Hope

Romans 5: 1-5             Ezekiel 37: 1-14

Beaumont Presbyterian Church

May 30, 2010

Rev. Susan Warren

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day on our liturgical calendar when we recognize the Holy Trinity, God in three persons, which we’re doing this morning in our hymns. And in the Beaumont Beacon that was published this week, I wrote about the Trinity. This sermon, however, is not about the configuration of the Godhead. It’s about hope – something I think we all could use a good dose of today. We’re reading one lectionary text from Romans, and a passage from Ezekiel that I added because of the message it contains.

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Today I’m skipping over Paul’s doctrine of justification by grace through faith and focusing on what he says about pain. He says pain produces character.  He goes on to say that character produces hope.  Interesting. Pain produces character produces hope. It rings true.  Faith, pain, endurance, character, hope.  It rings true for me when I think about my mother.

I may have told you my mother had a heart condition that caused her many problems most of her adult life. One incident resulting from her condition was particularly critical..  Her weak heart allowed blood clots to form and one blocked her small intestine. Our family spent a long, fretful night in the waiting room.

Mother survived the surgery and was given a chance of continued survival.  But her life was drastically altered because she was longer able to eat – her small intestine and a portion of her large intestine had been removed.  And so she would have to be fed on a continual basis through a port in her stomach.

What gets you through something like that?  One minute she was standing in the kitchen making Christmas cookies to deliver to friends and relatives – the next she was in life-altering surgery.

Paul lists the scenario:  Faith, pain, endurance, character, hope.  She had them all.  After her initial recovery, Mother was frustrated by the inconvenience of the pole that held her bag of liquid food.  You can imagine what a hindrance that would be, having to drag a pole beside you.  And so Dad figured out a way to modify a garment bag so it was just the right size to hold the food and fit around her waist.  She called the feeding device Freddie and Freddie became her constant companion.  When she was in the hospital her cardiologist told me that her heart didn’t really beat – it was in such bad shape that it just sort of squished.  She might have been a candidate for a heart transplant but for other problems.

And so I had to marvel all the more that her garden was prettier than ever that year.  That she and Dad danced at their 50^th high school reunion.  That a year later, despite another stroke, she and Dad celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary.  And that her determination gave her a bit more time on earth, watching her grandchildren grow and engaging life in every way that she could.  She continued to suffer many health problems, but they never rose to the level of her hope.  They never defeated her.  She never lost hope.  Maybe her hope was, as Paul concludes, a result of character born of pain.

Ezekiel knew a lot about pain.  He saw his beloved Jerusalem fall to Nebuchadnezzar.  He saw his people, the Jews, scattered, driven from their homeland.  He believed this defeat, this Diaspora, to be the will of a God angered by Israel’s many sins. As priest and prophet he bore the pain of his people’s iniquities – his people who worshipped idols; his people who cavorted with enemies in Egypt and Assyria; his people who horded what gold and silver they could find and abandoned the widows and children among them.

You can read about it today.  You can pick up the newspaper and read about the drug lords and the pimps draining their neighborhoods of life.  You can read about pharmaceutical companies pushing highly addictive drugs as if they were candy; you can read about children dying in the Sudan.  You can read about warlords lusting after blood diamonds, chopping off the hands and sometimes the heads of competing clansmen, raping the women.  You can read about the horrific mutilation of God’s creation to quench our insatiable thirst for more and more -- bigger and bigger homes and cars, more and more stuff for us to idolize.

I dipped into my “Outrageous News” file last week and found an undated story that had appeared in the Herald-Leader about a Kentucky man featured on an MTV show called “My Super Sweet 16.”  I don’t know if the show is still aired, but apparently it’s a reality show in which contestants compete to see who can offer the most opulent birthday party for their child.  In this case the daughter of a Kentucky tycoon squealed with delight at her father’s oil wells, crying “I love oil.  Oil means shoes and cars and purses.”  And it meant being flown to her party by helicopter and escorted to the house in a Cinderella carriage.  It meant a shopping spree that included a new BMW for the birthday girl.

Ironically, this birthday party was reported in the Herald-Leader because some investors who had allegedly been scammed for millions by the girl’s father had been unable to find him were shocked to see him on TV.  I guess heavy-duty investors watch MTV. Anyway, seems the father had recovered from his bankruptcy.

Where is there cause for hope?

In a country where 75 percent of the people identify themselves as Christians – shouldn’t that translate into almost everybody being in church this morning?  But we know that millions are not, that many denominations are failing, that some of our oldest churches, the bulwark of our faith, stand nearly empty.

Friends, can these bones live?

The Lord God took Ezekiel out into the desert, hot and dry, and showed Ezekiel the dry bones, the skulls – bones everywhere.  And God told Ezekiel, “prophesy to these bones and say to them “O dry bones hear the word of the Lord.  Say (that) the Lord God will cause breath to enter you and you will live!”

And so Ezekiel did as he was commanded and he prophesied – he told the good news of the Lord, he told of hope in days to come. And suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together.  First tendons appeared, and skin. And Ezekiel prophesied some more. And then breath!  Breath came into them.  Ezekiel prophesied some more and those bones lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.  And the Lord God said “This is the whole house of Israel.”  God said, I will bring them back to life, out of the graves they have dug for themselves.  They are my people and I will restore them.

Can you hear God calling to us in the same way?  Calling us to tell the good news, to live the good news, to renounce our idols, to love our creator and the creation we so graciously have been given?  Can you hear?

Dante’s Divine Comedy created the Inferno, the seven stages of hell.  And at the beginning is a sign that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”   It’s a good definition of hell, isn’t it?  The abandonment of all hope.

The story is told of a trek of villagers in Darfur who were wandering through the countryside hoping to find food.  Some of the women carried their children on their backs.  One woman stopped on the dusty road.  The child she carried was about eight, but he appeared  much younger.  He would not live long.  The women carried him to a place where some scraggly grass grew and laid him down. They formed a circle around him, dancing and singing.  “Look at the elephants!” “See the giraffes,” they laughed.  “Look, a cool lake,” one shouted. “And see the beautiful, blue sky above.”

The young boy’s chaffed lips stretched into a small, weak smile as he died.

The mother was asked why she and the others created such a fantasy scene around the dying child.

“I did not want him to die without hope,” she said.

 My friends, like Ezekiel’s, it is our prophetic voice that will make the dry bones of our culture rise up and live and breathe and restore hope.  Our prophetic voice.  Having that kind of voice means denouncing the ills of our culture – not an easy job – and lifting up the good.

Is there cause for hope?  Paul thought so. A product of faith, pain, endurance and character, that’s what Paul thought of hope -- given to use, like grace, as a gift from God, the God who breathes life into the dry and dead places of our lives.

 Is there cause to hope that we – and I mean all God’s people – that we will choose peace over war, that we will choose righteousness over riches, that we will choose purpose over pleasure, that we will choose life over death?  Can these bones live?

One last story.  Emily was telling me of a time when she was counseling at Burnamwood and the topic of a small-group discussion was “what would Jesus watch on TV?”  (Only kids!)  Some of the youth tried to think of Christian-type programming. But one young man pointed to programs more popular with youth – and adults – programs that reflect the rawness of our culture -- something like that Sweet 16 show.  Jesus would watch them, he said, because they would show him everything that’s wrong with our culture.  Everything that’s narcissistic and selfish and damaging to our souls.  And then, he said, Jesus would know where to begin his work.

That young, Presbyterian youth’s response gives me hope.  Amen.