Faith… Hope… Love…

Three Sermons by Pastor Orlie White

Introduction

These three sermons are the last ones I preached before my retirement from active ministry at Escondido First United Methodist Church. They are printed as transcribed from the tape recording of the Sunday morning service. While some references are specifically related to First UMC, Escondido, I hope the meaning will be relevant to you.

These three issues, faith, hope, and love, are the foundation on which our lives as followers of Jesus is built. I hope you will find some note of grace in these sermons, which will shed a bit of light in your world.

Orlie White Pastor Emeritus, The United Methodist Church of Vista

Bumper Stickers, T-Shirts, Notes On A Refrigerator—Hope

Well, I’m down to my last two cents, or my last two strikes, I’m not sure which analogy to use. People keep asking me how things are going. We’re at the point where we’re finished with sorting and packing; we’re just throwing stuff in the box now. If you want to know what color paint we have on the inside of our new house I’ll show it to you on my hands.

Today bumper stickers, wise saying on t-shirts, and the magnets we put on our refrigerator are modes of communication. They give us mottos, slogans, and wisdom to live by. They guide us, and sometimes keep us smiling.

Years ago some graffiti written on a New York subway read, “God id dead” and signed Nietzsche, the philosopher of a previous generation. Someone crossed that out and underneath it wrote, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God.

Someone, several years ago gave me this bumper sticker… there is no hell, maybe.

Paul, in I Corinthians 13:13, gives us a short saying which we can remember forever. He describes what, for him, are the principles of human life, of life under Christ: that is “the things that last are faith, hope, and love. The greatest is love.” If you remember those three things, and if you live by them, your life will be filled with abundance, joy, and hope always.

Today we’re going to talk about help. One of my favorite quotations is from Emily Dickinson who wrote, “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” If you lose everything from your life, hold on to hope, for with hope the green shoots of new life will always grow.

Victor Frankle was a Viennese psychiatrist who, himself was a prisoner of one of the Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War. He wrote out of his own experience, and the experience of many people whom he knew in prison; he observed that no matter how bad conditions were, if people had hope they could live, but when hope was lost, they died.

There are two ways to think of hope. One is as though it were a kind of wishing… “I hope the sun shines on our picnic today”… “I hope I get a raise”… “I hope I get a new boss”… “I hope things will pick up around here”… “I hope I get a good report from the doctor.” That kind of hope often expresses little more than wishing… “I wish that this were so.”

But there is another way of hoping, described in the Bible, which focuses on the larger picture. See if you can grasp it from these three quotations.

First, from the Prophet Jeremiah writing to a people in exile. They had been taken from the land of their fathers and mothers, from familiar scenes to a foreign country. Jeremiah writes to them, “Surely I know the plans I have your says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me I will hear you. When you search for me you will find me. If you seek me with all your heart I will let you find me, says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 29:14) Now memorize that, “If you seek me with all your heart I will let you find me, says the Lord.”

In I Timothy, Paul was writing to a young preacher and this is what he says about the ministry, the life of the faith. “FOR TO THIS END WE TOIL AND STRUGGLE< BECAUSE WE HAVE OUR HOPE SET ON THE LIVING GOD, WHO IS THE SAVIOR OF ALL PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY OF THOSE WHO BELIEVE.” (I Timothy 4:10)

One more quote, from I Peter. “YOU HAVE COME TO TRUST IN GOD WHO RAISED HIM FROM THE DEAD AND GAVE HIM GLORY SO THAT YOUR FAITH AND HOPE ARE SET ON GOD.” (I Peter 1:21)

In these scriptures we see that HOPE WHICH SAVES US IS GROUNDED IN GOD. We’re surprised by this from time to time as, without warning, hope breaks into our lives. The Bible talks more about where hope is found than it does about what we should be hoping for. The Bible affirms One who is providing hope in the midst of life, where we will find deliverance from captivity, healing when we are diseased, blessing when we’re neglected. The first thing we see in this scripture is that hope is grounded in God.

WE BELIEVE THAT THE FUTURE BELONGS TO GOD BECAUSE OF WHAT GOD HAS BEEN DOING.

The creation stories in the Bible concern not only plants, sun, and moon, and starts. The focus of the creation stores is on God who has created us to be in community with each other and in relationship to God. That’s the big news in the creation story; God desires us to be in relationship and to live responsibly together and with God.

God enters into what we call a covenant relationship to make this clear. The covenant with Abraham and Sarah, with Moses, with Isaiah describes the fact that this God of creation has made a promise to the creation, to you and to me; and that promise is that this God will never leave us. This God will never forsake us. This God will be with us through thick and thin, through floods and hurricanes. This God is forever and wants us to love and trust and serve that God.

This hope is grounded on what God is doing in the present day. In my short life I’ve almost drowned three times. The first I was a toddler. My parents were visiting friends and a neighbor woman saw me being pushed by another child into a fishpond in the back yard of this house where we were visiting. She rand out and pulled me out and I’m here to tell you the story today because she did.

The second time I nearly drowned I was in the fourth grade. Our family was on a picnic with other friends in a park which had a small river which had been dammed up in one place by rocks. The water running over the rocks formed a deep pool. I wasn’t a swimmer then so I thought I could sit or lie down on those rocks and let the water flow over me… however I slipped off the rocks into the deep water. The daughter of our friends, Joanne, a high school student who knew lifesaving, pulled me out and saved me a second time.

The third time I was an adult and I’d learned to swim. A work team of youth from our church had gone to Guaymas, Mexico. We had done our work and went to the beach on our last day. Several of us climbed on a big innertube and began to float out into the ocean. I’d gone out as much as I wanted and decided to swim back to shore. It was further than I expected. I floundered and one of our youth save me, again, from drowning.

When I read these words from Psalms, “I have come into deep waters and the floods sweep over me.” Or “Do not let the floods sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up.” (Psalms 69:2b) I pay attention. I say, "Yes, the God who is a part of our world, the God who has created me, the God who’s entered into covenant with my people, that God is the God who saves us from deep waters, because that God, three times, saved me from drowning.

Our hope is in the one who is loving, caring, creating, redeeming.

The surprise of this comes through Jesus Christ to us who are gathered in this room.

Several years ago I attended the World Methodist Conference which meets every five years; it brings four to five thousand Methodists together from all over the world. In a group learning evangelism I heard a man named Olav Parnaments, a Methodist pastor from Estonia, who told us about the work of the Methodist Church there. There are two thousand Methodists in Estonia, one of the Baltic countries, then just freed from Communist rule. Pastor Parnaments was the son of the Communist Finance Minister in Estonia. He said, “One day I stole a Bible from the church. I’d been drinking, probably.” He stole the Bible in order to sell it to get money to buy more liquor. But before he sold it he began to read it, and before he knew it he was applying to seminary to become a pastor.

We are surprised by hope in Jesus Christ, who is the light that comes to us in our darkness and brings hope in despair.

HOPE LEANS INTO THE FUTURE AND TURNS OUR ATTENTION TO WHAT LIES BEYOND US. Hope is not a celebration of what we have in hand, but an expectation of what will come.

The New Testament is written in the language of anticipation. It speaks of resurrection and that means that the Christian is not on the way to death, but to life. Christians will see and be clothed with the glory of God.

The truth is that God’s work is unfinished, the world is unfinished, I am unfinished, and you are unfinished. And so is he and she.

HOPE IS THE EMBRACE THAT HOLDS US AND LEADS US THROUGH THE DARK AND TROUBLING TIMES OF OUR LIVES. If we could see the solution to every problem we would not need hope. If we had every answer, hope would be of no value. God gives us hope precisely because we need it and don’t have all the answers.

Years ago Lou Little was football coach at Columbia University. It was in the time before college and university teams were farm teams for pro football. A sophomore played on the Columbia football team; he couldn’t play very good ball but was really a great guy.

One day this boy’s mother called to tell him that his father had died and asked him to come home for the funeral which was to be held just a day before the big game of the year.

When the boy returned after the funeral he asked the coach if he could start in the game. The coach reluctantly said, “OK.” He like the kid, but he knew he wasn’t a great player. But the guy played an inspired game. He blocked and tackled, he was the standout player of the game.

The coach asked him after the game was over, “Why did you have to play today?” The boy replied, “You remember, my father was blind. This was really the first chance my father had to see me play.”

We will be able to live inspired lives undergirded by hope when we develop an acute sense of unseen eyes upon us. The eyes of a God who loves us.

Let us pray…