good thing never dies.
Let’s turn to our scripture (finally). In last week’s reading from the sixteenth chapter of Gospel of John, Jesus could not have spoken more directly to us as he gave us, as a community, the gift of Joy. “Yes, you will weep and mourn and have pain … but simply ask and you will receive a joy that will make you complete.” The joy we receive as a Christ-community, as children of GOD, is not dictated by the realties of the world, it responds to them. This week we hear that another of our communal gifts is what makes us able to respond to the realities around us: We have been given Hope. We speak into the realities of this world, our world, with Hope – not optimism, but Hope.
As we turn to John’s seventeenth chapter, I invoke Emily Dickinson at last. (Turn to page XX in your pew bible if you’d like.) In the opening verses of John, chapter seventeen, the word of Jesus “perches in our souls and sings the tune”. The prayer that is chapter 17 in John’s gospel is not spoken to us the community, however. It is spoken to God. Jesus is praying to God on our behalf. The prayer is the entire chapter, but in these opening verses we know right away that we are on the outside looking in on this one. Chapter seventeen begins noting that “Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven.” Our second gift, Christian Hope, is spoken “about” us as followers of the Way of Christ, disciples of our Lord Jesus, Christians.
The petition is to God, the request is of God, this prayer of hope for us is not asked of us, but of Jesus’ “Father,” our God, too. He is praying on our behalf, and asking that the hope that God has revealed in him may now pass on to the community that will bear his name. In this prayer, beginning in verse nine, actually, he turns from his own glorification to pray for the future life of his followers, of you and me, so that God may now be glorified is us. He is not asking anything of us through this gift so presented, not yet. Knowing that “in a little while (these disciples, this first community) will no longer see him”, Jesus is praying that God will place the Hope of Christ he has been given into his followers. Nothing is asked of us through this gift so presented, and yet we feel the weight and the responsibility of it even as we pull it from its box, or we should. This is no longer someone else’s job, some other human or some external deity. Hope for the future of the world is ours as a Christian community.
Jesus says to God in these verses: I have made your name known to those you gave me from this world (that’s us!) … they know that everything you have given me is from you … I have given those words to them … they have received them. I am no longer in the world, but they (we!) are in the world … protect them, (O God), that they may all be one. (The Word of the Lord.)
On the eve of his death, as John plots the story, Jesus prays to God on behalf of all us who follow his Way, entrusting the hope for the future of the world to this community. Our Joy comes from our Hope. We are a people of Joy. We cannot allow the world’s realities to take that Joy away. And we won’t because we are a people of Hope. Not as “fingers crossed optimists,” but a community empowered and entrusted to transform what “is”, to “set the creation free from its bondage to decay.” We are a people of Joy and people of Hope when we are together as a community.
I know that some, maybe many, of you don’t feel that … even here – joy and hope. I believe that we don’t feel those things as we need to feel them because our tradition has insisted that we are not able to do the things that Jesus asks us to do. Now, I’m not bold enough to say our tradition, our church’s teachings, have been totally wrong. I agree that we’re not able to do what God in Christ asks us to do alone. But that’s been our whole point all summer long in this season of light – we’re not alone! We have each other, this community. We have Jesus’ endorsement. And we have our God’s hope in us. God has hope in us because Jesus entrusted us to carry on the life and the Love he shared.
How might our awareness of ourselves as a community of faith, a Christian community, change if we understood ourselves as a community that God has hope in, and not just one that God has fear for; as a group of men and women, boys and girls that don’t hold a curse so profound that God must constantly correct us, but a group of people that holds a promise so great that we actually merit the trust of our God to carry on the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Love that began for us in the Christ Jesus? How might our lives change if we trusted in ourselves the way that Jesus trusts in us?
It was a remarkable time in the history of one small, infant congregation, the church of John’s gospel, when a vision of the world as it might be and the history of one actual community came together. John reminds us over and over again, the only way to make any sense out of that strange concept of God’s coming again is to live God here now!
All the way to heaven … is heaven, not just because we have hope in God, but because, God has hope in us. We gather as a community to empower ourselves with joy and hope to free creation itself from its bondage to decay. Next week we will receive our gift of Peace. This week we have renewed hope for our lives together and for our world.
Amen.
Reverend Joel Weible, Pastor
Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church / August 13, 2023