WHEN HOPE FINDS US

By Rev. Orlie White

Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18

April 4, 1999

First United Methodist Church, 341 South Kalmia, Escondido, CA 92025

"When Hope Finds Us"

Jesus Christ is alive! It's a paradox of Christian belief that the most profound message of hope comes wrapped in stories and symbols which many find incomprehensible and perhaps even irrelevant to the main issues of their lives. These are strange stories. They seem contradictory and inconsistent beginning with Matthew and running through John. All are shrouded, no pun intended, in mystery.

For example, this story from John's Gospel, actually two stories we read this morning. John speaks of Peter and "the other disciple" going to the tomb. This is failing journalism. You always cover the who, what, when, where and why in the first paragraph of the story. "The other disciple" - if that were me, I would want my name in the story. What does it mean, "the other disciple?" I would want it spelled right too. Look at the story about Mary - how many people are going to believe a distraught and hysterical woman, even if her name is Mary?

These are primitive stories, unpolished stories. As I said earlier it seems as if they were written on the run, not the kind carefully drafted by a legal mind with the logical power to convince even the most skeptical person of the argument that is made.

Instead, these stories stand as a collection of witnesses sharing an improbable invitation to believe; to ponder a great wonder, that a man crucified in disgrace has become the living center of hope for hopeless people. The one who died in infamy has become the still point of the turning world, one whom almost a third of the worlds' population follow as Lord and Savior today. Jesus Christ is alive!

But where is the evidence? Where are the facts that would cause me to change my life a whit? The evidence of resurrection is in the goodness and vitality of women and men in whose life Christ reigns. I believe in resurrection and a living Christ when I see faith and compassion overcoming fear.

Sarah Carson is such a person. She was leading a team of seventeen young people, including two of her own children, on a three-month assignment in the jungle two hundred miles from the nearest city in a South American country. She had been there four years before with her husband to build a church and a fish hatchery. Now they had been invited to come back and experiment with a vegetable protein project.

After their arrival, the country began to experience conflict between the elected officials and the military. They felt safe until one night thirty soldiers approached the house where they were living. She prayed quickly, "God, if I have to die, take care of my family. And God, please take away this fear, I don't want to die in fear, afraid. Please help me. I trust in you." She was suddenly aware of the presence of God.

The commander burst into the room and shoved her against the wall even as she said, "Welcome brothers, come in, you do not need guns to visit us." He demanded angrily, "Why are you Americans down here trying to stop our revolution? Seventeen Americans would not be living in this poverty if they did not have political motivations."

Mrs. Carson responded, "We have nothing to do with your revolution. We're here for two reasons, teaching self-help projects to the hungry, and teaching the Bible." "That tells me nothing. I've never read the Bible," he said. She responded, "The Bible tells us about Jesus, who taught us the way of love, and because of Him I can tell you, even if you kill us, we will die loving you because God loves you too. To follow Him I love you."

He happened to glance at a Bible that was open on the table revealing the heading of the passages that said. "Jesus teaches love your enemies, return good for evil." "That's humanly impossible," he said. "That's true," she responded, "It isn't humanly possible, but with God's help it is possible."

The soldiers took the men and left the women, against orders. Saturday night they received a message from the soldiers that they would be coming to Sunday service. The man who led the attack on the village came with his bodyguard. The two them marched into the church with their rifles over their shoulders.

The people remaining in the village assembled, afraid. They began to sing. Then, as was their custom, they invited the soldiers and all visitors to come to the front of the church to be welcomed. The custom was that the visitors would come and stand in front. The people would line up, shake their hand, hug them and give some personal word of greeting. Mrs. Carson invited the soldiers to come, but expected the people to leave out the hugging and the greeting. But the first man came up and he hugged the soldier and said, "Brother, we don't like what you did to our village, but this is the house of God and God loves you, and so you are welcome here." The looks on the soldiers' faces became surprised and then incredulity.

After they had been greeted by the people in the church the commander marched to the pulpit and said, "Now I have a few words to say. Never have I dreamed that I could raid a town and come back and be welcomed as a brother. I can hardly believe what I have seen and heard this morning. That sister told me Thursday that Christians loved their enemies, but I did not believe her then. You have proven it to me this morning. This is the first church service I've ever been to. I've never believed that there was a God before, but what I have felt is so strong that I will never again doubt the existence of God as long as I live." Then he said, "Do all of you know God? If you know God, hang on to him. It must be the greatest thing in the world to know God."(Soujourner's magazine, April 1983) Jesus Christ is alive!

I believe in resurrection and the living Christ when I see hope coming into the life of those who are living in despair. It was so for those first disciples who'd been caught up in grief and trauma at the loss of the one that they had lived with for three years, for whom they had given up everything to follow - their families, their livelihood. Now he was gone and their life was empty. They had no certainty for the future. But on Easter the experience of new possibility burst in upon them.

We've seen it in the life of the disciples. I've seen it in the life of my good friend who found herself overwhelmed in choking panic that descended upon her uninvited and uncontrollable until she remembered she belongs to God and nothing can separate her from God. In that memory she found peace and courage that was more than her own. Hope came to hopelessness.

Robin E. Van Cleef once wrote:

    I look for Easter evidence.  
    The whole world is looking too,  
    Searching for some sign,  
        Some sure signal  
        That Christ is alive.
    But all I ever seem to see
        Are other persons. 
    And ever so often
        Along comes someone 
        Whose very life  
        Is a resurrection song,  
        A hallelujah.

    I guess that's all we have.  
    I guess that's all we need.  
    I guess that's what I need to be  
        As well.

(Printed in "Alive Now")

One thing we learn from these stories, and find confirmed in our own experience, is that belief in the Living Christ comes when we are surprised in the midst of other things. You remember the saying, "Life is what happens to you when you had other plans."

The presence of redeeming love comes unexpectedly, and in the oddest times, to a mind looking at the threat of death, or struggling with loss, or confused about decisions which need to be made. Bang, someone comes, a word is spoken or insight is given which changes the way we see everything.

It happened this way to a professor at a North Carolina university when he was a graduate student. He was traveling through Austria and was about to go to Vienna when, two weeks before, he became violently sick and had to spend all of his money on medicine and doctors. He had only enough left to buy a train ticket to get him to Vienna from the small village where he was stricken.

He arrived in the city too late to find the friends who'd been waiting for him and had no idea of where he could locate them. He was cold, hungry, and he had no money to buy food. He was standing in the station when he was approached by an elderly woman. She was the one who swept the floor of the train station. She asked him if he was hungry and before he could answer she took out her lunch and gave him half of it. He was warmed by her kindness, by the look on her face, by her reaching out to him, by the sparkle of her eyes.

They talked for more than an hour. She told him the story of her life. She had been raised on a farm and had a very hard life. During the war her husband and two sons had been executed as members of the resistance. She had only a daughter left. But she spoke with such a sense of peace, a sense of hope. He asked her, finally, "Why did you give me your food?" She said to him, "Jesus is my Lord. God is good."

The evidence is there. It is in the lives of people who share bread with us, who reach out to us in compassion and forgiveness, who care about us even when we're not worth caring for. God is good. Jesus Christ is alive!

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Rev. Earl Guy

Oh Lord of life, God of the living and the dead, God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we come to worship with a special sense of thankfulness today. We celebrate good news. Christ is risen. Yet in the back of our mind we are still unsure about that empty tomb. Sometimes the news seems too good. We remember all the tombs of our lives, the disappointments, the failures, the rejections, and we aren't sure what to make of an empty tomb. Life is full of dirty tricks and we would like to be wise enough not to be too gullible, too easily taken in by wild promises. We have learned if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. We are here, Lord, because we want to believe, but sometimes we need help with our unbelief. And so we come, glad to hear the message of hope, and still praying your Holy Spirit will work in us to help us not only to hear again the story, but to know the risen Christ in our lives.

We give thanks, Lord, for those who come to us in love. Often in them we find the hope that you care for us as well. And so we pray that we might be the messengers of hope for others. Help us never, by unkind or thoughtless word, to take hope away from another. Rather, guide us to build one another up through truth spoken in love. We offer our prayers for those who are sick or in need today, for each one shared on our prayer concern list, and for those kept within our individual hearts. We pray for healing of bodies and of circumstances, and of memories, and of spirits. We pray for strength to endure difficult times, where healing does not come as we might wish. We give thanks for visions of hope that lead us and those we love toward new understandings and new ways of greeting the future. Thus might we find the truth that Christ is risen for us.

We give thanks, Lord, for the reality of your Spirit at work. The world is far more troubled and complex than we can grasp. We pray for things beyond our control, beyond our knowledge and understanding. We pray for peace in troubled places, especially we pray today for those caught in the conflict in Kosovo, for the soldiers captured there and for their families who wait in anguish. Deepen our hearts understanding to share the pain of these and all who are caught up in our human failures. Widen our vision to know that pain cuts across the human boundaries of nation and culture. Let our prayers be for friend and foe alike. Because you have shown us the way of love which knows no boundaries, the love that brought Easter to the world, and left the tomb, and all our tombs empty.

Help us to face this day as ones who look out from the doof of death into life present and eternal, empowered by the risen Christ to live today and each day by the simple words of Jesus' prayer... Our Father...