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At the end of World War II, an
American submarine came into port and something terrible happened and it
began to sink. It went straight to the bottom of the harbor. Now they
immediately dispatched the Coast Guard to go and rescue them, sent down
the divers. And some sailor within the submarine took a hammer and
knocked out in Morse code “Is there hope?” That’s one of the
fundamental questions of life, “Is there hope?” Hope plays a huge part
of our lives. We see it in lots of different situations. People go to
doctors’ offices and await tests results. Sometimes people are standing
by the bedside at a hospital and they hear the question, “Is there
hope?” Sometimes a couple puts months into counseling hoping to avoid a
divorce, but doesn’t seem to go well and they ask the question, “Is
there hope?” Sometimes we ask that same question when we’re dealing
with a tax accountant; sometimes when a couple has a child that is
missing. We see it in sporting events all the time. You can tell when
a team has lost hope; used to be when they played the Yankees, but maybe
not any more. People would lose hope. In the military they teach you
it’s not really about how many people you kill, it’s taking the will to
fight out of the enemy. We see it all over the world. When you deal
with someone who has depression, yes, there may be chemical imbalance;
but the bottom line is that that person has lost hope. Hope is a part
of our lives in so many ways. We see it in the question about Iraq. No
matter what we think may be going on over there, the message is very
clear from the media: There is no hope. And that message is like a
drum beat.
Today we are starting a series of
sermons on how God meets our deepest needs. The first, and maybe the
deepest need we have, has to do with hope. I’m going to read to you a
scripture passage you may not be familiar with. It’s from the early
part of Genesis. The context is that Abram and Sarai, before they were
Abraham and Sarah, Abram meant “father” and Abraham means “father of
many”, and Abram was given the promise of a son but God kept waiting and
waiting and waiting. Finally, and this is worth another sermon in
itself, Sarai gets the idea. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll take my slave
maidservant and give her to Abram and she can bear a son for me.”
Abram, being the typical male, said: “That sounds like a great idea. I
get the young babe.” So they did and that’s the context of the story
which will follow after Hagar, the maidservant, and this is not the
Hagar of the comic strip, that’s her name, after she becomes pregnant
and what happens afterwards. (Genesis 16:1-16)
Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne
him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so
she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. (Guess
whose fault it is.) Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build
a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So
after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her
Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife.
He slept with Hagar and she conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she
began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are
responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms,
and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord
judge between you and me.”
“Your servant is in your hands,”
Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai
mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
The angel of the Lord found Hagar
near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road
to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come
from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress
Sarai,” she answered.
Then the angel of the Lord told her,
“Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel added, I will
so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.”
The angel of the Lord also said to
her:
“You are now with child and you will
have a son.
You shall name him Ishmael, for the
Lord has heard of your misery.
He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him, and
he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers.”
She gave this name to the
Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I
have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called
Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
So Hagar bore Abram a
son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram
was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven, we pray for the
word spoken today, may it enter our hearts and minds and give us hope;
give us strength; give us knowledge; give us heart; give us hope. We
pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well if you get nothing else out of
the sermon, the obvious place that we find hope is God. Of course,
there are different places that God helps us in different ways. The
first place we find hope is in God’s presence. I love the story
of Hagar. Here was a woman, an Egyptian; she was probably an idol
worshipper. She grew up knowing the names of the pantheon of Egyptian
gods. She becomes a slave, a maidservant in Abram’s household, and
hears about the one true God. But it doesn’t mean any thing to her;
it’s an abstraction. She’s heard about gods before. God was not real
to her. But then she gets into trouble and she runs off into the
desert. The angel of the Lord appears to her and has a profound impact
on her life. So much so, that she actually names this God, the God who
sees me. How poignant is that? Yahweh Roi. “The Lord who sees me,”
me, a slave. Not only that, this God names her son Ishmael, which means
he who hears; this God who hears, a God who actually sees and
hears. Novel thought in those days.
When did God become real for you? I
remember when it did for me. I’ve told you many times about my own
conversion experience. That was one of those sudden sort of things.
The only advantage I see of a sudden conversion versus say a gradual one
is that I actually do remember what it was like before and after. I
remember waking up the next day going “Oh, you’re here. You’re real.”
I was no longer alone and I knew it. In the early days of my own
Christian life I was so intensely aware of God’s presence; and, after
I’ve been a Christian for thirty-three years or so, it’s not as much
now. I think when you get older it doesn’t. But I’m convinced of it
even if I don’t feel it. You know, our culture is interesting. We have
come to believe nothing is genuine unless you feel it. You ever notice
that? People say “Well I haven’t experienced it, it must not be real.”
We can’t just take a truth and believe it. I think we need to believe
this presence of God even when we don’t feel it, for a variety of
reasons. First is it’s within the nature of God, it’s consistent with
His nature. The God in the bible is one who is here, there and
everywhere. He is in every place at every time. He is omnipotent.
What that means to you and me is there is no place we can go where God
is not. I’ve said before that sometimes when I go out and visit people
I try to train myself, and I forget sometimes, but I try to remember
that and ask that question “What is God up to in this place where I’m
going, because He’s already there. He’s already up to something.” My
job is to find out sometimes. “What’s God doing, because He’s already
there?” There’s no place emotionally or mentally or physically I can go
or you can go that God is not there, because God is omnipotent and
omnipresent, present everywhere at once. It’s also consistent to what
the bible says. It’s interesting how the world tries to take this
nearness of God out of life through its philosophies and its messages.
Thomas Jefferson was a deist. A lot of people were deists in his time.
That simply means that you believe that God, like the old fashioned
watch, created the universe, wound it up and let it run and you didn’t
have much to do with it. There wasn’t a personal contact between God
and you or the universe. Of course, in the sixties and the seventies
the message was that God is dead. How ridiculous is that? It’s
certainly totally against what the bible talks about how God is
intimately involved with people and the world. God is there. We see
that in the temple, in the tabernacle, God dwells among His people.
Jesus is Emanuel, God with us, and Paul says later “Don’t you know that
you are the temple of God, your body?” That’s consistent with His
promises. Jesus says “I will be with you until the end of the age.”
You might say, “Well, O.K. That’s great but I still don’t feel it.”
And it’s good to feel it. What happens to you? I would simply suggest
that we all have to practice the presence of God. Sometimes that means
using our imagination. In my early career as a minister, in my first
church I ran into a guy who had been a minister for years. He was
rather famous. He had a radio program and he was just a smooooth
talking Southern preacher. I was an associate pastor and the pastor
left and so he came and became the supply preacher and the congregation
got him one Sunday and me the next. That’s another story. But he wrote
a book and it’s called Letting God Help You. He had an illustration.
He said “Jesus is there. When you are praying to God, just imagine he’s
sitting there; for you islander types, maybe you need to imagine him
being there in the chair next to you. Actually it works. It helps.
Find ways to practice God’s presence.
We find hope in God’s presence and we
find hope in God’s purpose as well. Again, Hagar is given the
most amazing promise, the most amazing purpose, a slave. “You will bear
a son who will be the father of a multitude of nations. You will be the
matriarch.” What a purpose that is. What is your purpose? What is the
purpose God has given you? The bible says “For I know the plans I have
for you,” declares the Lord “plans to prosper not to harm.” Paul says
“being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will
carry it on to completion.” We know that “God causes everything to work
together for good for those who love God and are called according to His
purpose.” God has a purpose for us and purpose gives hope. You know,
one of the banes of churches, though we still need them, is committees.
It’s like going to a Presbytery committee. We go to these committee
meetings and wonder why we’re there. What is the purpose of spending
two hours this afternoon? And sometimes a lot of people don’t even
know. It happens in the church sometimes. But we had a committee
recently, Jubilee 2007, about twelve people, they had a mission, a
purpose and they accomplished it and they were motivated. There’s
nothing so motivated as a clear mission. A lot of us wander around in
life and God has a purpose for you. It’s there. There’s hope in
purpose.
There is also hope in following God’s
path as well. I have to believe that Hagar had to be a little
disappointed. Here she goes out into the desert and totally
unexpectedly God shows up. She’s real excited about this. But then he
says to her, “Go back.” “Go back. To that mess? To that woman? To
that place? That dysfunctional relationship?” Sometimes knowing God’s
purpose has a price. Sometimes having hope has a price. It is doing
what God tells us to do. I remember a few times in my own life praying
to God, “Just show me what you want me to do. Write it in the sky, do
something.” I remember doing that one particular time a few years ago,
days on end “Show me what to do Lord,” And finally the message was as
clear as a bell. “I’ve already shown you what to do. Go out and do
it.” The problem is that I didn’t want to do it. Isn’t that very much
like us? The problem is, many times, God has already shown us what we
should do, but it might interfere with our plans. We all have agendas
for our own lives. Might interfere with that vacation in the summer; or
all those plans we have to do this or that, with what we really want to
do. Or maybe what God calls us to do, if we focused on His kingdom
instead of our own stuff; maybe that would embarrass us. Make us
uncomfortable. Sometimes in order to have hope, we have to “go back”,
we have to obey. Sometimes we say “Well, God doesn’t feel close to me;”
but guess who moved? We stray away from what God has for us to do.
We’ve all heard of the phrase “What would Jesus do”, WWJD. It’s a good
question; but I sometimes think it’s a little too abstract. I think we
should really ask “What would Jesus have me do?” We should ask that
question on a regular basis.
Sometimes we also find hope in
pain. I know that sounds strange. But again Hagar is out in the
desert out in the middle of no place. She’s impetuously left her
protection, her food, her water. She’s run off into the desert and she
doesn’t know what to do. She’s suffering; and there she finds God. I
don’t think this is a coincidence. I think so often in our lives, and
we can point to them ourselves, we find God in the midst of our
problems. Have you ever wondered why sometimes we have an experience
with God when we watch a sunset on the beach? Or out fishing someplace?
Or out in some beautiful mountain? It is because all of the
distractions go away. We’re there by ourselves and we can think about
God and nothing is distracting us from it; or there are no temptations
or the disobedience. God is there. God is there anyway; we’re just too
busy to take note.
Sometimes God uses pain and suffering
to wake us up. I had a friend named Tim who I met in my year of
counseling training. Tim was about my age. We had a lot to talk
about. He was a big guy. At school they were always getting us mixed
up because we looked like each other. People would call me Tim and him
Chris and sometimes I wouldn’t even correct them. I’d think it was just
kind of fun. But he played football for Auburn and we just had a lot of
things to share. Well Tim was from North Carolina and he moved back
there after school and we moved to Tennessee. It wasn’t long after he
got back, he contracted terminal brain cancer. I was able to go down
and see him. I had some duty down in Ft. Bragg and I drove up to
Raleigh over the weekend and saw my friend Tim and asked him how he was
doing; and, of course, he wasn’t doing very well. He said, “You know
Chris, I’ve never felt so close to God in all my life.” Everything had
been taken away, except that. And that was enough.
Sometimes we find hope; and we find
hope in God’s place, His future place. There is a story about a
town that was facing its own death. The State government of Maine had
decided to flood the area where the town stood and make a big lake, to
build a dam and add to the state’s water and power supplies. With this
prospect ahead of them, residents of the town stopped making
improvements to their houses. Paint began to peel; grass was high. One
man in the town explained the town’s bedraggled appearance. He said
“Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the
presence.” You know, for Christians, we have a faith in the future.
Sometimes we are accused of having this pie in the sky, by-and-by sort
of an attitude. We look forward to heaven so we’re no earthly good.
But there is power in having that future, that hope that is real, that
faith in what God is going to give us. Jesus said “In my Father’s house
there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I’m
going there to prepare a place for you.” Peter says, “Praise be to the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He’s given
us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish,
spoil or fade.” Sometimes I don’t think we take advantage of this hope
very much. We don’t like to talk about death or what lies beyond. We
spend a lot of time avoiding it. And of course, none of us wants to
die. I told this story at a memorial service recently about this
rancher that had this truck. He told the funeral director he wanted to
be buried in the truck. The guy said “Why do you want to do that?” He
said “I’ve never seen a hole that that truck couldn’t get me out of.”
But the fact is, we’re going to die. If you are a person who doesn’t
have any belief, that is the end of the story. We spend a lot of time
denying that. It’s like, “O.K. the hero dies in the end. Bummer.” But
in the Christian story, it’s only the end of a chapter, and the story
goes on. There’s power in that. There’s hope in that. We have faith
in the future and it gives us motivation for now. There’s hope my
friends. It is in God and what He’s done for us and His presence,
His purpose, His path, yes in the midst of pain,
and certainly in the place for the future. In the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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