"HOPE IN GOD"
Psalm 42; Romans 5:1-5

This past week I had to go down to Dallas for a few days.
There was a Synod event called "Next Steps,"
where leaders from all the presbyteries in our Synod
got together
to talk about life after General Assembly.
I was asked to lead worship on the first evening
and put together a five-minute homily on "hope."
So I did.
It was a lovely service.

Then the next morning,
while we were still digesting breakfast
and enjoying a second cup of coffee,
we found out
that we had been fiddling while Rome burned.
We got word around 10:30 Thursday morning
that the members of the Kirk of the Hills Presbyterian Church in Tulsa,
all twenty-two hundred of them,
had voted the night before to leave our denomination //
because of the way General Assembly voted
on the Peace, Unity and Purity report. 
To a bunch of church leaders
who had been sitting around rehashing committee reports
and singing Kum Bah Yah,
it was like someone had punched us in the stomach.
The action of one congregation
had just sucked all the hope out of the room.
The folks who were there from that presbytery
left immediately for home.
So much for my lovely little homily about hope.

I have seen Dave Wasserman mad before,
and irritated and hyperactive and lots of other ways,
but I hadn't seen him depressed until Thursday morning.
It was like there had been a death.
His first instinct
was to want to be with the group from Grace Presbytery.
And so we all huddled back up in our presbytery groups
to pray
and to talk about what had just happened,
and what it might mean for our own presbytery
and all the churches.
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It seems to me like there are lots of places in life
where hope is in short supply right now.
The war with Iraq seems endless
and sometimes even pointless.
Just when we think we get things under control,
terrorists find ways to blow up airplanes with hair gel.
The thermometer will not go below a hundred and fourteen,
or at least it feels that way.
Gasoline prices are more than twice that.
Any rain we get
seems to evaporate before it hits the ground.
Salacious stories in the news
make us just want to turn off the tube
or fold up the papers
and go back to bed.

Why is it that we are losing hope?
It can't be because of all the things that are happening.
There have always been wars
and church fights
and droughts
and terrible news.
We lose hope //
because we are putting our hope in the wrong place.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
And when we shift our eyes away from God,
there is room for any and every other pretender
to slip in and capture our attention.

This, I think,
is what's happening in our denomination right now.
So many Presbyterians
have shifted from hoping in God
to hoping that their side will win the ordination issue.
We've shifted from hope in God
to hope in benevolence dollars
that churches may or may not give for mission.
Some have shifted from hope in God
to hope in an institution which exists to serve God.
And that is not the same thing.

It happens in this congregation.
Some of us have shifted from hoping in God
to hoping that worship won't run too long today,  
or hoping that the SERMON won't run too long today,
or hoping that we will make the budget,
or hoping that somebody else will sign up to teach Sunday School
so that I don't have to.

And it happens to every one of us.
Some of us have shifted from hoping in God
to hoping that if I hold my breath and cross my fingers
and turn around three times,
my loved one won't die.
Or hope that I have saved enough money for retirement
and that the economy will hold.
Or hope that if I keep my head down,
I won't have to get involved.
Or instead of hoping in God,
hoping that I won't be left out,
or marginalized, or ridiculed,
or forgotten.

Friends, leaving God out of the equation
is what breeds anxiety and despair.
Leaving God out of the equation
leads to paralysis.
We become paralyzed
by the fear that war, or the economy,
or disease,
or the liberals or the conservatives,
are bigger and more powerful
than anything God can do.
We lose hope
not because of all the things that are happening,.
but because we are putting our hope in the wrong place.
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The thing that will get us off the mark
and move us from paralysis to hope
is only this:
hope in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the fellowship of Holy Spirit.
That hope
is what will give us the courage to move forward.
Hope in God
is the kind of hope, Paul tells us,
that is borne out of trouble
and which will ultimately not disappoint us.

Saint Augustine said
that hope has two lovely daughters,
Anger and Courage:
Anger, so that what must not be can not be,
and Courage,
so that what can be will be.

Fueled by appropriate anger and courage,
hope in God
also gives us the ability to keep things in their perspective,
and not to give people or events
more power than they rightly ought to have.
One way we can do that
is to reframe a situation
by calling it not a calamity,
but an adventure.
Stanley Hauerwas does that.
He says that
"adventure means the future is in doubt."
If we knew how things were going to turn out,
it wouldn't be an adventure, would it?
We don't need to be rocket scientists to agree with that.
None of us
knows what is going to happen tomorrow.
With as much turmoil as we are experiencing in our world,
it's safe to say
that we are living in a time of adventure,
and so the future is in doubt.

But he goes on to say
that to the extent that the future is in doubt,
hope is required -
because there can be no adventure
if we despair of our goal.
Hauerwas says that this kind of hope
is not overly confident.
"It involves the simple willingness to take the next step."
When we place our hope in God,
when we know who it is
that walks before us, and behind us, and beside us,
we have all the courage and willingness that we need
to move forward
in the adventure that we call our lives.

Frankly, that's the kind of hope we demonstrate
as we celebrate the baptisms of Avery and Leslie today.
I think it was Carl Sandburg
who said that "a baby is God's opinion
that the world should go on."
Rearing children in any age, I believe,
is also an extreme act of hope in God.
Garrett and Jodi,
and Jason and Teresa,
are showing their hope in God
by taking part in the audacious act
of bringing their daughters forward
and presenting them for baptism.
And each of us shows our hope in God
by standing to take a vow which says
that we will stand by them and their parents
as they live out this extreme act of hope.
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A friend of mine
has been trying to get me to read books by Sylvia Browne,
a psychic who has made lots of money
through books and seminars.
I do have a problem
with psychics who make a living off gullible people.
But to say that there couldn't possibly be anything
to the psychic world //
would be to say
that there is something God cannot do.
And I can't say that.
So I decided to go online to Amazon
and see what I could find out about Sylvia Browne.

It didn't take long,
and I didn't have to go deep.
In perusing a book she wrote called simply Prophecy,
I found this statement on page three:
"Of course the future is knowable."
I think instead I'll spend more time
following the words of another prophet,
the Reverend Ralph Abernathy,
who said "I don't know what the future holds,
but I know Who holds the future."
That's hope.

Friends, you and I miss the boat
if our hope is in what my personality
or my portfolio or my politics can do.
Our real and truest hope
is in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the fellowship of Holy Spirit,
who hold the future of our presbytery,
this church,
Iraq and the United States and Israel and Lebanon,
conservative Presbyterians and liberal Presbyterians,
and you,
and me,
and all of us.

Amen.
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Stanley Hauerwas' words can be found in a book which has been a favorite of mine for 20 years now, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Indiana:  Notre Dame Press, 1981), page 13.

I found the quotations from Saint Augustine and Carl Sandburg with the help of Google on the World Wide Web.

If you want to find Sylvia Browne's book, you'll have to find it on your own!  ;-)