Great Words Of Lent And Life: Hope

March 20, 1988

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Scripture: Acts 4:13-20

Two stories, if I may, to begin our consideration of HOPE. Great Words of Lent and Life is the theme for this special season of the Church year.....great words of the New Testament that are so rich and vibrant when we take them out and polish them up....

We need to know the words of our faith, we said, because the God we worship is a God who speaks...He calls and we have to answer, He speaks and we have to respond....THIS IS THE NATURE OF THE BIBLICAL RECORD.

We began with GRACE...where you have to begin, where God begins, thank God, in His dealing with us....And then we talked about FAITH, our response to God’s grace, and God’s initiative. Even without knowing totally, we go, we “faith” because we have to believe in something, life makes us, and we don’t know anything better than this Thorn-Crowned Man who keeps pulling us onward.

So grace and faith....Now, HOPE is the next word I’d like us to examine, and with your permission, I’ll get us into it by telling you two stories. They’re both Biblical stories, in a sense, and yet neither one is in the Bible.

Story Number 1. Back during the days of the 2^nd World War, when the hearts of a great many people were heavy with despair, an amazing thing happened in, of all places, a German prison camp. It’s a true story...I found it very moving.

The place was Buchenwald. Even today the name sends shivers up the spine. All that was horrible and ghastly, all that was physically and emotionally and spiritually debased took place there. For the rest of history, I guess, it will be remembered as one of the degraded places of the human experience.

Well, at Buchenwald, along with thousands of others, a group of medical doctors was imprisoned. Some were Christian,  some Jewish, some nothing at all in the way of religion.

They were thrown into the same compound with the rest, indiscriminately, no distinction being made, no preferential treatment given.....

Just like all the others the doctors followed the same routine---up at 4:00 in the morning, shivering roll calls, outdoors in the snow, labor all day on the autobahn, more shivering roll calls, and finally, at the end of the day, a bowl of thin potato soup, made usually from rotten potatoes.

Just like all the rest the doctors were starved, beaten, and overworked....the same treatment was inflicted on them as on every other prisoner in the camp.

BUT AT NIGHT, when the others had dragged themselves off to bed, this little group of physicians met and talked....they talked about medicine, they talked about cases, they swapped observations and diagnoses, they organized within the prison camp a little medical society, and did what they could to improve health conditions.

THEN they began smuggling in materials to make, of all things, an x-ray machine. The pieces for it had to be found, somewhere, they had to be located, they had to be stolen, they had to be concealed, they had to be carried back to the compound, and slipped in, either by fooling the guards, or bribing them.

It took weeks, and there were all kinds of disappointments. But little by little they did it, working for the most part into the night while others were sleeping, over and above everything else the routine demanded.

And they actually used that crude instrument in Buchenwald, a prison camp x-ray machine to help take care of their fellow prisoners.

Dr. Karl Meninger, the famous psychiatrist of the Meninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas tells this story. He visited Buchenwald in 1945, just a few days after it was liberated along with a group of army doctors. They got it firsthand from some of the ones who had actually participated.

What made them do it? What prompted that kind of devotion, and stubbornness, and perseverance? What made them so dedicated to medicine and humanity that they would work like that, under those conditions, for so long?

Dr. Meninger concludes that the one ingredient in the situation, the one factor that makes it not only possible, but plausible, was the quality of HOPE.

THEY NEVER GAVE UP HOPE...and even when external conditions threatened to crush them that HOPE made out of them something tragedy simply was not able to touch. They transcended it, and gave to both their profession and to humanity a dignity that I think has not often been equaled. There’s almost a Biblical quality in the narrative. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

Who can even hear about it and not feel a flush of admiration?   THAT’S STORY NUMBER 1.

Story Number 2 comes out of the mountains of East Tennessee, where my in-laws live and move and have their being. My wife was born among those beautiful hills. She emerged from there to grace the flatlands of Central Florida and bring new dimensions to my otherwise drab existence.

But that’s where she comes from. Her father tells a story which I treasure and have saved for just such an occasion as this...indeed, for this very sermon.

In East Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority has been erecting dams since the 1930’s for purposes of conservation and electrification. There are a lot of them now. One particular dam was built on the Little Tennessee River, near where her folks live. It’s called the Tellico Dam, and when it was built and put into operation, the water that was backed up flooded a whole section of bottom land, turning some good, rich property into a lake.

Some people lived on that land. They had lived there for years. Their fathers and grandfathers had farmed it for decades. It was home.

When the government condemned the land, showed them charts and maps, explained to the inhabitants what was going to happen, and finally paid them, really quite generously, for their property, life, suddenly, almost stopped on those farms. Oh, visually, for a while, you couldn’t tell it. It took several years, as a matter of fact, for the inevitable to happen, but long before that, everything was changed. Outwardly, nothing seemed so different, but inwardly, a whole new mood prevailed. Life pretty much ground to a halt.

Building stopped, fences were left unmended, repairs were not made, weeds grew up.....What was the use?

What was the point of fixing up a place if within a few months it was going to be flooded?

Nancy’s father knew a man who lived down in the bottom, had lived there all his life, 80 years. One day he was talking to him, old Uncle Ephraim.....And Uncle Ephraim, commenting on the situation said, with a kind of native, untutored wisdom, “You know, Qualls, when there ain’t no faith in the future, there ain’t no power in the present.”

Brilliant insight! Uncle Ephraim could have been an Old Testament prophet. As soon as I heard the quote, I knew I had a text and a theme....

Both of these stories are about the same thing. One comes at it from one side, the other from the opposite side, but they both illustrate the same point, and it’s as solidly Biblical as you can get....HOPE.

Strengthen hope and almost nothing is impossible...even x-ray machines in Buchenwald. Eliminate hope and you eliminate motivation, you eliminate effort, you eliminate desire....even, after a while, the will to live.

You’ve seen it, we all have....every doctor, every nurse, every minister I know can tell you stories about people who die, almost by default. You can almost watch it taking place. Sometimes, maybe, it’s a blessing, of course, sometimes not, but this is how it happens. AS LONG AS THERE’S HOPE, THEY STRUGGLE....but when hope dies, the spirit and the body soon follow.

This is what hope does for us. It gives us something out there to cling to. It gives us something out there to anchor in. It’s no accident, I’m sure, that the Christian symbol for HOPE is an

anchor......When we have that we can withstand the buffeting of wind and wave.

When there’s faith in the future, there’s power in the present. Uncle Ephraim may have said it backward, but he couldn’t have been more in harmony with the basic Biblical perspective.

Couldn’t our world today use an infusion of hope? Couldn’t the Church? Couldn’t you, in your home, in your personal life?

What is there anywhere that would give us all a lift more, that would pick up and rejuvenate us more than recovering in a fresh and vital sense this energizing quality of hope?

Where does Christian hope come from? What is it rooted in? Certainly not in immediate conditions around you. Not much there to build on. I’m not going to take the time this morning to chronicle the evils of society. Heaven knows there are plenty of them, and maybe they need to be chronicled from time to time.....

But any newspaper can give you that. Or just look around. Make your own list. It’s not hard. I’D LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO GO DEEPER.

Here’s my point, something I think hasn’t been said frequently enough from Christian pulpits: THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN HOPE IS NOT TO BE FOUND IN EXTERNAL CONDITIONS....

.....IT’S ROOTED IN THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD, AND IN HIS REDEEMING ACTION IN JESUS CHRIST.

Our hope as Christians, our confidence in the future, whatever it may be, doesn’t depend primarily on what’s going on around us......It isn’t determined by the CBS Evening News, or the Gallup Poll, or even by where George Shultz[1] happens to be this morning.

If godlessness seems to be on the increase, it doesn’t mean that the Almighty is incapacitated, or home with the flu, or something, and we need to remember that.

Maybe standards today generally are low....I don’t doubt it. Maybe morals are eroded. Maybe old fashioned integrity is at a premium....Maybe all of that is true....WHEN IN THE LONG SWEEP OF HUMAN HISTORY HAS IT REALLY BEEN ANY DIFFERENT?

One of the oldest known pieces of writing was dug up on a clay tablet not so long ago in Iraq, what used to be the country of Babylonia in the Middle East. There in ancient cuneiform characters, scratched in the clay....as old a piece of writing as we know anything about......when they finally deciphered it, it read, “Alas, alas, things are not what they used to be.”

Now, please, a warning....don’t hear me wrong. I’m not suggesting that external conditions are not important. I’m not suggesting that moral standards are not important....Of course they’re

important. BUT THAT’S NOT WHERE CHRISTIAN HOPE IS GROUNDED.

When the moral climate around is improving, it doesn’t necessarily mean that God is moving in for the kill....and when the moral climate around us seems to be decaying it most emphatically doesn’t mean that God is somehow losing His grip.

The truth is that from the Christian perspective HOPE and PROGRESS are not the same thing at all. People talk a lot about progress, the gradual, upward, continuous improvement of civilization

through the centuries. That was a popular theme in the latter part of the 19^th Century, and the first part of this one. Some of us were raised in the afterglow of that assumption....“Every day in every way everything is getting better and better....”

I have to tell you, but for the most part, that’s nonsense. Now, not entirely. I’m overstating the case to make a point. There is some progress, of course. There’s what we call TECHNICAL PROGRESS.

I read somewhere recently about a new kind of deodorant somebody has invented. They call it VANISH. You spray it on, it makes you disappear, and the people standing around wonder where the aroma came from. I suppose you could call that a kind of progress.

But that’s not the kind of progress I mean. I’m talking about basic, human improvement,

something down inside the heart, something down in the craw of people. That kind of progress is not a Christian idea at all.

Look through the Bible sometime. See what it says about human improvement, human progress in that sense. THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

“Let the wheat and the tares grow side by side”....That’s what the Bible says....WAIT FOR THE HARVEST. THEN there’ll be separation.

Even the story of the leaven in the loaf is not really a story about gradual improvement, though it may look that way at first glance. It’s really a story about the POWER of the Gospel to transform....it can change EVERYTHING.

No, the Bible is devastatingly clear here. Progress is not built inherently into the system of things. Improved technology, wonderful as it is, does not by itself bestow moral maturity. Those don’t have to go together at all. You can’t have morality without tending very carefully the springs of morality.

MAKING BETTER THINGS DOESN’T NECESSARILY MAKE BETTER PEOPLE....In fact, it almost

seems the more we have, the more irritable and the emptier we become.

Could it be why the suicide rate among young people seems to keep on climbing? “When there ain’t no faith in the future, there ain’t no power in the present.”

Does it strike you, the parallel, with New Testament times? It’s eery...it’s eery, the closeness. This Book is a mirror. We’re not all that removed, are we, from the mood that permeated the 1^st Century....the more we learn about it, the more at home there we feel...the helplessness, the despair, the feeling of being caught in the grip of a world too big to control.....Why it’s almost DeJa’Vu. That was the New Testament world, too.

Paul, as usual, summed it up best. “It was a world”, he said, “having no hope, and without God.” My Lord, he could have written it for today’s Orlando Sentinel.

So what are we left with? What were THEY left with? What then is the basis for HOPE in the Christian sense? If it’s not rooted in external conditions, if it’s not rooted in inevitable progress, or things, WHAT IS IT ROOTED IN?

Don’t stumble here just because it’s revolutionary, or maybe transparently simple....THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN HOPE IS A RADICAL COMMITMENT TO THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD, AND IN AN ABIDING TRUST THAT HIS PROMISES TO HUMANKIND CAN NOT AND WILL NOT FAIL.

You see, hope and faith are opposite sides of the same spiritual coin.....Hope is a projecting out into the future of what already has been experienced in the past. Hope is FAITH, not looking backward, but looking forward. It’s faith, turned inside out, and focused ahead on whatever may be in store.

GOD HAS ALREADY PROVED HIMSELF TRUE TO HUMANITY---He’s demonstrated that faithfulness on the Cross—that’s the message, the good news of Christianity. He gave Himself there, remember, spent Himself there, for you and for me, totally identifying Himself with my estrangement, and yours, there at the boundary situation, at the end of the road, where all the trails run out, and there is no place left to go.

“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?”

And if the Cross represents the identification of God’s Son, then the Resurrection represents the affirmation of its worthwhileness, the consummation, as it were, of the whole priceless miracle. GOD WAS DOING THAT FOR ME, and it far, far exceeds my deserving.

That’s the basis of my hope as a Christian, something rooted in God’s action, through which

nothing that ever happens can separate me from His love in Jesus Christ.

How does the old hymn put it, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness......” You can give it a D for poetry, if you want to, but you’ve got to give it an A for theology.

It doesn’t mean an exemption from life, or a cancellation of anything. Death is going to come one day, maybe sooner than I think.

Tragedy may strike, for why should I be immune? Disappointment may hover around, or dog every step along the way......BUT NOTHING CAN CANCEL THE RELATIONSHIP GOD HAS BESTOWED THROUGH HIS SON, EXCEPT MY OWN APOSTASY.

To affirm this, to have this hope implanted within me sets me free to look at the world around me with realistic eyes, because my destiny is beyond its control.

It’s this hope which makes it possible for us to call even the funeral services for our loved ones celebrations.

Please don’t hear it the wrong way....It’s not death itself we celebrate...We don’t call good what is bad. It’s not loss, deprivation, removal we celebrate....Of course there is anguish, pain when a loved one is taken away. BUT THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPER HERE.

What we celebrate is that which transcends death, that which has overcome it.

What we celebrate is the eternal, consistent faithfulness of God, who has conquered death in Jesus Christ and promised us that death no longer has dominion. When we know that, the hackles are ripped away, and we are free.

Our hope is not rooted in things, our hope is not rooted in events, our hope is not rooted in the times....Our hope is rooted in God, and in His power to remain true to Himself....If you believe that then there is hope whatever happens, and there is a motivation for “hanging in there” in scorn of consequence.

Now I close with this...at last...the Scripture. You probably had abandoned hope that we would ever get to it.

It’s that wonderful old story from the Book of Acts, Chapter 4. You remember it. It’s the account of two intrepid, bull-headed, Spirit-intoxicated disciples who were hauled before the Sanhedrin

one day on the charge of stirring up the people with their preaching. Imagine!

The authorities laid it out to them...unmistakably clear directions....CUT OUT THIS NONSENSE....or ELSE.    They could have been talking to two rocks...and maybe they were!

Peter and John took a deep breath, I suspect, remembered Easter, looked the Sanhedrin officials square in the face, and then said,

“Hey....whether it’s right to obey you or God is something every man and every woman has to work out alone. All we know is something has happened in the world that never happened before. Regardless of you we can’t help but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

I guess there are some things in life that nothing else in life can touch. To put those things first is to know HOPE.

“All other ground is sinking sand.”

--

[1] He served on the Cabinet for three US presidents.