PATIENCE WITH THE LAMP LIT

Patience with the Lamp Lit (May 12, 2002)

"So that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…." Ephesians 1:18

Ascension Sunday is the Sunday in which the Church remembers our Lord's departure after the forty days of his resurrection. In the resurrection appearances Jesus had shown his power but it was to a limited number. Now, in order to be with more people he had to leave the ones who had seen him in his resurrection body.

As he goes, he sends his disciples out with the message that they shall be his witnesses to all the world, beginning at Jerusalem, then Judea, and to the uttermost part of the earth, and he promises to send the Holy Spirit who will make Him known. What was shared with only a few will now be shared with innumerable saints of every tribe and tongue and clime, of every land.

Partings are often sad, but the remarkable thing about the story of Jesus' parting from his disciples is that the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy, praising and blessing God. The reason is hope. St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you."

Hope has been defined as "patience with the lamp lit."

It seems we've never been more in need of this "patience with the lamp lit" than now. I've always believed you're as young as your hope. There are many people of so-called advanced years who strike us as people of a youthful outlook. And what is at the core of that youthful outlook: a positive frame of mind toward the future, a solid hope. And we've all known people who are "old before their time", who are much older than their chronological years suggest, and invariably that is because they do not live with any hopes. Their lives are filled with chronic complaining.

Hope is one of the three great virtues of the Christian life. It is always, it seems to me, in too short supply. There are always plenty of people who will be ready to tell you it's time to turn off the lamp.

One of the greatest pessimists was the German philosopher Nietzsche. He said, "Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man." How about that! Aldous Huxley said, "Maybe this world is another planet's hell."

Two years ago I visited Moustiere in southern France where the writer Albert Camus is buried in a modest grave. Camus said: "he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool."

Christian hope is centered in God - in the final triumph of God, in the completion of God's redemptive work in Christ. Christian hope has its core in the message of scripture - from the story of Abraham and Sarah who trusted in God's faithfulness and who placed their hope in the promises of God. According to the letter to the Hebrews, Abraham and Sarah went out "hoping against hope."

From the prophets who placed their hope in a time of universal peace when nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and justice and peace prevail in all creation, right on through the New Testament, which is filled with expectation. Jesus taught us to pray "thy kingdom come", St. Paul spoke of the "God of hope" (Romans 15:13), and the last words of the Bible are "come, Lord Jesus".

There is one bogus form of Christian hope on the market which has claimed a lot of attention. It is the form of hope which feeds on the fears of people. It sets an exact timetable of coming awful events and talks about a coming nuclear holocaust and a terrible Armageddon and out of this terrible tribulation believers will be "raptured", that is, rescued from a world plunging toward destruction.

There's a lot of this out there these days, taking a few verses of the Bible entirely out of context, manipulating them, reducing the life and ministry of Jesus himself to something which hardly matters. The Princeton theologian Daniel Migliore calls this stuff "apocalyptic terrorism". It has no theology of the cross, no identification with human suffering, and it is entirely self centered as well as complacent.

Contrast that to the hope we see in the last words of Jesus at the Ascension. "You shall be my witnesses, in Jerusalem, and the uttermost parts of the earth." "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." There's nothing there about running or escaping from the world, but just the opposite, going into the world, with the most uplifting and hope-filled message ever proclaimed.
The signature of New Testament hope, as Daniel Miglore says, is not the "rapture" but the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.

The resurrection is God's almighty Yes to all that is negative in our world. We don't need to come to church to be reminded of all the negativity. We see it nightly on our television news reports. The hatred and violence, the indiscriminate killings, the ravages of AIDS, the threat of terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problems of the Middle East. . In all this and more the world seems to say a mighty No to the future, but the resurrection, which is entirely the work of God, is a mighty Yes.

As we heard last week, Jesus says "I will not leave you orphaned". I will not desert you.

God has given us wonderful gifts to aid us in our hope. First, he has given us the Holy Spirit: the comforter, the advocate, the upbuilder, the strengthener of our lives. Next week is Pentecost, the birthday of the church, in which we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit.

God has given us also the church to the work of Christ in the world. The church has its hope to which it is called, as Paul wrote to the Ephesians. One of the best things to build up hope is to have something to do. The church has plenty to do: to announce the gospel, the good news, to work for justice, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We are not called to drop everything and get on a one-way ticket to the Rapture. We are instead to "keep awake" and "be alert" for signs of God's work in the world.

And of course another great gift is that we have one another. The easiest way for people to become cynical about the future is to pull into themselves, absent themselves from others, crawl into a shell. Human beings bear a consciousness of something beyond the immediate, but we need to be with one another to pull that out of ourselves. Loneliness, we should remember, is not the same thing as solitude. God can turn embittered loneliness into profitable solitude.

When the psalmist says "why art thou cast down O my soul and why art thou disquieted within me?" It was because of loneliness. He then says, "hope thou in God." God is always near and available. Faith in and fellowship with God, nourished in the community of faith and with other people, overcomes our feelings of hopelessness.

Finally, I want to say that the essential strength of the Christian Life of hope is that it looks forward to a life to come. That sounds strange, but it is true. It sounds escapist, but it is not. If you believe that this is all there is, and then things take a bad turn as they often do, what resources do you have for overcoming? Not much. But if you believe that life has all its problems and tribulations but there is another to come and that we are thus called to live as nobly and sacrificially as possible in this one until that time when we see Him face to face, then we have all the reason in the world to live in hope.

C. S. Lewis wrote in Christian Behavior that a continual looking forward to the next world is one of the things Christians are meant to do, not as escapism or wishful thinking. If you read Christian history, he said, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, the Pilgrims who set out from Leyden, Holland, to come to the new world, all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were preoccupied by Heaven. Then C. S. Lewis says this: "It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in", aim at earth and you will get neither."

With eyes wide open, that you might know what is the hope to which he has called you. Patience - with the lamp lit!