Persistent Hope

Read: Luke 20:27-38

 

Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost - November 10, 2013

The Rev. Kenneth R. Elkin

 

Let's hear again a verse from

       2 Thessalonians:

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

 

One of the very oldest of Greek myths is that of Pandora.

Prometheus had befriended humanity by giving us fire.

Zeus wanted to get even for this powerful gift, and so he ordered the creation of the wily woman Pandora.

She came to earth bearing a large storage jar, a pithos, and in curiosity opened the jar to see what might be inside.

Out flew all the troubles that the gods wanted to unleash upon mankind, all the pains, sorrows,  anxieties, and vices.

Vainly, she tried to shut the top of the jar, but all of the troubles were set loose.

The only thing that remained under the rim of the jar was poor, feeble Hope.

 

Is hope a good thing, as Paul indicates in his passage?

Or is it evil, following one of the old Greek interpreters, because he thought that it deceives with illusions and thus intensifies our suffering.

Some thought that if we were rid of hope, we would not experience suffering as pain.

We would not have fear, and thus we would be invulnerable.

In this view, hope is a fraud, and we need to see through the deception and thus be at peace.

Everyone:  give up hope, and be happy!

 

Did that old Greek convince us?

It sounds like whistling in the dark to me.

Hope is, as Paul proclaims it, a good gift of God, not something to be feared or rejected.

 

To hope or not to hope is not an issue to be quickly settled, however.

Much of what passes for hope in ancient times and today also is really something quite different.

 

The gods of ancient cultures were thought of in ways vastly different from the Lord God of the Hebrews.

 

The king of the underworld seizes Persephone, the maiden of spring and carries her off.

Her mother, Ceres, the goddess of harvest, grieves for her, so nothing grows, and becomes cold.

She will not be comforted until her daughter is returned.

Then there can be spring.

This is what happens over and over, year after year:

Persephone is taken and thus there is  winter; when she is returned , there is spring and summer.

 

And there is more:

Every day the sun god drives his golden chariot across the sky, resting in his stable at night.

Every year the river gods send the floods which bring fresh silt to the Nile delta, etc.

This is the way we have always done it;

thus it shall always be,

and the gods back it up.

This is not hope: rather there is the assumption that the past will keep right on repeating itself  into the future.

Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus will be.

 

I read one time that when the Lenin centennial was celebrated, it was sung: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.”

That is not hope, but a hanging onto a dead past.

 

For the god of the Greeks, Egyptians, and all those in our own time who have no hope, their god is the persistence of the past.

They say: At least it won't get any worse than this; we can predict what will happen and it will keep on happening that same way.

 

The God to which the Bible witnesses is much different.

Ours is not a god of the past, but of the future.

--of what is not yet revealed to us, a God of surprise

--a God of hope and anticipation

--a God of promise and good news.

 

In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus was very annoyed with the Sadducees.

The whole argument was ridiculous.

The Sadducees think that heaven is merely a continuation of earth.

But God says in Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new.”

We are tied not to a deadly repetition of the past

but to the God who has yet fresh things to unfold.

That is the ground of a true and Christian hope.

 

If the ancients said “Zeus was, is and will be,” how does the Bible speak of God?

The book of Revelation opens:

Grace to you and peace from him who is, who was, and who is to come.

That is profoundly different:

God has a future which is coming to us.

All that he has done will be revealed in what he will yet do.

 

Artists in the Middle Ages represented the world as a golden ball in the hand of the Lord.

Not that everything about the earth is golden and we should pretend that everything is wonderful; the artists knew well the miseries of life as well as its joys.

Rather, according to Helmut Thielicke, they were saying that
“No matter how hard life may be, how cruel the world, it nevertheless rests in the hand of God, and is related to his goals.

Therefore, we with all of its dubious elements shimmers with the glow of gold, of what it will yet become.”

 

Now we come to the “so what” section of the passage from  2 Thessalonians.

What happens to us here in Williamsport, when we hope, trusting in the God of the future?

 

It will make a difference in how we use our money.

In this season when not only the church  but also charities and other organizations are requesting funds, do we ask ourselves “What is the least I can give in order to keep the machinery running?”

or do we anticipate a fresh vision of what the church can yet become, and indeed a whole society transformed?

We may react with our hearts and checkbooks very differently if we see this as a community of hope... or a country club with vestments,

and if we understand “resurrection” to be about the transformation of the entire world... or think of it only as “my Jesus and me”.

 

Jesus will strengthen your heart in every good work and word, Paul says.

Let us begin to act like it is true, and in the doing, in the venturing and trusting, the Father will give more than we imagine.

 

Helmit Thielicke tells of two elderly women he once knew.

They were sisters whom he observed over many years.

The one sister poured out her life in service to her family and sacrificed herself for them all.

In the process, she became a strong, vital person, the very picture of hope and anticipation.

Her sister, on the other hand, set out to be a proper, highly cultivated person, who thought only of her own wants and desires, and who absorbed everything she could for her own benefit.

She turned out to be a dried-up, one-sided, uninteresting person, compared with her sister who gave herself in a hope-filled way.

 

One of the other organizations to which I contribute is Covenant House, which works to rescue runaway kids in New York and other cities.

The director collected the heart-breaking stories of so many of these kids who ran away from abuse or neglect and fell into even worse situations of drugs and prostitution.

They need food and shelter, to be sure, and just as much they need the love of God through the care of another person and the gift of hope that there can be a tomorrow for them.

It takes quite a while for many of these kids to really hear and trust that there is a possibility of life for them.

“Is there any hope for me?” is their spoken or unspoken question.

The sharing of that kind of hope is a key element of what we are to be doing in whatever our daily work is.

 

Be careful!

Watch out for what might happen to us as we worship today!

Prayer is a dangerous thing.

In it we exercise the good hope that was given to us in Holy Baptism.

When we pray through the Spirit, we are praying for God's future to break in, to stir us, to transform us,

to make us to live in lively hope....

all who now and ever will sing

Blessing and honor and glory and power be to our God forever and ever. Amen.