The Cathedral Church of the Nativity ~ April 27, 2008
The Ven. Richard I Cluett
Acts 17:22-31 + 1 Peter 3:13-22 + John 14:15-21
Last Saturday the Diocese of Bethlehem celebrated the memorial Eucharist for Henry Pease, a priest of the church, and a very good man. His family members were there, his parishioners, his colleagues and his friends. I said in the funeral homily, “His death is akin to the passing of a tribal elder, the passing of the leader of his clan, the passing of a wise teacher, the passing of a beloved priest. It is the passing of a son – a child of God – who returns to the Father.”
The feelings at a time such as that are well known to everyone who has experienced the loss of someone loved and valued. Get in touch with those feelings within yourself. If you have known death, if you have known loss, if you have known a sense of abandonment, if you have ever been bereft… Remember what that was like.
It’s important because that is what is going on in John’s Gospel today. We continue to hear what is called the Last Discourse of Jesus – his farewell address to those with whom he has lived for all these months who have left everything for him. They have left their families, their work, and their homes. They have bet their all on him and he is going to leave them. You know what they are feeling. You know what they are thinking… and so does Jesus.
And he gives them a reason to hope. He tells them, “I will not leave you orphaned… I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
He tells them the truth and he gives them a word of hope. The truth is a word of hope. How important it is that people hear the truth that is a word of hope. How important it is that the world hears the truth that is a word of hope.
Writing in a time of danger and despair for the early church, Peter counsels, “…be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.”
I don’t think he is offering that counsel solely as a defense strategy. He is offering it because it is the truth that the world, the powers of the world need to hear, what people need to hear – the truth that is a word of hope.
In Ephesians 1:17-18, the apostle Paul writes:
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints…
What we have here in these verses is the prayer that believers will know what their hope is and how powerful God can be in their lives. Whatever it may take, to ensure we have a foundation of hope.
Hope occupies the God-spot in our lives, just as God occupies the hope-spot. Hope gives us a sense that life is worth going on. It is not a hope we control by having knowledge about it. It either is or it is not.
Probably the greatest Oral Historian of our time is Studs Terkel. For 60 years he has listen to, annecdoted, recorded, reported and found meaning in the stories of people lives: work life, family life, love life, life-changing life, cataclysmic life, war-torn life, and life of epic and historic proportions.
His last book was intended to be Will the Circle Be Unbroken? – his oral history on death (and life). He finished this last book when he was 90. But he didn’t die right away (he’s not dead yet at the age of 96) and he found that after death in the list of human subjects comes the greatest subject of them all – and one well-timed to every moment – Hope. He had one more book to write.
Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times. It is a reminder that in good times, you can do nothing and still have hope, but in bad times, you have to act, take that first small step, in order to hope.
Hope is God-given. It is created in the human DNA, it is part of our being, as is, for instance, the ability to word things, to use language. But we know that language must be nurtured and taught, and used, and if those things don’t happen the language ability goes away, it dies. I have studied Latin, Greek, French, and a little German, along with English. Except for English, now they are all gone for me. I have no ability to use these languages, it is as if that ability was dead to me.
Hope may die last, but it can die, and it is a living death. You may have experienced a time when you were without hope, and how terrible that is. I know.
As disciples of this Jesus who lived and died and has risen, whose Ascension we remember in the week ahead, this Jesus who would not leaves his disciples or the world orphaned – this Jesus calls us to a Ministry of Hope to a world bereft of it, to people who have lost or are in danger of losing it, and for the salvation of our own souls.
As a safe example, let me mention Kajo Keji. After 50 years of war, exile, displacement, and loss you would think that the people there would have felt abandoned and been bereft in hopelessness. You would have thought that hope would have died. Certainly there was some flirting with hopelessness. But when we first went there found a people not without hope, but a people whose lives were based on hope that was founded in their faith in Jesus Christ.
And then a cathedral congregation in the US raised a few thousand dollars and sent it to them to build a well. That well bought in not only refreshing, life-giving water; it also brought refreshing life-giving hope. Hope that there can be a future there. Hope. How important is that? Priceless.
Bring-ers of hope. That is the ministry to which we have been called as the community of Jesus; that is the ministry to which each of us is called as a disciple – to be signs of hope for one another and for those we meet.
There can be for us nothing other than this faith and this hope; nothing other than to be ready to make our defense to anyone who demands from us, who needs from us, an accounting for the hope that is in us.
People need the eyes of their heart enlightened, so that they may know what is the hope to which Jesus has called them…” They need to know that that Jesus would not leave them orphaned. We cannot leave them orphaned. They must know the truth that is a word of hope, a word that can sustain, and be life-giving – even in the midst all the tough realities of life.
Soon we will celebrate Pentecost, remembering that God has sent the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Counselor. One translation of the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, Paraclete, also means the Encourager. Jesus would send us to be encouragers of one another. When we obey him, we know that he lives in us, and we in him.
I invite you, therefore, in the name of Jesus, to a ministry of encouragement, to a life of bringing life-giving hope wherever you go.
No comments:
Post a Comment