Love Hopes All Things

A Sermon Based Upon 1 Corinthians  15:  19-22;  51-58

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Epiphany 4, Year (B),   February 8^st,  2015

… If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.   (1Co 15:19 NRS)

How hopeful are you?     

In the German Novel, Night Train to Libson, Rainmund Gregorious is a classics teacher in Bern, Switzerland.   The story opens with a very predictable day starting like most other days, with the professor walking across a bridge to arrive at his school by 7:45 AM so he can begin his 8:00 o’clock Greek class.  But on this particularly wet and windy day, just as he crossed the Aare River Bridge, he notices a woman standing at the railing about to jump. 

As she lets go of a book she had been reading and leans into the wind, Gregorious quickly let go of his umbrella and bookcase and leaps to pull her back.  After a moment of confusion, she thanks him, then starts helping the professor pick up his own books and papers now scattered everywhere.   Knowing this woman doesn’t need to be left alone, he invites her to come with him to class.  She agrees, but as soon as he begins his lecture, she slowly rises and then walks out.  Gregorious abruptly leaves his classroom to follow.  But she has disappeared.  The only clue he has is the book she left behind.   This book, which gave her great depression, will lead the professor on an unexpected adventure that challenges and changes his life.

Of course, Night Train to Libson is only a Novel of fiction, but it was based on true events which took place under Portugal’s last dictator, notoriously nicknamed the Butcher.  You’ll have to read to book if you want to know more, or you could rent the movie, which stars actor Jeremy Irons.   But I’ll warn you, it’s a book and a movie that looks deep into the human soul, asking some of the deepest questions of life: What am I doing?  Why am I alive?  Where am I headed?  What is the purpose of my life?  What is worth living and dying for?

Which brings me to ask you today: What kind of hope keeps you going?   To answer this might send you on journey too.   Maybe some unexpected event has caused you to stop and contemplate your own reason for hope?    When Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, he wrote that ‘love hopes all things’  (13.7).  He went on to focus on a particular kind of hope which takes us to the very core of the Christians faith---the hope of the resurrection---Jesus’ resurrection and ours.  

This should remind us that the kind of love that hopes all things is not an abstract, speculative, intangible hope, but it is hope that is particular, pivotal and even peculiar.   It is a hope that firmly sets at the foundation of everything it means to live and to love as a human person.  “What is needed most is not speculative intelligence, wrote the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. “It is not just my passionate mind that has need of a hope of salvation, but it is also my flesh and blood….   Only love can believe in the resurrection, or should I say,  it is love that believes in the resurrection…   Without Christ’s resurrection, we only live in a sort of hell where we are roofed in, and cut off from heaven, and can do nothing but dream.   Without resurrection, Christ can’t help anyone. “   (http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrs-blog/2009/11/27/wittgensteins-thoughts-in-1937-about-god-the-resurrection-of.html).

HOPE IS RECEIVED FROM LOVE

Paul says that the hope he has in Christ’s resurrection is a hope that he has ‘received’ from others.   It was not a discovered hope, as much as it is a delivered hope.  It is not a hope that is handed down from the heights of political opinions, ideas or ideals, but it is a simple hope that was received and handed down by an experience transmitted from love, person to person.  

Is this how all our greatest hopes always comes--- from and through those we love, who love us, and who have taught us how to love?   It is out of such simple, earthy, relational, and particular connections that we always find our greatest resources for hope.  

When counselors work with people who are struggling emotionally, one of the first things they have to do,  beyond hearing about their particular struggle, is to learn about their background, their family history, and what kind of relationships they had growing up.   If our family was loving, we will have the best chance of becoming a loving person.   If our family was responsible and honest, we will have a greater chance of becoming responsible and honest.  And if our family was hopeful about the future---that is if we received hope, we will mostly likely find some way to claim hope, no matter what kind of struggle we face in life.   While there are always exceptions, both for the better and for the worse, the truth remains that who we become is largely determined by how we were raised and what we’ve known.  Of course we can go beyond it, and we might improve on it, but we can’t remove or ignore it.

Paul says the hope he has in Jesus Christ is a hope that he has received from a loving community of faith.   Isn’t this still the best way create hopeful children, have hopeful lives, and to become a hopeful people?   No matter how talented, how smart, how creative, or how religious---to be hopeful people in a world like ours---where there is always death, always destruction, always disease and there is always evil,  requires that we come together and surround ourselves with whom we receive,  learn, and share hope.    We can’t maintain hope on our own.   We certainly can’t create it for ourselves without help.  True hope must be bigger than ourselves, and hope will always connect us to people who have hope in life.   Hope can’t just be my own hope, but hope must be rooted and connected with people create and sustain an atmosphere of hope.

I’m thankful that I received a heritage of hope from my family.  There were surely enough things that worked against hope in my heritage.  My grandfather died at age 35 of acute appendicitis that led to surgery, then infection and then death.   He left my grandmother with 7 children to raise alone, 6 boys and 1 girl.   It was right in the middle of the Great Depression and after her husband died.  Social Services visited my grandmother and told her that due to her hardship, she should move the children into other homes, but she refused.   With her grit, determination, community and faith, Grandma held the family together to live together as a family of love and hope.   

I didn’t always understand all that my family had been up against.   I was too young to grasp all of it, though I did come to ask Grandma “How she did it?”   Her answer was brief, but always said something about having ‘faith in the good Lord’ and you ‘just did it’.  Through the years, I have come to realize even more the many of the implications of undying faith and hopefulness that was passed on to me and to others in our family.    Most recently, in researching my family history, I learned that my grandmother’s mother,  Mammie Summers, was one of the earliest patients to die and be buried at the mental hospital in Morganton in 1910.  She suffered from Post-Partum depression no one really understood how to treat in those days other than with horrifying shock treatments.   After my great grandmother was committed,  my own grandmother had to grow up without her mother.  This made her strength, faith, hope, and love even more amazing and makes me even more appreciative of what she overcame along with the courage and hopefulness, and faith she passed on to me. 

Your story will be different, (I hope so), but the result will not be that different .  It is through the attitudes, the faith, and through the love of family and friends that hope is passed on and received by us,  most often when we don’t even know it.  

HOPE IS REVEALED WITH LOVE

The hope handed down to Paul is personal, but it goes beyond any kind of private hope.    There are two particular kinds of hope revealed in Paul’s discussion.  He speaks of the hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but then, moves on to speak primarily about the coming resurrection of the human person who will one day, be raised to new life, with a new body for living in a brave new world.    

Paul calls this revelation a ‘mystery’ (15.51) and it still is.   But it is a revealed mystery in that we have received as it was revealed through the gospel of Jesus Christ and comes to us through the loving community of faith.   We have received it, but it is still a mystery because we still don’t know how to explain it, nor do we know everything it means.  

The resurrection of the dead, as Paul names it (15.13), is a mystery that goes against everything else we know but it also stands for everything we would ever want to hope could be true.   Who does not want to live?  Who does not want to believe that there is life after death?   Who does not want to believe that in some incredible future moment, those who are buried in the ground will have their DNA spout like a seeds planted in the ground, which is exactly how Paul describes it.  

But here, we need to be reminded again, that this Christian hope of resurrection is not merely a hope of going to heaven when we die, but this is a hope that your flesh, my flesh, our flesh and blood, will one day be transformed and raised to live a human, bodily life on a newly transformed earth (15.21.  Rev. 21).   Who would dare dream of such a hope, if it were not revealed to from God?   It is beyond anything we have ever known or experienced.   Even Christians, still today, have trouble grasping this, for we too mostly think of gaining immortality or of going to heaven when we die.  The mystery Paul speaks of certainly includes heaven, as it comes from ‘heaven’ (15.47), but heaven is just the start, a waiting place Jesus called paradise (Luk 23.43),  where we will wait for what is still to come.  And what is to come is neither the end of this world, nor the end of our flesh, which will one day be transformed and ‘made alive’ (15.22).   Do you have a hope like this?  Do you know that God cares about you, you in your body, not just you as a spirit?   We might get confused about the details, and that’s understandable (I obviously don’t really know what I’m talking about either, but I believe).  What we must do is not miss what kind of realistic ,mysterious, and incredible hope all this talk of resurrection, not just immortality, implies!

In her book, Apostles of Reason, religious historian  Molly Worthen,  tells how two German, Christian thinkers named Karl and Carl, had differing Christian viewpoints about hope, which publically clashed, when Karl Barth, the greatest protestant thinker of the twentieth century, visited the United States.  “At the end of his long 1962 tour, after lectures in Princeton and Chicago, Barth was weary, but he agreed to a luncheon and question-and-answer session at George Washington University in the nation’s capital .”   “On a muggy spring afternoon two hundred religious leaders and a barrage of newspapermen swarmed the room, including a Christian journalist named Carl Henry.  Henry worked in Washington as editor in chief of Christianity Today, the rising “magazine of evangelical conviction” that he had helped found six years earlier.   Henry stated his credentials and, as soon as he could gain the elderly theologian’s attention, and then called out his challenge: “The question, Dr. Barth, concerns the historical factuality of the resurrection of Jesus.”   Gesturing toward the many reporters, he ask: “If these reporters had been covering the news of first-century Judea, would they write up the resurrection? “Was it news in the sense that the man in the street understands news?”

Barth was seventy-five years old, but his hedgelike eyebrows were still black and forbidding beneath his white hair. He quipped back a question to Carl Henry:  “And what of the virgin birth? Would the photographers come and take pictures of it?”  Everyone laughed, except Karl and Carl.  Karl Barth went on to declare that Jesus appeared only to believers, not to the wider world.   Much to Carl Henry’s dissatisfaction, Barth concluded: “Christ’s resurrection is a matter of “personal faith” not (provable) historical fact.  (From Worthen, Molly (2013-10-01). Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Kindle Locations 241-247). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

The Bible gives us a witness to hope, but we still, like Carl Henry, or like doubting Thomas, want to see to believe.   “Blessed are those who believe, without seeing, without proving, only based on their faith and hope.   Make no mistake, Karl Barth believed in the resurrection, but he believed it without any proof, without any pictures, without any photographs or without any news reports.  He believe it because it was a message from love sent personally with love.  

What Karl Barth can still teach us is all is that resurrection, Christ’s and ours, must forever remain a mystery if it is worth believing.   It is only an unsolvable mystery that should give us our greatest hope.  Why is this?   Because this very personal mystery is a hope that comes to us from beyond the world we know, and this is exactly why it remains the cornerstone of all our greatest hope.  Eternal hope cannot come to a temporary world except from the outside,  beyond the way things are, and away from what we now know.   True hope must remain faith without explanation, beyond any theological interpretation,  beyond any imagination or any other hope—because the resurrection is, as Barth has said, is not of human invention or insight, but resurrection is a sheer gift of grace from God alone.   If hope could ever be proven or explained, it ceases to be hope only comes as a gift from God---from and with love. 

Isn’t it interestingly how last year, German scientists, for the first time, landed a spaceship on a comet moving 40,000 miles an hour through space?  It wasn’t a perfect landing.  It took 10 years for the spaceship to reach the comet, and because of the landing position, the fear is that the battery will not receive enough solar power for long to transmit signals back to earth.   That does matter, because the Scientist were still filled with hope about the event.  Why did these Scientist ever attempt such a feat?   Their answer was that they wanted to learn something about the earth, about life, which could only be understood from beyond the earth.  

Perhaps unbeknownst to them, these Scientist are following a path religious believers and seekers have always taken.  We can’t find our greatest hope or understanding for life within ourselves.   We have to look beyond---it has to be revealed to us.   This is what makes resurrection so vital to everything elese.   Without the promise of hope in resurrection, the story of Jesus is just a another story that will eventually be ‘told’ out.  But because this is a story about our own future beyond what we now know,  it substantiates everything else we believe about faith, forgiveness and the future (15: 13-18).  Resurrection give us hope, because it is part of our own story that is yet to be told.   It this story that personally speaks to each and every one of us, addressing our greatest fears, worries, and questions, challenging our with a love that radiates and reveals the hope of all hope into our hearts.

HOPE IS REALIZED FOR LOVE 

In the 1990’s movie Flat liners, the main characters are 5 medical students, experimenting to learn or prove whether or not there is life after death.   They put themselves into coma like states, for longer and longer periods, putting their brains to sleep for up to 12 minutes, and then bringing themselves back to see whether or not they saw anything while on edge of death.  As a result, like in real life, these ‘mad scientists’ ended up just as confused and conflicted about their questions and beliefs at the end of their experiment, as they were before ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatliners).

We must not leave this place more confused than when we came.  Hope comes to us, not just so we will have it for only for ourselves, but hope comes to us so that we will pass it on to those around us, and keep giving a gift of faith, hope and love to the world.  Paul concludes: “Therefore, my beloved,  since you have hope, that is, “be steadfast, unmovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”  (15:58).

Admiral Jim Stockdale, was the highest-ranking US military officer in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp during the Vietnam War.   He was tortured over 20 times during his 8 years of imprisonment. 

        How did he survive?  Writer Jim Collins once asked him.

         Stockdale answered,  “I never gave up faith in the end of the story….” 

        “Who didn’t make it out”  Stockdale was then asked. 

        “The optimists.” 

        “The optimist?”  What do you mean?

 The optimist were the ones who said, “We’ll be out by Christmas!”  But Christmas came and they weren’t out.  “We’ll be out by Easter!”  but Easter came and they still weren’t out.  “We’ll we be out by Thanksgiving”, but those days would come and go and they would finally die of a broken heart.
        ”I didn’t confuse having faith with being optimistic.  Only faith prevails. “

(As quoted in “Contextualizing the Gospel, by Brian L. Harbour,  Smyth & Helwys, 2011, p. 210-211).

Only one comment needs to accompany the Admiral’s prevailing faith.  It is only a faith that comes from love, with love to prevail for love that maintains hope in all things.   The only hope that will survive the worst we can imagine,  comes from the loving Lord, who prevailed over death,  is the only one who has the right to be the LORD over everything in our lives.  In Jesus too, we can have, unshakeable, unmoveable hope.  It is love that brings us this love that keeps hope in anything, in everything, and in all things.   Amen.