Sermon 29th April 2012

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches based on the reading from Revelation 21, verses 1-8.

HOPE

At the end of this sermon I am going to draw a link between the new church kitchen over there [St P’s: St Saviours’ new church kitchen] – at least I still thinkof it as new! – our bathroom at home and the theme of Hope which is today’s sermon title. So at least I might keep your attention as you wonder for the next fifteen minutes or so, “How on earth is he going to do that?!”

But how I’d like to start is to ask everyone to close their eyes for a while……..

…and then quietly just imagine that the limits of this building are in fact all we know, so that when you open your eyes when I tell you…in a few moments….what you will be seeing is your entire world.

Keep your eyes shut just now but what will you see when you open them? You’ll look around and see a place of peace and not a little beauty, filled with a lovely mix of people. It’s light; you might even see a glimpse of greenery or blue sky or hints of cloud. There is a small side room where food and drink might come from, the hall [St P: church] has spaces going off it so there is variation. There

is teaching to exercise the mind, music to lift the soul, it can be arranged [St P: there is some space] to allow children to run around and there is plenty of space for people to talk and talk. It’s not a perfect image of course, as we’d have to think about places to sleep and so on but it will do.

So open your eyes now and look up and then around you for a few seconds…..

I wonder if you’d agree with me that it’s not a bad place to be, but it does have its limitations doesn’t it? ……Imagine that in fact this was all we did have…… Where would we cycle or run, how would we travel and see new places and new people, how could we ever stand on a mountain top and see stunning, snow-covered mountains for 60 miles in each direction? If this was all we were told we had, wouldn’t we always have that niggling deep desire that there was something beyond these walls, that there was more to life than this? It’s not a bad place, some of it is pretty good, but surely something more lies beyond?

I wonder whether Hope is a deeply felt desire, tinged with an element of possibility, that the limitations of what we see around us can be broken through and that there is something better beyond what we have and see…

Hope often arises of course in the limitations of suffering. When things are bad, particularly if they involve pain and suffering of any kind, then hope arises that improvements will be made, that things will get better, that pain will be relieved. Suffering is often a fine sharpener of Hope.

Suffering of course can arise on all kinds of levels. From the personal, physical suffering of a long term illness or disability for example, or the deeply personal emotional suffering of a baby lost in childbirth or a relationship broken or the death of a loved one, to - at one other extreme – the national suffering of a country torn apart by genocide or the complex political suffering, for example, of

a city or a country or even a whole landmass so torn apart that it must be divided by a political or even a physical wall. Think Rwanda for genocide or Belfast, Israel/Palestine or the Iron Curtain for the city, country or landmass divided by a physical wall. Think South Africa for the political wall of apartheid. In all of these situations, the personal, the national and the political, people have looked up at the limitations they find themselves in and they have found from somewhere the strength to Hope.

St Paul knew suffering of course and you just may at this point have some words vaguely forming in the back of your mind that we might even be challenged to “rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character and character produces hope.” Thankyou Paul for breaking it down in that way and helping us to see how Hope can be formed in the crucible of suffering – find the strength to deal with your suffering, to persevere and you might find that actually you grow in your character, that is your maturity and your ability to deal with things and from that seedbed might spring Hope, that deep desire tinged with an element of real

possibility that the limitations caused by your suffering can be broken.

The scoffers of course are the other voices around, those that counsel hopelessness. Give up they might say, accept your limitations. There is nothing that can be done.

Against that, Hope, as they say, springs eternal. St Paul would go on as he does in that Romans’ passage, to say that “Hope does not disappoint us” “because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” We’ll come on to specifically Christian Hope in a moment but everywhere you look you can see this principle at work, that the scoffers are not correct,

that even the bleakest of situations, the most apparently hopeless of limiting circumstances, can be broken through.

At the national and political level, who would ever have imagined that the brutal wall of apartheid could ever so dramatically come crashing down in South Africa or the decades of separation caused by the Iron Curtain in Europe the same?

In a more extreme example, who would imagine that anyone could find Hope after the horrors of genocide in Rwanda but Google “Hope in Rwanda after genocide” and you will see plenty of evidence that there is. I have brought just one example which is an article from something called the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania which states that today, 17 years after

the slaughter, Rwanda is considered one of the safest African countries. I know these issues can be more complex than simple slogans but it would have been very difficult to imagine that seventeen years ago..

On the personal level, until we moved offices recently and no longer had desks of our own – it’s the new thing called “hot desking” if you haven’t come across it - I had a picture on my desk at work of a Frenchman called Philippe Croizon swimming the channel. He did in around 13 hours. Very respectable indeed. But this becomes a story ridden with Hope when you learn that the reason that in the picture you see that he has to breathe all the way across through a facemask and snorkel tube is that he lost both his arms and both his legs in an accident so he swims with specially adapted prosthetic flippers and his little stumps of arms…

I heard a similar story talking to someone on a train on the way to the Olympic Park a few weeks ago.. ..we were talking about the Paralympics. He had been scuba diving, he said, in the Philippines recently and the person who seemed to enjoy the diving most and seemed to get most out of it in fact had cerebral palsy. But he could get into a wetsuit with air tanks and get under the water and under

that water he began to break free from his limitations.

The whole history of Paralympic sport of course is a triumph of Hope over physical limitations.

And what of specifically Christian Hope? Well, no wonder Cameron has planned for at least two sermons on the topic in this series, there is potentially so much to be said, but I just offer these thoughts arising from today’s New Testament reading.

The vision in Revelation is of a completely renewed heaven and earth….note not just a new earth but a completely new heaven and earth. The way I read this is in the context of the passage is that the relationship between heaven and earth is to be so fundamentally changed that both must be completely renewed. The hope is that no longer will we be bound by the limitations caused by the

separation of earth and heaven, if you like the wall or the apartheid that divides mankind on earth from God in heaven. That relationship between God and man will be so restored that “the dwelling of God is going to be with men and he will live with them.” Forgive the male specific language. That language is of course not remotely the full meaning as the writer goes on to say that mankind “will be

God’s people and God himself will be with them and be their God.” Can you sense the limitations of the way we currently relate to the God who we might only catch glimpses of, broken down, and the fullness of that relationship with God restored and as it should be.

And the vision is that this full and limitless relationship will take place within a place, a time and space if you like, that itself is completely restored. Everything will be made new….. “Write this down” the writer is urged specifically by the figure of God in the vision, “for these words can be trusted and are true.” “I am making all things new.” They are being spoken by the one who was there at the beginning and will be there at the end, who is the Alpha and the Omega. Don’t even worry, He seems to me to be saying, about the perfectly respectable scientific predictions that we hear quite often at the moment that one day the entire universe will collapse back in on itself and all stars burn out, whether that is in billions or trillions of years. I will be there. I was there at the beginning and I

will still be there at the End. Even the limitations of the whole of created matter, as we currently perceive it cannot hold me nor ultimately, prevent or destroy my relationship with you.

And within this place, what you might describe in words that would have been full of meaning for first century Jewish Christians as “the new Jerusalem”, (replacing the idea of a city where there is a Temple where before then people might meet with God), what of the suffering that so imposes limitations on our human experience? Well the Christian hope, says the writer, is this: that there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, because the old order, the old way of things, the old limitations, the old inevitabilities of this life have passed away. They have been completely replaced and made new. It is done. I invite you now to drink from the water of life, not the water of suffering anddeath.

Pause…

For me there is great power for Hope in these words, and in particular because they themselves are not limited. Inherent in these words, for me anyway, is the idea that hope is not just for this life, hope is not bounded by the limitations of this life with all its imperfections. Is there hope in this life for justice? Well yes, possibly, if you are fortunate enough to be able to bring your cause successfully

before a human court in the time you have available. And if not?

….But bring in the idea of God and you open up the hope for perfect justice.

Is there hope for equality of opportunity and development of human potential? Well yes if you are fortunate enough to live in appropriate prosperity and at an appropriate time (and thank God that there are those passionately committed to ensuring opportunities are available to as many as possible to live fulfilled lives). And if not?

But bring in the idea of a God who fully restores everything and yes, you open up the hope of perfect opportunity for all.

Is there hope for life beyond our sickness and death? Well yes, if you think of a God who has actually broken the power of death.

And how credible are these Christian ideas? And what should our response to them be now and how relevant are they in the modern world?

Well, for me, Christian Hope is not some airy-fairy, silly, fluffy sort of naïve optimism in the face of stark reality. Quite the opposite. It is formed in the sheer, real brutality of first century torture and death by crucifixion and then the experiences and accounts of the many who saw and heard and touched Jesus, free from the limitations even of death itself and appearing to them bodily resurrected from the dead.

In this book “Surprised by Hope” which Cameron gave me 6 months ago when I was licensed as a Reader, Bishop Tom Wright argues that the vision in Revelation of the new heaven and the new earth is not a vision of a place where we might all leave earth to go to as disembodied souls when we die, the sort of account we might often think of as the Christian hope of heaven, but rather it shows how God intends to do for the whole of creation with its entire history what he has done in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that is to make it new.

So what is our response to these ideas of Christian Hope? If God is going to do all that should we not just put our feet up and do anything we like until God eventually sorts the entire mess out. No! I don’t know if you ever read the story of Robinson Crusoe in which he tries to tell Man Friday the Christian story of forgiveness and Man Friday says great, I can do anything I want as God is going to forgive me in the end! No…read again the stark warning about God’s abhorrence of deliberate sinfulness at the end of that Revelation passage this morning and you just know that is not the way it works. For me it is the same with hope. For those whose hearts and minds have seen the enormity of the Hope that Christian faith brings, it seems to me rather we are compelled to try to do what we can to start to bring that sense of hope about here and now. No wonder that Christian people so often feel compelled to compassion…..how can we do anything else with the hope of glory in our hearts?

And finally how relevant might these Christian ideas of hope be in our modern world? There is so much that could be said about this as I hope I have given just hints of but for now I offer just two stories.

The first is from Marcus Brigstocke, the comedian, who wrote recently on the whole topic of religious belief saying essentially that he finds so much of these God ideas difficult but when his close friend died suddenly and relatively young recently he so much wanted to have hope that his friend James had not just gone and a hope that he could pass on to James’ young son.

And the second concerns a man in his forties who was helping us recently to paint our bathroom at home. He’s one of the men who worked on that beautiful new kitchen down at St Saviour’s a few years back. Finishing off our bathroom a few months ago one Saturday, there were just the two of us in the house, me downstairs working or reading and him upstairs working. And he came down

towards the end of his shift to clean his brushes and popped his head in and said “If you don’t mind me asking, you go to church and that don’t you? So why do you think we are all here?” and for twenty minutes or so we had this great, sympathetic conversation. I would love one day to talk to him again. It felt like the kind of conversation that could easily have gone on for a long time. I am almost certain that he does not normally attend a church. And back upstairs he went to finish off. But when he finally came down, ready to leave, he put his head through the door again and said what I thought was one of the most simply profound things I have heard for a long time,

“You’ve got to have Hope, intcha?”

Amen to that!