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Forecasting the weather can be
very imprecise. I read a story about two men who were hunting
and camping. One night they lay down to go to sleep. One
looked up at the sky and said, “What do you see?” Replied the
other, “I see millions of stars.”
“And what does that say to
you?”
“It says that there are millions
of stars and galaxies out there, and it says it will probably
be a nice day tomorrow. Why? What does it say to you?”
“It says to me that somebody
stole our tent.”
Weather forecasters don’t have
precise answers. They often tell us more than we need to know.
My Internet provider now goes out six days with the weather
forecast instead of just five. That gives them an extra day to
be wrong. Weather forecasting is a very fluid business.
Apparently people knew how to
forecast the weather to some degree in Jesus’ day. It was very
simple—probably very much like “Red at night, sailors’
delight, red in the morning, sailors take warning.” Jesus
picked up on the forecasting trend. At one point he said to
them, “You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth
and the sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the
present time?”
How do you interpret the present
time? There’s a lot of uncertainty, to be sure. We live in an
uncertain economy. We experience an uncertain peace. We sense
an uncertain moral compass.
A sign of that uncertainty can
be seen in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race in these days.
The simple fact is I do not know for whom to vote. Both
candidates support casino gambling in Pennsylvania. There are
different uses for the money (one wants to use it for
education, the other wants to use it for the elderly), but
it’s the same support. Casino gambling is the coward’s way of
raising money for public use. Casino gambling only produces
two things: poverty and greed. It is a catalyst for economic
downturn.
The fact is we don’t have
healthy choices. This is not the hope of Pennsylvania. To move
in that direction is not a good sign for the future.
Unsettling times produce some
strange developments. One of the strangest of all is something
called “apocalyptic thinking.” For quite a few people, all of
the signs point to the impending end of the world. God will
bring history to a close, and God will do it soon.
Many people read the Bible that
way. This way of reading has been more prominent in the past
30 years than at any time in the past 300 years.
In the 1970s it was Hal
Lindsay’s book The Late Great Planet Earth. The book
sold millions of copies. It was a record-breaking bestseller.
The thesis of the book was that because of the rise of the
state of Israel, we had a sign of the end times.
Today it’s the incredible
success of the “Left Behind” books. Originally there were to
be 7 books, then 9, and now 12. These books by Tim LaHaye are
very popular. In 2001 the 9th book knocked John
Grisham off the top of the bestseller list for the very first
time. This year the 10th book, The Remnant,
was published. Prior to its publication on July 1st
it sold 2.4 million copies.
The message of the books is that
something called the “Rapture” is almost upon us. Some of us
will be taken up into heaven, some will be left behind for
tribulation.
It reminds me of the story of a
plane that had to ditch in the ocean. No one was hurt but they
needed to get out of the plane because the plane would sink.
The pilot came on over the intercom, “Those of you who can
swim, please move to the left side of the plane; those of you
who cannot swim, please move to the right side of the plane.
Now: those of you on the left side of the plane, please jump
out the door and swim for that small island you see off in the
distance. Those of you on the right side, thank you for flying
our airline.”
The LaHaye books seem to say
some people will swim to safety and some will be left behind.
The books are called novels,
but they are not being read as such. They are being read as
weather forecasts—God’s forecast for the world.
In unsettling times such books
are devoured as Biblical truth. However, the truth is that
they are neither good Bible nor good theology. They are simply
proof that you can take anything out of context and make it
say whatever you want it to say.
There is no evidence in
Scripture that the end times are upon us. There is some
evidence that the early Christian community thought it might
happen in their day. It seems to me utterly arrogant to say
that the signs in the Bible point specifically to the early
years of the 21st century for the end of time.
I caution you not to take Tim
LaHaye too seriously. Read the books if you like. But they are
not God’s forecast for our generation.
Remember the words of Jesus:
“You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the
sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present
time?”
What is the sign of the present
age? For a believer in Jesus, there is only one sign. It is
the same sign that has been in place for 2000 years. It is the
sign of hope—a deep down, firmly rooted, indefatigable hope.
What is my forecast for the
future? It is the forecast of hope. Hope is rooted in the way
and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus left us behind 2000
years ago to carry that hope.
Do I know where the economy is
headed? Not at all. Do I know where Washington will lead us in
relation to the Middle East or with Iraq? No, I do not. Do I
know what was the intent of North Korea in indicating they
were producing nuclear weapons? I have no idea. But I do know
that those who walk with Jesus can live confidently in hope.
There was a small sign of this
during the past week. The wife of a man seriously injured by
the sniper spent all her waking hours at his bedside in the
hospital. News reporters asked the doctor how she was doing.
The answer was instructive. The doctor simply said, “She is a
remarkable woman of faith.” What does that imply? Is she
worried about her husband? Of course she is. Does she have
deep concern about whether or not he’ll be able to completely
recover? Of course she does. But she is a person of hope.
Paul writes to the church in
Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and
peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the
power of the Holy Spirit.” That is our hope statement.
Stephen Curtis Chapman is a
contemporary Christian singer. Our group has sung some of his
songs at “Sunday Night.” I think I saw his name on the leaders
for Youth 2003 this coming summer. Listen to the words.
We can cry with
hope;
We can say
goodbye with hope!
Because we
believe with hope.
We wait with
hope, and we ache with hope.
We hold on with
hope, and we let go with hope.
Michael Riddell writes, “Our
conviction is that there is no territory or future which is
not already included in the salvation of Christ. Therefore we
can cross all frontiers, including that of death itself, in
the certainty that God is ahead of us. And where God is, there
is no reason to fear.”[i]
Not only can we have hope, but
we can also say that the church—including this church—is a
center of hope.
Many of you will remember Laird
Stuart, who was for many years the senior minister of
Westminster Presbyterian Church here in our community. His
ministry and mine overlapped for quite a few years. He now
serves a Presbyterian church in downtown San Francisco. When I
visited him a while ago, he took me on a tour of the church.
We walked from a new part of the building into the old
original building, which housed the sanctuary. As we crossed
the threshold from the new to the old I saw a sign on the wall
that said, “This part of the building is not earthquake-proof.
In the event of a major earthquake, the building will probably
collapse.” Laird smiled and said to me, “It’s sort of like
reading, ‘Abandon hope, all who enter here.’”
The true message of the church
is, “Claim hope, all who enter here.”
Remember the plaque on a small,
500-year-old cathedral in England? You’ve heard me refer to it
before. It said that it was a church built in 1653, whose
“singular praise it was to do the best things in the worst of
times and to hope them in the most calamitous times.”
We are a community of hope whose
singular praise it is to do the best things in the worst of
times and to hope them in the most calamitous of times.
You have often heard me share a
greeting at the beginning of a worship service: “We are a
community of believers who live in the world who hope in Jesus
Christ and who meet in this building.” That’s who we are.
So we not only live by hope, we
offer hope. We offer hope to the frail elderly through our
Prime Time Adult Day Care. We offer hope to mentally
challenged adults by our P.E.P. program on occasional Friday
nights. We offer hope to the homeless families in our area by
way of the Interfaith Hospitality Network. We offer hope to
the hungry by way of a monthly food collection for S.H.I.M.—including
the Fill-a-Truck effort every Pentecost Sunday in the spring.
We offer hope to Christian craft workers in the third world by
way of the SERRV program. We offer hope to hungry spiritual
seekers through our Sunday night contemporary service.
What new hope might we offer for
2003? Our vision is to “partner” with two United Methodist
hospitals in Zimbabwe for a revitalization program. We have
selected the hospitals and we are waiting for further word
from the General Board of Global Ministries on how to proceed.
We want to offer hope to brothers and sisters in a very poor,
civil war-torn nation. We are a people of hope in Jesus who
gather to offer hope in Jesus’ name.
A few years ago, the fall
lecture series at my theological school had an interesting
title: “The Church as Hope for a Damaged Planet.” That’s our
mission. That’s who we are. It’s an important slice of the
larger vision we have for making disciples.
I sat for about an hour with my
District Superintendent this past Wednesday afternoon. She
makes an annual one-on-one visit and consultation with all the
pastors on the district. In the course of our conversation she
asked me the question, “How do you feel about what you are now
doing?” I answered, “I feel great. I enjoy coming to work each
day. I carry a great hope for the church in my heart.”
Remember the little story I told
you about lunch at the Red Lobster restaurant a while back? I
walked in with someone for lunch. The waitress thought she
recognized me. She said, “You’re here pretty often. Are you an
insurance salesman?” I responded, “No, I’m not an insurance
salesman, I’m the pastor of the Methodist church at the top of
the hill.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you’re
sort of an insurance salesman!”
I don’t think of myself as an
insurance salesman. But I am a dealer in hope. I believe the
future belongs to those who give it the greatest hope.[ii]
Someone once asked this
hypothetical and rhetorical question: When you approach the
pearly gates, would you rather be told, “Well done, thou
hyper, hopeful, risk-taking servant”? Or would you rather
hear, “Well done, thou sober and play-it-safe servant”? I
would distinctively prefer the former. Hope makes
things happen.
I give you today a God who gives
you hope. That’s the divine weather report. Hope for living,
hope for the church. Hope for even the most difficult days.
If we have been “left behind” in
any sense at all, we have been left behind to be ambassadors
of hope.
Amen.
[i]
Threshold of the Future, Michael Riddell, p. 122
[ii]
This is a quote taken from Teilhard de Chardin
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