The 6th Sunday of Easter - Speaking and Acting on the Hope Within You

From today's epistle reading comes this quote:  "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence."

In seminary when we were preparing preach our extemporaneous sermons with only a half-hour to prepare--and groaning about how hard it was to get something intelligent and meaningful organized in so short a time--our professor paraphrased this quote from the first letter from Peter:  "You must always be ready to speak of the hope that is in you."

How important is the word "hope" in our scripture?  It appears 45 times in the 27 books of the New Testament mostly in the letters written to the early churches.. St. Paul included it as one of the top three enduring facets of our relationship to God (faith, hope and love). 

In the first letter Peter wrote to the Christian communities in Asia Minor, he spoke about "a living hope" given to Christians by "the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."  In the passage we heard this morning Peter claims that our baptism results in our being saved by God.  God wants us to live in such a way that our conscience is clear, and baptism is our path to that goal. Now God can clearly understand our desire for salvation, because the resurrected Jesus has returned to the Godhead and all the powers of heaven are his.

The theme of hope can be discerned in the reading from John’s gospel today as well.  Jesus, in this passage from John's gospel, marks a promise to the disciples not to leave them in an orphaned state.  He promises an Advocate, the Spirit who will encourage them, represent the truth about God and dwell within them.  He speaks to them, as a group, whose hope is for life eternal.  He assures them, ". . . Because I live, you also will live."

So hope—in the sense these readings portray—centers around Jesus—especially his overcoming death.  By his overcoming death, Jesus offers a path through the fear that our lives with their pain and suffering and their transient joys are all that we can expect.  Death isn't the end.  Union with God in the joy that comes from living in eternal presence of God's love becomes our hope.  The popular focus on reports of near death experiences today comes, I believe, from our need to seek the same reassurance Jesus understood the disciples to need.

But the other part of our "living hope" should focus on our lives and our world today.  In two weeks, we will celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit into the lives of the disciples and, by extension, into our lives as well.  The Feast of Pentecost will highlight the part of hope which focuses on our tasks as believers in the "meantime"--the time between when Jesus returned to the Godhead and when we believe he will come again to establish fully the reign of God with peace and justice and freedom from the oppression of sin--other people's and our own!  Liturgically we call this Ordinary Time (when our “color” in worship becomes green.)

Our "living hope" in Ordinary Time becomes what we pray for and what we work for.  Yes, we long for salvation, but there should be much more to our hope than that.  We may disagree about the means, but our prayers of petition and intercession and our actions that follow from these prayers should reflect our hope for lives in which God's love for us and God's compassion for those in need can be fully seen.  This means holding up to God the concerns from our lives, from the lives of those we love and from the lives of those we only read about in the newspaper or hear about through other media.  This means taking action about these concerns as well.

There’s a litany from “A Wee Worship Book,” created by The Iona Community in Scotland, which encapsulates this “living hope.”  I’d like to close by sharing it with you—and your response is “Christ is coming to make all things new.”

“Among the poor, among the proud,

Among the persecuted,

Among the privileged,

Christ is coming to make all things new.

In the private house, in the public place,

In the wedding feast,

In the judgment hall,

Christ is coming to make all things new.

With a gentle touch, with an angry word,

With a clear conscience,

With burning love,

Christ is coming to make all things new.

That the kingdom might come, that the world might believe,

That the powerful might stumble,

That the hidden might be seen,

Christ is coming to make all things new.

Within us, without us, behind us, before us,

In this place, in every place,

For this time, for all time,

Christ is coming to make all things new.”

So with the “living hope” given to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ may we join with Christ in working to make all things new.  Amen.