Tag: hope

I’VE GOT BAD NEWS AND GOOD NEWS, LUKE 4:14-30

by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, Faith and Values, Lectionary Texts, Uncategorized

Nationwide Insurance ran a pretty creative series of commercials a few years ago based on the slogan “life comes at you fast.”  In one of my favorites there is a pastoral scene of a father swinging his little boy in an old fashioned swing made of a heavy rope and a board, tied to a sturdy oak branch.  The dad pushes the little boy a couple of times, and then about the third time the boy swings back into the picture, he weighs about 250 pounds and knocks his poor father flat.

The sketchy details provided in the Gospels about the early life of Jesus remind me of that boy growing up very fast.  If we combine all four Gospels, which makes what a friend of mine calls “Gospel stew,” we still only get one brief vignette of Jesus between infancy and adulthood, that being Luke’s account of Jesus in the temple with the elders when he is 12 years old.  The next time we see Jesus in the Gospels is when he’s about 30 years old and being baptized by his cousin in the Jordan River.

There are lots of questions and speculation about where Jesus was during that 18 year gap because the Gospels are theology and not biography.  The only true answer is that we don’t know where Jesus spent those 18 years.  He may have been working in Joseph’s carpenter shop.  More likely he was in some kind of religious community learning the traditions of his faith and preparing for his role as Messiah, God’s anointed one.

When he makes his first public appearance in ministry in his home town of Nazareth in Luke 4, we see immediately how challenging and dangerous being a Messiah can be.

In his first public proclamation Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah and then asserts his claim that God’s spirit is upon him.   Ok so far, we’re all God’s kids, created in God’s image.  That’s the good news – God’s spirit is upon all of us.  But immediately, Jesus makes a wrong turn and starts explaining what it means to have the spirit of God upon him or upon us.  He says he is “anointed to bring good news to the poor, release captives, restore sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.”  Ok, we could maybe go for those last two – if we don’t’ think about it too much – like realizing that we are the blind that need our eyes restored or that the oppressed are going to want their share of the pie if we take our foot off their necks and let them up.  But good news for the poor – what about us Lord?  And release to the captives?  You mean freeing the criminal element?  Those potential terrorists at Guantanamo?   Or folks on death row?  Not so fast, Jesus.

Luke says the people still were cheering Jesus on at this point.  They were “amazed at the gracious words from his mouth.”  They haven’t quite figured out the catch yet.  And then someone says, “Hey, wait a minute, this is Joe’s kid.  We know him.  He’s just a carpenter.  What would he know about anything but nails and saw dust?  How could the spirit of God be upon the likes of him?”

They start asking for proof.  “We heard what you did in Capernaum. Show us your bag of tricks here too, Jesus!” And then Jesus goes over the edge – he pushes them too far, too fast.  He starts spouting examples from the Bible, of all places, about how God has favored the Gentiles over the chosen Jews – in Sidon and Syria – and there goes the neighborhood. They are immediately filled with rage and try to throw him over a cliff.  Oops.  Stepped on the wrong toes there Jesus.  But then, Luke’s punch line – “he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”  Almost a throwaway line, but it is Luke’s way of saying, “see, he really is the Messiah and you can’t stop him, no one can.”  This is a preview of things to come when they really do kill him, or thought they did; and he passes through them again and goes on his way – because Jesus’ way is God’s way, not the way of people.

So, we know very early in Jesus’ story that it’s dangerous to claim a special relationship with God.  Prophets get shot and stoned and run out of town all the time.   That’s the bad news.  The spirit of God is upon all of us, and there’s good reason to avoid claiming our own Messiahship.  We feel unworthy, the responsibility is too heavy, and besides, the Greek word for “witness” also means “martyr.”  No cowards need apply.

There was a story in the Ohio news a few years ago about the power of oneness with Christ.  Thomas and Cynthia Murray appealed to Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland to spare the life of Gregory McKnight, a convicted murderer on death row.  That’s not so unusual.  Many people believe capital punishment is not a Christian response to violence.  What is remarkable about the Murrays is that Mr. McKnight was convicted of kidnapping and killing their daughter, Emily, 7 years earlier.  Emily was a 20 yr. old philosophy major at Kenyon College at the time of her abduction and murder.  She was planning to become an Episcopal priest and was “passionately opposed to the death penalty.”  Out of love and respect for their daughter and her beliefs, her parents asked for McKnight’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison.  Can you imagine doing that if you were those parents?  I’m not sure I could, even though I’d like to think I would have that courage and faith.  The Murrays showed us the power of Christ to overcome hate and revenge with forgiveness and compassion.

Let’s back up.  This story about Jesus in Nazareth comes right after his baptism.  Remember Jesus was never ordained – no bishop’s hands ever weighed heavy on his head.  In fact, no one had invented bishops yet.  Jesus was baptized – just like you and me.  So that means that the spirit of the Lord is also upon all of us, not just Jesus, and that our mission, should we choose to accept it, is also to proclaim release to the captives, good news to the poor, and sight for the blind!

Clergy sometimes tease each other about having a Messiah complex when we get a little too big for our britches and think we have to save the world in a single bound.    That super pastor attitude might be reflected in this quote from one of my favorite authors, Nikos Kazantzakis.  In his book, Saviors of God, Kazantzakis says, “My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar or a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: this is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, and this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.“

There certainly might be an ego problem with that kind attitude (and I’m not crazy about the militaristic metaphor); but it may not be all bad, in fact may be very good, to take our faith and personal mission that seriously.  One way to do that is for all of us to realize that the first two letters of Messiah are “me”.

That may sound crazy, but there’s a lot of biblical evidence for that idea.  In John 14 Jesus says it plain and clear, “I am in God, and God is in me…. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to God.”  John 14: 12 says, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do.”  Wow! How is that possible?  Because, Jesus goes on …. “You know him (the spirit) because he abides with you and he will be in you.”  (John 14: 17)  And then in John 14: 20 Jesus caps it off by saying, “On that day you will know that I am in God and you in me, and I in you.”

That’s a good thing right – power. We can get Jesus and God to do whatever we want!  Well, not quite – it says “whatever you ask – in my name, this I will do.”  We can all think of some things that we might ask for that just might not qualify as “in Jesus’ name” right?

But there is something even more serious than that.  If we are all one, i.e. “in” God and Jesus and vice versa, what does that mean for God’s expectations of us?   If we are all God’s sons and daughters, as Jesus is – then are we not all Messiahs too?  Messiah means “the anointed one.”  Jesus was baptized by water in the Jordan.  And we as Christian disciples have been baptized too – so far, all the same.  The anointed part is a little trickier, or do we just make it so?  Jesus says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.”  Don’t you suppose that’s true of all of us too?

After a United Methodist pastor baptizes someone with water, he or she says, “the Holy Spirit work within you, that being born through water and the spirit, you may be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. “

Whoa, that sounds a lot like pride or hubris, and we all know that pride goes before a fall; and having God’s spirit upon or within us sounds like really big pride.  That’s what the angry crowd at Nazareth thought when Jesus said it.  What keeps us from claiming our special relationship with God, from believing that we can do even greater things than Jesus did?  Is it true humility or false humility – what a friend of mine calls the “humble bit?”  That’s when we just pretend to be humble because it serves our purposes and gets us out of living up to our potential.    Is it fear of what other people will think or do, or fear of what is being asked of us?  When Jesus claims his Messiahship in his home town, they immediately try to kill him.  That’s not a great recruiting strategy, Jesus.  Is it just easier to stay in the comfort of the status quo and not make any waves?  Freeing captives and such stirs up trouble.  Those who are in positions of comfort now won’t be very happy if they have to share their wealth with the down and outers.  Oh, yes, a little charity at Christmas time is ok, but that’s not the same as changing the socio-economic rules we live by – the ones that have the system rigged in our favor.

But, even though the costs of claiming our Messiahship are obvious – the hidden cost of not doing so is even worse.

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee” is a famous quote from St. Augustine.  What does that mean?  It means there is no peace, genuine peace, until we claim our true identity.  To be at war within ourselves, denying our true worth and mission and purpose may keep us “safe,” but it also prevents true peace of mind and spirit from ever being possible.

Have you ever tried to keep a secret that was eating at you and hard to keep?  Or told a lie and then had to work at covering it up and remembering what you had told whom, so as not to blow your cover?  Pretending to be something we aren’t is very hard work,. It takes a lot of emotional energy.

Many years ago I had the privilege of playing the role of Bert Cates in a production of “Inherit the Wind.”  The play was demanding and required rehearsals late every night, and each night my part required that I fall in love on stage with a lovely young woman.  And then, to preserve my marriage, I had to fall back out of love again before I got home to my wife.   When the play was over I was exhausted – not just from the long hours, but emotionally exhausted from pretending to be something that I wasn’t.

And that’s also what happens all the time when we are at war with our very essence; we are tired and on edge, not close to being at peace.  We all want peace in our world, but peace has to start in our own souls and hearts. That means knowing and being true to who we really are.   In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare describes that important truth this way:

“This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The internal conflict, the denial of our true selves as blessed children of God, me-ssiahs, happens at a deep level when we are convinced by a theology that overemphasizes the negative aspects of human nature.  Too often we hear only half the Bible, that we are horrible sinners, unworthy folks who need to “bewail our manifold sins and wickedness” (as the old Methodist communion ritual said).   But deep inside we know the truth, that we are created in the very image of God.  You see what an internal civil war that creates.

But Jesus comes to proclaim that truth, the very good news to the poor and the poor in spirit.  And that’s all of us.  When we measure our value and worth by economic standards, we inevitably feel like failures.  No matter how much we have in the bank, it is never enough – it could be gone tomorrow.  One good hospitalization can wipe out the largest nest egg.  And the same fear and negativity is true if we buy into the notion that our basic human nature awful and terrible at our core.

We are all sinners, yes, because we are fallible human beings who live in a world full of sin.  But that is not who we really are.  At the heart of our nature we are God’s children, created in God’s image.  We are one with our Lord and God – as we are told by the creation story in Genesis and by Jesus, our fellow Messiah.  He is the anointed one who proclaims at Nazareth and here today the good news that heals our spiritual blindness, sets us free from captivity to sin and fear, and empowers us to say yes to his call and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

From Doubt to Hope, Luke 1:5-25, 57-80

by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values

[Note: This is an Advent sermon preached at Jerome UMC, Plain City/Dublin, Ohio on November 27.  It is the companion piece to the drama posted earlier in the week.]

Prayer:  O God, being alone with our doubts is not an easy place to be for most of us – but it’s a necessary place from time to time for reflection, prayer and time with you.  Zechariah doubted your promise and needed some time out to be still and know you are God.  Zechariah’s story challenges us as we begin this hectic holiday season, and we pray for the wisdom to find adequate time especially now to pray and reflect on the reason for the season.  Amen.

How would you rate your level of doubt on a scale of 1-10?  My doubt score changes from day to day, sometimes hour to hour.  I’ve learned that some doubt is better than others; a healthy bit of skepticism can keep me from being naively gullible to a sales pitch or one of those Chicken Little alerts we all get from time to time in our email inbox.  The ones that assure us the sky is falling and our computers are going to crash if we don’t send all of our passwords and personal information to someone in Bangladesh immediately and forward this dire warning to everyone in our address book.  I’m most thankful for snopes.com as a resource for checking those things out before I perpetuate them.

Doubt is like yeast.  It only takes a smidgen of it to influence our decisions.  The doctors say, “we’re 90% sure this is nothing to worry about,” and that’s good.  90% is an A-, right?  But it’s that darn 10% that convinces us we need CAT Scans and PET scans – and I don’t’ even have a cat or a pet!  My dear wife, Diana, went sky diving a few years ago, and the instructor assured us it was 95% foolproof.  She went up and had a once in a lifetime experience, but the 5% doubt kept me on the ground watching.

There are lots of good reasons to have doubts today – political paralysis, congressional chaos, economic uncertainty here and abroad, virtual and real time bullies, violence masquerading as entertainment, fears about changes in health care.  You know the list all too well.  Part of the reason doubt is epidemic is TMI – too much information—and 90% of it is bad news.  The 24-7 news cycle makes it very hard to escape from it.  Following the stock market creates more whip lash than riding some monster roller coaster at Cedar Point.  When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated it took weeks for the news of his death to reach the western parts of our country.  Compare that with how quickly we know about tragedies today.
Most of us watched the 2nd plane crash into the world trade center in real time, live as it happened.  God’s still small voice is hard to hear amid the information overload.  There’s an easy solution to some of the TMI – I pads and I phones all have a great little app called an OFF Switch.  And the good news of the Gospel is that we also have an OFF switch for I DOUBT.

One of the biggies in the doubt department is our fear and uncertainty about eternal life.  We profess a belief in eternal life that is light years better than anything we have here, but we are very reluctant to reap that reward.  We will seek out any possible medical treatment to postpone our passage to paradise.  We sometimes even resort to eating wisely – well, not this weekend – or exercising.  I’ve heard it said that exercise doesn’t make you live longer – it just seems like it.  I recently saw an email about the advantages of walking that said walking every day will extend your life expectancy – so you can spend 7 more months and $30k more in a nursing home before you die.  My favorite – “My grandpa starting walking 3 miles every day when he was 55 years old, and we have no idea where he is now.”

Seriously – why are we so unwilling to depart this life?  Isn’t a big part of it that 10% of doubt and uncertainty about what the future holds?  Eternity is a long time, and we want to get it right.  Frederick Beuchner says “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.”  We can’t have faith without some doubt because faith and hope are about things we can’t see or touch or feel.  You don’t hope for something you already have – nobody puts something they already have on their list for Santa.

Hope implies a degree of ambiguity, and the strength of our hope depends on what evidence we have to lessen our uncertainty.  Evidence is funny stuff.  Two people can look at exactly the same object and see it differently depending on their perspective.  The glass half full or half empty is the classic example, and what we see when we look at that glass depends on the lens through which we view it.  Do we look through the lens of faith and hope or put on glasses of doubt and cynicism. What is your default position?

A communication professor of mine in grad school called this process attention switching, meaning that how we choose to think and talk about life and situations makes all the difference in how we feel about them.  My favorite example from Dr. Brown was the difference between asking someone at a back yard barbeque, “Would you like a pork chop?” or instead asking, “Would you like a piece of dead pig?”   Same reality, very different response.

Do we look at life through a lens of doubt or hope?  Hope implies the need to wait, and that’s hard for us 21st century folks for whom instant gratification is way too slow.  Next time you are on an airplane – watch how many people grab for their cell phones the second the wheels touch the tarmac.  We can’t wait to know what’s happened or if someone has called us or texted us in the two hours we’ve been off line.  We don’t like to wait – Black Friday is now Black Turkey day or earlier.  We can’t wait till the football season is over to hire the next coach – we want our Messiah and we want him now – not four weeks from now.

Guess how long it was between the time Isaiah wrote his prophesies about the Messiah –How “the government will be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  We could use that kind of leadership in Washington or Greece or Rome – most anywhere today, right?  But do you know how long it was between Isaiah’s time and Jesus’ birth – six or seven hundred years!  And then Jesus wasn’t what the Jews wanted for Christmas; so they missed him and are still waiting for the Messiah.    We have GPS’s that track my Fed Ex packages, and Santa’s travels on Christmas Eve.  Why can’t we come up with a Messiah tracker and take doubt out of the whole process?  Just think how much easier if would be to time our last minute conversions if we knew when Jesus was coming back!

The bottom line question is – what evidence do we have for being Hopeful people?  The way to look for that evidence is to ask what God has done for us in the past.  Notice I did not say what God has done for us lately.  That’s the wrong question.  God’s time table is different than ours.

The Bible is our record of God’s steadfast love and redeeming actions.  Read your Bible this Advent season to remember how God over and over again saves people from their doubts and sinful behaviors.  None of the leading characters in the biblical story are perfect.   There’s more sibling rivalry and adultery and deceit in the Bible than a modern day soap opera.  The sub-title for the Bible could well be “All of God’s Children.”  But God’s love and redemption trump human doubt and dubious deeds every time.  God’s grace is stronger than Moses murdering an Egyptian and Peter’s denial of Jesus.  It’s even stronger than a Roman execution and the tomb that couldn’t contain our risen Lord.  So that love is certainly stronger than my doubt and yours.  When in doubt, pray on those things.  If we focus our attention on the promises God has kept and the blessings we have received instead of on the disappointments and doubts – we have a much better chance of having an attitude of gratitude.  We enjoy celebrating Thanksgiving, except for some of those annoying relatives; but making thanksgiving a way of life year round is what hopeful people do.

Now, let’s look at Zechariah’s story – thought we’d never get back there didn’t you?  Luke tells us Zechariah was a priest, a godly, righteous man.  Being that kind of religious person, we can assume Zechariah knew his Bible.  He knew the stories of his people and how God had delivered them from Egypt and from the Exile in Babylon.  He knew the story of God’s salvation history, and he most certainly would have known the foundational story of how the nation of Israel began with the birth of Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s son.  That story in Genesis is so similar to Zechariah and Elizabeth’s situation that I can’t believe Zechariah could have possibly missed the connection.  Abram and Sarai were old geezers too – barren, giving up hope that God’s promise that they would be the parents of a great nation could ever happen.  They doubted too – they laughed at God’s messenger when they were told Sarai would conceive in her 90’s.  But they weren’t laughing nine months later, and after that Abraham believed God’s promises.  Genesis and Romans both tell us that Abraham’s belief was “reckoned to him as righteousness.”  (Gen. 15:6, Romans 4:9)  That’s very important because it is the basis for our Protestant belief in salvation, not through doing enough good works, but through faith and trust in God’s grace.

So, given all that obvious evidence, why would Zechariah fail to believe it was possible for him and Elizabeth to have a son?  In a word, Doubt.  We all have it.  Martin Luther is famous for saying, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”  God by nature is mysterious and beyond our human ability to figure things out logically.  The problem Zechariah has and that Abraham had originally, and that some people have with the virgin birth, is that we think rationally and scientifically.  We know AARP card carriers don’t have babies – thank God for that!

But this isn’t a biology test –it’s a theology test.  And that’s what moves us from doubt to hope, from mere intellectual belief in God to 100% trust in God’s promises.  Belief is something I do in my head.  For example, I understand the physics of why parachutes work; I believe it.  But it takes real trust and faith for me to strap one of those on my back and jump out of an airplane.

It also takes a Leap of faith to trust that God will provide for us now and forever – that we can bet our lives on god’s promises.

Advent is a season of Hope because we wait for Christmas and the birth of Christ.  We remember again what our Awesome God has done and that he is a promise keeping God who gives himself 100% to become one of us – an even more outrageous miracle than Zechariah’s becoming a daddy in is golden years.

The good news is that just as Abraham and Zechariah doubted God at first, our doubts can also be transformed into hope and trust if we take time to ponder the mystery of this Christmas season.  God will give us time to do that, just as he gave Zechariah quiet time to consider his choice between doubt and hope.

To be fair, we know Zechariah’s story began in doubt – but it didn’t end there.   I’d like for Zechariah to come tell us the rest of his story.  Come on down Zechariah, and I’ll interpret for you.

Zechariah:    [excited and animated]  No need to interpret.  It was a real miracle!  Elizabeth did indeed conceive, just as the angel said.  And when her time came she gave birth to a beautiful son.  Everyone expected us to name him after me, but God had told us both to name him “John,” even though no one in our family ever had that name.  I guess God knew “Zechariah the Baptist” didn’t roll of the tongue as well as “John the Baptist!”

Interviewer:    So, when did you get your voice back?

Zechariah:    As soon as I showed my belief in God’s plan.  I wrote, “His Name is John,” and immediately my voice returned, and I haven’t stopped witnessing since.  I tell everyone who will listen what great things God had planned for our son.  God has promised us that John will live in the wilderness and become strong so he will ready when the time comes to go before the Messiah to prepare his ways – the ways of repentance and forgiveness and salvation!

Interviewer:    Thank you, Zechariah, for sharing your amazing journey from doubt to Hope.

Zechariah:    Thanks be to God!