That a meteorite crashes
Through the skies,
Blazing a trail so bright it turns
Darkness into day.
Suppose it smashes into a mountain
And shakes the country
So that people sit up in their beds
And ask “What happened?”
Then picture the scientists and journalists
Rushing to the meteor
And stopping in their tracks,
Amazed at the glow
Coming through its cracks.
In the shell of this giant rock is a light
Which shines a new colour.
This is not a new shade of
Red, green, blue or yellow.
This is something new.
So it is with hope.
You will not find the word “hopeful” in the Bible.
When the writers spoke of hope
They were not talking of vague optimism.
No, these people glimpsed the plans of God.
They knew their lives - our lives - were not like a film
Spooling towards the moment when the screen fades to black.
No, God’s plans would crash into our reality and shake the foundations of everything.
The vision was so glorious centuries of prophets
Were dazzled with the new colours of his glory and grace.
They did not know the precise details of how history would unfold,
Or that the cry of a baby in a manger would be the
Fanfare of God’s revolution,
But they had reason to believe that time and space were caught up
In the purpose and power of a loving God.
That certitude -
That gift of knowledge -
Is hope.
It is the expression of trust
In the God whom Jesus taught us to call
Father.
Hope is not denial of the sin, darkness
And downright dread,
Which can wake us in the night like a stab to the heart.
Hope is not faith in human progress
Or a spurious cheeriness
In the face of disaster, scandal or oppression.
But hope is the knowledge that a God of justice reigns;
That he loves;
That his standards are true and his promises are real
And that the destiny of the cosmos is in his hands.
When the people of Israel were
In captivity in Babylon,
Everything seemed hopeless.
They had been hauled away from Jerusalem,
The holy city,
And were now enslaved by pagans.
Psalm 137 captures their despair:
“By the waters of Babylon,
There we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
We hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
Required of us songs,
And our tormentors, mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How shall we sing the Lord's song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
If I do not remember you,
If I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!”
From a human point of view,
The destiny of the Jewish people seemed dashed
On the rocks of a foreign empire.
But part of the challenge for any follower of Yahweh
Is to learn to see the world from his point of view.
He sent his prophet Jeremiah with this message:
“[I] know the plans I have for you,A future and a hope.
Declares the Lord,
Plans for welfare and not for evil,
To give you a future and a hope.
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me,
And I will hear you.
You will seek me and find me,
When you seek me with all your heart.”
What more could a person desire?
Is this not what all of us long for?
Humanity is haunted by dread,
The opposite of hope.
How many of us have the chilling fear
That all that awaits is the dying of loved of ones
And the crumbling of dreams?
How many of us regularly wonder if we do have a
Hope and a future?
How often could we join Job in crying these words:
“So I have been allotted months of futility,
And nights of misery have been assigned to me.
When I lie down I think, ‘How long before I get up?’
The night drags on,
And I toss till dawn.”
The book of Job is perhaps the most ancient in the Bible.
But is not his gasp of existential despair something
All of us can hear on the streets of our city?
Has not every one of us known the moment
When we grasp for purpose
And exclaim Job’s words:
“If the only home I hope for is the grave,
If I spread out my bed in darkness,
If I say to corruption, You are my father
And to the worm ‘My mother’ or ‘ My sister’
Where then is my hope?
Who can see any hope for me?
Will it go down to the gates of death?
Will we descend together into the dust?”
This is the reality we know.
And this is the reality to which the God of the Bible speaks.
And this is the hopelessness from which Christ rescued us.
Bob Dylan,
One of the poets of the 20th century,
Had it right when he declared:
“[He] not busy being born
Is busy dying.”
In this couplet there is the echo of Job’s lament:
“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
And they come to an end without hope.”
And in death
There is the terror of extinction.
Everything within us cries out that we are programmed
For a deeper reality,
A longer life
And a more meaningful existence.
When a dog dies,
He curls up in peace.
But when a human passes away
Like a dying animal
Everything seems wrong.
Dylan Thomas said in his famous poem:
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The spluttering nature of death,
Which has haunted our world since the Fall,
Seems an offence against the wonder
And design of nature.
As the writer of Ecclesiastes said:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.The message of the Bible
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
Yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Is that not only does this state of affairs
Seemed wretched and wrong
To every human on he planet,
God, too, grieves at the sorrows of
Sin, pain and death.
In Eden,
God once walked with Adam and Eve
In the cool of the day.
Yet in Genesis,
We see the first people hiding from their Maker,
Suddenly ashamed of their nakedness.
The greatest grief in this scene is God’s.
He knows the true horrors of sin
That humanity has released in the world.
He knows what it will cost to conquer evil
And ransom the people he loves.
And when God comes to this world as one of us,
When he stands with Mary and Martha and
Sees their sorrow at the death of their brother, Lazarus,
He weeps.
The tears of the creator fall in his creation.
Yes, in these pages our God weeps in the face of death.
But in a few chapters time, he will conquer it forever.
As Jesus himself put it:
“For God so loved the world,With these words,
That he gave his only Son,
That whoever believes in him
Should not perish
But have eternal life.”
A thousands comets,
Each in a colour never glimpsed by human eyes,
Have blazed into the inky night of our lives.
There is the revelation that God loves a world
Humanity curses.
There is the invitation to take God at his word,
To trust in him,
And not perish.
This is more than the uneasy hope
Of a reincarnation
Or a second chance on another planet.
We have the new hope of eternal life.
Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection,
Has taken the guilt of our sins.
And His Holy Spirit is at work in our hearts,
Healing us of the instinct to hate
And the desire to rebel.
But this is more than a cosmic repair operation.
Jesus is not like a coastguard who fishes you from the sea
And drops you off at your house with a warning
Not to be so foolish again.
No, he is taking us to his own home,
To delight and live in the glory of a healed kingdom.
As CS Lewis said in his 1947 work Miracles:
“[One] may think of a diver,
First reducing himself to nakedness,
Then glancing in mid-air,
Then gone with a splash, vanished,
Rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water,
Down through increasing pressure into the
Death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay;
Then up again, back to colour and light,
His lungs almost bursting,
Till suddenly he breaks surface again,
Holding in his hand the dripping,
Precious thing that he went down to recover.”
You are that dripping, precious thing.
We may have been stuck in sludge in darkness,
But God sees you as a jewel which will
Shine in eternity
For millennia after our sun has died.
God wants us to live in this hope.
Religion without hope is just a drug,
Like Novocaine,
Easing the ache of existence.
But the Apostle Paul wrote to the first Christians in Corinth:
“If only for this life we have hope in Christ
We are to be pitied more than
all men.”
This hope is a real as the stone in your shoe.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians, he wrote:
“Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant
About those who fall asleep,
Or to grieve like the rest of men
Who have no hope.”
It is a cliché to say that death is the last taboo in the secular West
But we force it from our thoughts.
Yet centuries of Christians have regarded death as the journey
Leading to the revelation of their hope.
The 17th century spiritual writer Jeremy Taylor noted:
“It is a great art to die well.”
While in exile in Wales he wrote a book on the subject, Holy Dying:
“If thou wilt be fearless of death
Endeavour to be in love with the
felicities of saints and angels,
And be once persuaded to believe that there
Is a condition of living better than this;
That there are creatures more noble than we;
That above there is a country better than ours;
That the inhabitants know more and know better,
And are in places of rest and desire;
And first learn to value it,
And then learn to purchase it,
And death cannot be a formidable thing,
Which lets us into so much joy and so much
felicity.
And, indeed,
Who would not think his condition mended if he
Passed from conversing with
Dull tyrants and enemies of learning,
To converse with Homer and Plato,
With Socrates and Cicero,
With Plutarch
And Fabricius?
So the heathens speculated, but we consider higher.
‘The dead that die in the Lord’ shall converse with St Paul,
And all the college
Of the apostles,
And all the saints and martyrs,
With all the good men
Whose memory we preserve in honour,
With excellent kings and holy bishops,
And with the great Shepherd and Bishop
of our souls, Jesus Christ,
And with God himself.
For Christ died for us, that,
Whether we wake or sleep,
We might live together with him.”
This vision of hope excited men and women in 1651,
And I think it can quicken the pulse in the 21st century.
But it does more than that.
God uses this hope to change us from within,
Shaping us into the likeness of his Son.
The apostle John wrote in his first letter:
“Dear friends,Where Jesus walked,
Now we are children of God,
And what we will be has not yet been made known.
But we know that when he appears
We shall be like him,
For we shall see him as he is.
Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself,
Just as he is pure.”
Joy exploded
As miracles were worked
And God’s love revealed.
Something similar should happen
Among the people who have this hope burning in their hearts.
We are not supposed to keep
The Love of God a secret.
Like elves on the night of Christmas Eve,
We exist to distribute the gift of this knowledge
Into homes on every continent.
Paul praised the Colossian Christians for
The “faith and love that spring
From the hope that is stored up for you in heaven”.
He wrote in his world-changing letter to the Romans:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace
As you trust in him,
So that you may overflow with hope
By the power of the Holy Spirit.”
A hope and a future,
Joy and peace,
These are the gifts of a great God who loves to give.
What a joy to be called into a community
Which “overflows with hope”.
But while we long to be filled with joy and peace,
What should we do when
The dank chill of dread
Creeps over us,
No matter how much we might want to blaze with hope?
We should cling to God’s promises as the bedrock of reality
And refuse to let to doubt and despondency
Relativise away our hope.
Paul described hope as a helmet -
Head protection which guards the brain from damaging thoughts.
The writer of the epistles to the Hebrews
Called it an anchor,
Something to stop us drifting towards shipwreck.
This does not mean we will not be buffeted,
Bruised, disorientated and dazed
By all of the vicissitudes
That can blast into the path of anyone alive on earth.
Just as Jesus shared in the cruellest sufferings conceivable,
There is no guarantee Christians will escape
The traumas and terrors
Which define the existence of millions.
For we are not people who look forward to escaping the world.
Somehow, the hope we carry
Is good news for all of creation.
The joy which gurgles in the church today
Is a life which will one day make the cosmos dance.
As Paul wrote in the eighth chapter of Romans:
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparingWe do not go on this journey of rebirth alone.
With the glory that will be revealed in us.
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed...
We know that the whole creation has been groaning
As in the pains of childbirth
Right up to the present time.
Not only so, but we ourselves,
Who have the firstfruits of the Spirit
Groan inwardly as we await eagerly our adoption as sons,
The redemption of our bodies,
For in this hope we were saved.”
We are part of a community shaped by hope.
The greatest theologians, prophets and apostles
Elders, Sunday schoolteachers, caretakers,
Rainbow-strap-wearing worship-leading guitarists -
All of us -
Like a community of caterpillars,
Await the transformation
Of ourselves
And the world.
These are the days when the cosmos is in the chrysalis.
But what a crazy yet beautiful glory.
What a joy to live in hope.
As the 16th century Bible translator and martyr William Tyndale
Put it in his rendering of 1 John 3:1,
"Beholde what love the father hath shewed on vs
That we shuld be called the sonnes of god."
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