Today’s message is a message of hope. Frederick Buechner, in his book, “The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections” writes:
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
They hope that the words of their sermons may bring some measure of understanding and wholeness to the hearts of the people who hear them and to their own hearts. They hope that the public prayers they pray may be answered, and they hope the same for their private prayers and for the prayers of their congregations.
They hope that the somewhat moth-eaten hymns, the somewhat less than munificent offerings, and the somewhat perfunctory exchange of the peace may all be somehow acceptable in the sight of the one in whose name they are offered. They hope that the sacrament of bread and wine may be more than just a pious exercise.
They hope that all those who come faithfully to church Sunday after Sunday may find at least as much to feed their spirits there as they would find staying at home with a good book or getting into the fresh air for some exercise. At the heart of their hoping is the hope that God, whom all the shouting is about, really exists. And the heart of heart is Christ - the hope that he really is what for years they have been saying he is. That he really conquered sin and death. That in him and through him we also stand a chance of conquering them.
So today I do as Buechner says I am going to preach to you what I hope for myself as well as for Ephrata and for Memorial Christian Church.
This week the community, our small idyllic community has been shook to it’s core and my friends right now we need hope. Things like “that” aren’t suppose to happen here. Two deaths in such a small span of time, two losses of youth or if we think about it more—it is more than a loss of two children it is the loss of innocence for many and the stop to life as has been known.
I prayed Wednesday night and I prayed fervently and I prayed hard. I didn’t know if I should even approach this subject but as I prayed, I knew that this is not something that could be pushed aside or hidden in a closet. Our community is hurting, children in our larger community are hurting, and children within the community of Memorial Christian Church are suffering. Many have been touched.
Quincy lost a young man to an accident. He was a teenager that had so much going for him. He had nothing but the future to look toward. He was a basketball star, academically strong, he was popular, he was well liked and like many teenagers, he thought he was invincible. He could test the need for speed, he could push that car to see how fast it could go. Sadly he lost control and crashed. He lost his life. A brilliant dynamic life was taken from our midst. A brilliant life snuffed out too early. Our hearts ache for his family and for the Quincy community.
A 13 year old boy, Craig Sorger, he was not a child who had everything going for him. This is a child who not many knew his name and now we all know who he was. He was being integrated from special needs classes to mainstream classes. He was bright but he was different. He had only lived in this community a short time and was still trying to find a way to fit in and he was slowly beginning to make friends and find his place. His life was tragically and brutally ended. Not by an accident but by another’s hands.
It is easier for us to accept the death by an accident than by another’s hands. Our hearts pour out for both these families in their loss. Two young lives gone.
But it doesn’t end there. See we have other children involved. We must not forget the ones who committed the crime. Do we understand why it happened? No. Are we angry that it happened? Yes. But we must understand that someone else’s life has been destroyed, someone else’s family has been put on hold. We must also pray for the family of the boys involved who did this heinous act. In all honesty will we understand why it happened, probably not?
We as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles cannot come to grips with this. We walk around in horror. We walk around thankful that this was not one of our own. Saddened by the loss and the effects it takes upon our children and our families. Devastated that it happened here, we expect things like this to happen in LA, New York, Spokane, Seattle, the Tri-Cities but in Ephrata.
And today I preach about hope. Hope does live on. Hope does help us survive. How ironic that I talk of hope on a day when many of us have wonder where hope has gone or we wonder if we have lost ours.
Our scriptures today speak of hope. Hope in the times of despair and knowing that Christ is there for us and hope that if we believe if we have faith that our hope can save us.
The paralytic and his friends not only had great hope but they had great faith that Christ could heal the man. And the question crosses our minds—why hope at all?
That is not an uncommon question especially living in a world as we do today.
Whether hope is extinguished by a famine of the body or a famine of the spirit…whether it is threatened by loss of work or the by the loss of joy in our work…whether it is imperiled by random acts of violence that strip human beings of all sense of security and safety or by intentional acts of domestic violence that betray a sacred trust and rob the soul of the ability to trust…whether it is undermined by subtle yet relentless prejudice or assaulted by blatant discrimination….whether it is exhausted by mental illness, dehabilitated by physical illness or cruelly snatched away by the most brutal of all enemies today—death—Our Hope, our very hope is under siege today.
And the threat of the impending loss of hope are not only felt within the church, and I am speaking of the church as in the universal church, but they are also felt within ourselves and within the world.
What I am trying to point out, in a not so subtle manner, is that hope—in many quarters of the world and the church and within ourselves and in serious danger of being extinguished. It is a burning ember with no one fanning the flame.
We are in the state of “give-up-itis”.
In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Victor Frankl tells of his years trapped in the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. He was transported there like a despised animal, given two minutes to strip naked or be whipped, every hair was shaved from his body, and he was condemned to a living death. His father, mother, brother, and wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. His existence was full of cold, fear, starvation, pain, lice, vermin, dehumanization, exhaustion and terror.
Frankl wrote that he was able to survive because he never lost the quality of hope. Those prisoners who lost faith in the future were doomed. When a prisoner lost hope, Frankl said, he let himself decline, becoming subject to physical and mental decay. He would die from the inside out.
Frankl said this usually happened quite suddenly. One morning a prisoner would just refuse to get up. He wouldn’t get dressed or wash or go outside to the parade grounds. No amount of pleading by his fellow prisoners would help. No threatening by the captors would have any effect. Losing all hope, he had simply given up. He would lay there in his own excrement till he died. American soldiers later told Frankl that this behavior pattern existed among prisoners of war, and was called “give-up-it is.”
When a prisoner loses hope, said Frankl, “he lost his spiritual hold.”
We must not lose our spiritual hold. These are the times when we need to go to extraordinary measures to find our spiritual hope and we as Christians cannot fall into the state of “give-up-it is”.
Let me speak to you of the reflections that we can find in the gospel reading:
Four men literally carried a man who was paralyzed. They did not hire a taxi to take him or have an ambulance come and get him or even get a donkey to carry the load. They carried him. They did not ask Jesus to come to him. They picked him up bodily and walked with their burden to the place where Jesus was staying. How lucky the paralytic was to have such good friends to carry him. Not only did they carry him to where Jesus was when it was too crowded for them to reach Jesus they took the man to the roof and cleared the roof and dug an opening so that they could lower the man. Now, we aren’t sure what the owner of the home must have thought of a skylight installed into his home but we must look at the hope and ingenuity of these friends. These friends went to all this trouble for this one man.
We have to consider how often do we go to all this trouble for someone. We must go that extra mile and sometimes carry someone’s burdens so that they can find their faith and hope in the midst of their ailments.
On the basis of the faith of these four men, the hope and belief of these men, Jesus gives forgiveness to the man. These men would not have carried the man to Jesus if they did not believe that Jesus would and could heal him.
And the paralytic. he never questioned his faith or his hope or the words Christ said to him. He rolled up his mat and he walked away. He had not suffered from give-up-itis, he had not lost his spiritual hold.
Now the teachers of the law, our good old friends, always seemed to be around Jesus to question, to doubt, and to point fingers. They seemed to want to put a stop to the hope that Christ spoke of, the salvation and forgiveness that he was offering. They did not question that Christ could heal the man but they did question that he could forgive the man. Power to heal—no problem, power to forgive—wait a minute, who is he?
It always amazes me that these teachers of the law always seemed to be a little slow on the uptake. They were too slow to figure out that this was the Messiah and he could and he did perform great deeds and miracles.
Sometimes, you and I are like those teachers. It’s easier to question, doubt, re-consider, analyze and deduce than to recognize the Savior.
It’s easier to look at the bad than find the good. You are all thinking right now…Dawn Marie, give us a break, what good will come out of the events of the last week. This is a hopeless situation. This is sad situation without any hope.
Right now it may seem so. But what will the future bring. Will a child in the schools reach out to another child in compassion and love? Will our teenagers slow down and think as they get behind the wheel? Will some seeds be planted where God will work his wonders? Will someone who has never walked into a church walk into one in this community and try to find some hope?
We do not understand what has happened and we may not but we know that there is hope in the world, hope in a future and a hope in Christ.
In the old hymn the words flow…
“My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness.”
Hope is a precious commodity if we do not have it, we too will be like the victims of the holocaust camps and we will begin to die inside out. I have met people who have already began that journey and it saddens me.
Several years ago a teacher assigned to visit children in a large city hospital received a routine call requesting that she visit a particular child. She took the boy’s name and room number and was told by the teacher on the other end of the line, "We’re studying nouns and adverbs in his class now. I’d be grateful if you could help him with his homework so he doesn’t fall behind the others." It wasn’t until the visiting teacher got outside the boy’s room that she realized it was located in the hospital’s burn unit. No one had prepared her to find a young boy horribly burned and in great pain. She felt that she couldn’t just turn and walk out, so she awkwardly stammered, "I’m the hospital teacher, and your teacher sent me to help you with nouns and adverbs." The next morning a nurse on the burn unit asked her, "What did you do to that boy?" Before she could finish a profusion of apologies, the nurse interrupted her: "You don’t understand. We’ve been very worried about him, but ever since you were here yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He’s fighting back, responding to treatment--.It’s as though he’s decided to live." The boy later explained that he had completely given up hope until he saw that teacher. It all changed when he came to a simple realization. With joyful tears he expressed it this way: "They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?"
Heb. 10:23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
I ask that you my friends recall God’s grace and the hope that we have in our lives and in the lives of our children. And remember that when our internal hope flags we need to turn to the one who brings us hope in the times of hopelessness, Jesus our Lord. We need to have the faith to believe in a future and the faith to take our hopes through the roof.
Let us pray.
