Hope: Psalm 139:1-10 and Philippians 3:17-4:1

Click HERE to hear audio of this service at Hillcrest Covenant Church (the mp3 is about 9MB).

This past week I finished my summer working as a chaplain at MacNeal Hospital in the Chicago suburbs. There are many things that I learned, but one in particular kept reoccurring.

Each of the chaplains at the hospital is assigned particular floors on which to spend most of their time talking with patients. The floors are very different. One chaplain had the Intensive Care Unit, another had the Mother/Baby Unit, and so on. I had the Transitional Care Unit. What made my unit unique was that most of my patients were fairly healthy compared to the patients on the other units. Most of my patients were elderly people who had come in for a knee or hip replacement, or perhaps had fallen. They were very talkative and we were able to visit for long periods of time.

As I spoke with patients I learned that they were often lonely and extremely worried and uncomfortable with losing their independence. In many cases they believed that their life was behind them. They wondered why they were even still alive or what possibly they could do to help their loneliness subside. Many were pessimistic and spoke as if they had nothing to look forward to.

On one particularly difficult day I had talked with several patients that had expressed these feelings. They were depressed, cynical, and void of any hope. They did not want to die because they were scared to. . . and they did not want to live because they felt they had no purpose. I spoke with them and attempted to comfort them, but I left feeling that I was accomplishing little.

Frustrated and saddened by the day, I reluctantly visited one last patient. I walked into the room and introduced myself. The patient was sitting in a chair, but had her head dropped. I thought to myself, here we go again. But something was different. This patient, Dorothy, popped her head up quickly with a warm and beautiful smile. As we talked I learned that she had been in the hospital for 2 months, that she had been scheduled to go home last week, but fell as she was getting ready, that she had had polio and nearly died as a young girl, that she had lost vision in one of her eyes, that all of her friends had passed away, that she had no children and her husband was deceased, that her extended family all lived far away, and the difficulties continued.

But more than all the other patients Dorothy smiled and laughed and never sounded as though she was complaining.

Dumbfounded, I wondered how Dorothy, a woman who had endured more difficulties than all the other patients combined could have such joy in the face of such hardship. So I asked, “what gives you such happiness despite all this difficulty.” She looked me straight in the eye, with a confidence that only 90+ years of living could bring, and said, “God does.” It was as if she had never considered feeling any other way.

As we talked I learned that Dorothy had a deep passion for God and firmly believed that her life on earth was simply a temporary visit. She understood that she was a child of God and that God had prepared a place for her with Him in heaven. She was not afraid of dying. She was not disappointed with the things that life had thrown at her. She didn’t cry out in anger because she had been wronged by the world.

Dorothy’s hope was not in this world, her hope was in heaven. She did not expect to get her happiness from the things here on earth. . . she truly understood that every good and perfect thing comes only from God above.

Both of our scriptures this morning point to the hope that we have as Christians. A hope that transcends anything that worldly things can provide us. A hope that is truly unique to the Christian faith.

In Psalm 139, our first reading, the psalmist is proclaiming God’s amazing nature and what it means to be God’s creation. Beautifully made. Artfully crafted. Brilliantly conceived. And the psalmist continues by pointing out God’s presence wherever we are. . . but most importantly the psalmist points out God’s amazing interest in us. How He has made each one of us unique and special. . . and how he cares deeply about who we are. He knows those things about us that no one else knows. He understands our fears. He sees our insecurities. He watches our failures. He witnesses our sins. He rejoices in our joys.

And the remarkable thing is that he never leaves us. He stays right with us where we are. He loves us regardless of anything we could do. We are his creation and there is nothing that we can do to prevent God from loving us.

God’s love offers us hope in a fallen world. As we are surrounded by violence and evil on the news and in our own lives, we are left wondering how can we hope, what good can come of any of this. . . but God continually knocks on the door to our hearts. . . We are His creation. . . He loves us deeply. . . He wants in. . . and He wants to give us hope.

The world in which we live cannot promise us these things.

I have always believed that each of us has a God-shaped hole in us. We may not know it, but it is there. Each of us has a yearning for the divine. To experience unconditional, authentic, and pure love. To experience something that is beyond earth and that ignites our heart and enflames our passions.

C.S. Lewis, a great Christian thinker, suggested that all our desires, all our human appetites, are reminders of our ultimate hunger for God. Our sexual desires, our food desires, our desire for meaning and purpose, our work desires, all point to a deeper longing to feel God’s embrace, God’s gentle caress.

I think that in times of sadness, hurt, and pain. . . we desire something authentic and true. . . we naturally desire something that will give us joy and peace. And out of this desire to find true hope we continually try things of this world to fill our God shaped hole. But nothing fits. It is like sticking square pegs in a round hole. Nothing quite fills the hole. Many people will try drugs, or drink alcohol excessively, or incessantly seek after money. . . all thinking that they will find peace. . . some abuse sex, or obsess over personal achievement. . . these things may make us feel good for a while, but the truth is that no matter what we try we never feel a long-lasting sense of peace.

Nothing in this world is perfect enough. . . no one in this world knows us well enough. . . to fill that hole in our hearts.

God gives us this hope though. We must open ourselves up and allow God’s goodness and peace to fill our hole. We must claim and take rest in the hope that comes with believing that we are children of a loving and wonderful God.

And we must maintain hope that God has secured for us a better and perfect place with Him in heaven. And if we take comfort in this hope and claim it, it can be unbelievably powerful.

A number of years ago researchers performed an experiment to see the effect hope has on those undergoing hardship. Two sets of laboratory rats were placed in separate tubs of water. The researchers left one set in the water and found that within an hour they had all drowned. The other rats were periodically lifted out of the water and then returned. When that happened, the second set of rats swam for over 24 hours. Why? Not because they were given a rest, but because they suddenly had hope!

Those animals somehow hoped that if they could stay afloat just a little longer, someone would reach down and rescue them. If hope holds such power for tiny rodents, how much greater should this effect be on our lives?

In the Philippians passage that Kassi read this morning, Paul says that “our commonwealth is in heaven.” By commonwealth he simply means our citizenship. Paul wants his readers to understand the power of Christian hope and that although they may be legal citizens of Rome or whatever country they live in, their true citizenship belongs in heaven. Their hope does not lay in the things of their world, but in heaven with God.

We must learn to live in both realms. But although we spend a lot of time dwelling here on earth, we must always remember that our true citizenship belongs in heaven with God. It is by God’s side that we will find true fulfillment.

In a speech to a group of students at St. Andrews University, the writer J.M. Barrie quoted a letter which Captain Robert Scott of the Antarctic wrote to him, when he and his expedition were in the hours before their death: “We are dwelling in a very comfortless spot. . . We are in a desperate state – feet frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and our cheery conversation.”

The secret in Captain Scott’s letter was that happiness depends not on things or on places, but always on people. If we are with the right person, nothing else matters; and if we are not with the right person, nothing can make up for that absence. In the presence of Jesus Christ, the greatest of all friends is with us; nothing can separate us from that presence, and so nothing can take away our joy.

Do we truly understand how powerful this hope is? It is unbelievable. Once God comes and dwells within is, our world is expanded exponentially. Our hurts, our frustrations, our anger, our sadness begin to pale in comparison to the awesome power of God’s love and his unending desire to see us dwell with Him in heaven. Our perspectives are changed.

The movie Amistad illustrates the power of this hope well. Amistad tells the story of a group of African slaves who seize control of their slave-ship and demand to be returned to their homeland. The captain instead takes them to an American seaport where they are imprisoned.

As they await a judge's verdict on their destiny, one of the men, Yamba, sits in a corner of the prison cell thumbing through the pages of a bible he found.
Cinque, the leader of the group, looks over and says, "You don't have to pretend to be interested in that. Nobody's watching but me."

After a brief moment Yamba looks up. "I'm not pretending. I'm beginning to understand it" he says. He cannot read the writing - English is foreign to him - but he can make sense of the pictures. When Cinque comes over to see for himself Yamba explains the story in their native language. "Their people have suffered more than ours" he says. Showing Cinque a picture of Jews being attacked by lions, he continues, "Their lives were full of suffering."

Then Yamba flips the page and points to a picture of the baby Jesus, crowned with a halo of light, "Then he was born and everything changed."
Cinque asks, "Who is he?"

Yamba replies that he doesn't know, but that the child must be special. He moves through the pictures of Jesus. He points to a picture of Jesus riding on a donkey, praised by onlookers. A golden orb forms a halo around Jesus. "Everywhere he goes" says Yamba, "he is followed by the sun."

Picture after picture the same theme emerges. Light surrounds Jesus as he heals people with his hands, as he protects an outcast woman, as he embraces children.
But this is not the end of the story. "Something happened" says Yamba. "He was captured, accused of some crime."

Cinque shakes his head back and forth and insists, "He must have done something."
Yamba says, "Why? What did we do?... Do you want to see how they killed him?"
Yamba is now getting very emotional. Cinque reminds him, "This is just a story, Yamba."

Yamba shakes his head in protest. This man's death was real. "But look" he says. "That's not the end of it. His people took his body down from…" Yamba pauses and draws a cross in the air.

"They took him into a cave. They wrapped him in cloth, like we do. They thought he was dead, but he appeared before his people again…and he spoke to them. Then, finally, he rose into the sky."

"This is where the soul goes when you die here. This is where we're going when they kill us." Stroking a picture that depicts heaven, Yamba concludes, "It doesn't look so bad."

These slaves in Amistad began to understand the hope that Jesus Christ brought to the world.

Dorothy, the patient I visited in the hospital understood this hope.

When Dorothy left the hospital, I had never seen quite a sight. Doctors, nurses, other patients. . . even custodians, food service workers, basically everyone that she had come into contact with came to see this little frail woman. She had something about her that others were attracted to. She had this joy about her that made everyone she encountered feel more at peace. That even though things don’t always go so well, there is something better to come.

I knew where Dorothy’s strength came from. I knew what gave her such joy. . . and she shared what she knew with everyone around her. . . and it had an impact. Others wanted what she had.

Everyone has a God shaped hole in them. Most don’t know how to fill it up. As Christians who have found hope and the perfect peg that fills our hole. . . we should make an effort to live our lives in a way that reveals that hope to others. We should acknowledge our citizenship here on earth, but we should live a life that reveals that our true citizenship lies in heaven. A life that clearly demonstrates that we know that the things of this world will never give us the joy that we yearn for, but that we must look to God for the hope that our hearts’ desire.