From Sampler to Sower

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #5: If you give up on hope, then you’ll be happy.

Sermon in a Sentence: Biblical hope does not disappoint because it is grounded in a God who does not fail.

Text(s): Ecclesiastes 9:3-5, Isaiah 38:18, Romans 5:1-5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty:8 of 10; This week’s lesson incorporated several videos which all had to be cued at the right time, plus shooting the best (and most complicated) of our Mythbusters videos.

Message Summary:

This week we wrap up our Mythbusters series with a sermon on hope. Originally we were going to complete the trilogy of faith, hope and love, but a couple of snow days and the fact that our next series is set to coincide with Lent means we have to cut it short and wrap up this week.

We began by showing a video from eleven72 called Change IS Possible.  It features a guy singing about hope.  Only he realizes as he sings that some people never change, and hoping they will really is meaningless.  The song ends with the line: “There is no hope.  Give up on hope.  If you give up on hope then you’ll be happy. Or whatever.” The video closes with text on the screen encouraging viewers not to give up on hope, but we made sure to stop the video before that.  Our fifth myth was the closing line of the song – “If you give up on hope, then you’ll be happy.”

Of course our students laughed at the video.  But we pointed out that while that line sounds laughably cynical, the fact is people buy into that myth every day.  How do we get to such a place in life?

People give up on hope when they are tired of being disappointed.

To illustrate that fact we looked at one of the most optimistic speeches in recent political history.  Barack Obama ran on the theme of hope.  One of the iconic images of the 2008 election is the red and blue “Hope” poster by Shepard Fairey.  You know the one.  The message of hope carried Obama to the presidency.

And perhaps the most pivotal moment in the campaign came on January 8, 2008.  Obama had surprised many pundits with a win in the Iowa caucuses. Attention was focused on what would happen in New Hampshire.  Despite Obama’s hard fought campaign for that state’s primary, Hillary Clinton won, and many wondered if Iowa was just a fluke.

The night of the primary, as it became clear Hillary Clinton had won, Obama delivered one of the best speeches in modern politics.  It was so inspiring, some artists have taken the words of that speech and made it into a song.  Here it is:

What I found most interesting, however, was watching how people responded to that message.

Some people were profoundly inspired and deeply moved by his words.  Note all the celebrities in the video who were moved by the optimism of “Yes We Can” to lend their support to the Obama campaign.  Or look at the legions of people, especially young people, around the nation who signed up to volunteer for the Obama campaign.

Yet others were skeptical, even cynical about Obama’s words.  They called him naive and inexperienced, ignorantly optimistic.  A little over a month later, Hillary Clinton responded to the optimism of the Obama campaign with vitriol that very well may have cost her the primary.  Listen to her reaction to Obama’s message of hope as she speaks in Rhode Island:

I was especially struck by her comment “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions . . .”

In other words, she’s explaining to the world that if Barack Obama was a little bit older, and a little more experienced, he would have given up on hope by now.  Sounds kinda like the song.  There is no hope.  Give up on hope.  If you give up on hope then you’ll be happy.

Of course, Hillary Clinton isn’t the first to sound this cynical note.

Winston Churchill is said to have said “Any man who is under 30 and is not a liberal has no heart. Any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.”  Now, we’re not sure if he ever really said this.  If he did, he wasn’t the first.  It’s a common political idea – that when you’re young and idealistic, you ought to be optimistic.  But once you get older and learn a little better, you’ll realize the best course is to give up on hope.

And Churchill wasn’t the first either.  Take a look at Ecclesiastes 9:3-5

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope —even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. (NIV)

While people are alive, they can afford to have hope.  Of course, they are also filled with madness and delusions.  Eventually everyone dies, and hope dies with them.

Or look at Isaiah 38:18: “For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise; those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. “  Those who go down to death (the pit) cannot hope.

Everyone seems to realize that eventually hope dies.  And if you’ll just live long enough, you’ll figure that out too.

And is it any wonder?  After all look at the things in which people put their hope.

• Some hope for pleasure, for happiness.  Yeah, the daily grind is a bit hopeless, but we can live for the weekend.  Only pleasure is a matter of diminishing returns.  The last time is never as pleasurable as the first.
• Others hope for position.  They want to accomplish something, make something of themselves, get somewhere in life.  Only in today’s economy, we realize that positions can easily be lost.  Or worse yet, we could get trapped in an unfulfilling dead end job.
• Sometimes we put our hope in possessions.  If only I had enough, then I’d be happy.  It’s the same misplaced hope of the prodigal son from a few weeks back.  “If only I had property, I’ll be happy.”  And when that failed, he said “If only I had some spending cash.”  And then “If only I had my own place.”  The problem with stuff though is you can never have enough.
• Sometimes we put our hope in people.  Of course, you don’t need me to point out that even the most well-meaning people will, from time to time, let you down.  You’ve experienced that yourself.
• And sometimes we put our hope in ourselves.  Maybe I can’t trust anyone else, but at least I can count on me.  Although truth be told I disappoint myself all the time.

Put your hope in enough of these things and eventually you’ll grow weary of being disappointed.  Eventually it gets to the place where hope sounds about as naive as a little girl singing about tomorrow.

The only problem with tomorrow is, there’s no guarantee it will be better than today.  All of us have gone to bed telling ourselves to be happy that at least today is over and tomorrow will be a new day, only to wake up and discover the new day is even worse.  And what’s more, we also know that eventually we will run out of tomorrows.

Life teaches the cruel truth: If you put your hope in something as uncertain as tomorrow, it will let you down.

And eventually we learn the lesson the secret to avoiding disappointment is to “not get our hopes up.”  Just think about the movies.  All your friends are talking about how awesome this new movie is, how it’s the best thing ever, how you just have to go see it.  So you do, and because your expectations were high, you walk away  disappointed.  But if all your friends tell you this movie is stupid, a waste of time and money, and don’t bother with it, it’s easy to walk away impressed.  “Granted, it’s no Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it was ok.”  Because our expectations were low, we are satisfied.

“Don’t get your hopes up” is just another way of saying “If you give up on hope, then you’ll be happy.”

The problem is, I’m convinced that God desires something better than this for his children.  God desires us to live a life that’s full of hope, not one that assumes the only way to happiness is hopelessnes.  “Give up on hope” is the basic tenet of Buddhism, not Christianity.

Instead we believe in the radical optimism of grace.  This optimism is one of the distinctives of our theological heritage as Nazarenes.  And it’s at the very heart of the way we see our world.  The radical optimism of grace believes that:

• God really can forgive me of my past and give me a fresh clean start. That belief isn’t necessarily a distinctive of Wesleyanism, but it is radical in a world that rarely forgives and never forgets.
• God can set me free from sin so I don’t have to live a life of constant failure. Here we get into the real distinctives of Wesleyanism.  We believe that God set us free the necessity of sin.  We don’t have to continually make mistakes and make a mess of our lives.  We might – but it’s not inevitable.  God really does provide a way out of every temptation.
• God doesn’t have to just pretend that I am holy in order to have a relationship with me, He really can change me and make me more like Him. This too is a distinctive of Wesleyanism.  Other streams of Christian thought teach that the only way God can convince himself that I am holy is to impute Christ’s righteousness to my account, so that when he see’s me, he tricks himself into thinking he’s seeing his Son.  But that’s not what we believe scripture teaches.  God really is, little by little, transforming me into his likeness and that is a real change.
• God really can work through me to change my world until His will really is done on earth as it is in heaven. This is one aspect of the radial optimism of grace even Wesleyans can sometimes forget.  We’ve become so convinced by millenial theories that God’s going to come back at the very last moment before humanity destroys themselves, we somehow expect there’s no hope for this world.  It’s just going to continue to get worse until Jesus has to come back before it gets to late.  Only that’s not how I read scripture, and that’s not what Jesus tells us to pray for.  Instead he calls us to pray for and work toward the transformation of our world.

All of that sounds pretty hopeful.  It even sounds rather naive.  I suppose someone could say “yeah, just live a little longer and you’ll give up on that too.”  After all, it’s one thing to say God wants to set me free and transform me.  I still often fall short of that ideal.

So how do you hold on to hope, when you fall short of what you hope for? I think Romans 5:1-5 has the answer to that question.

It begins by talking about some of the very things included in the radical optimism of grace.  Romans 5:1 talks about justification – the fact that God can forgive us and give us a fresh clean start.  Verse 2 talks about our hope for transformation.  We hope in the glory of God – the ability of God to transform us until we become like him.

Verse three however addresses the question “What happens when life falls short of expectations?”  It’s one thing to rejoice in our hope.  But what about when our hope lets us down.  When life is less than we hope it could be.  When we suffer?

Paul says we rejoice then too! Because sufferings give us the chance to persevere.  If everything went right and we always recieved what we hoped for, we’d never have the opportunity to persevere.  Perseverance requires struggle.  But we  don’t rejoice just because we persevere.

Instead Paul writes that our perseverance proves our character.  When we refuse to give up even when hope seems lost, we begin to get a picture of the character God is shaping in us.  It is times of struggle like this that we really see how God is shaping our lives.

And that proven character leads us back to hope.  When hope is lost.  We hold on anyway.  And as we hold on, we prove our character.  And as we prove our character, we have cause to hope again.  Because transformation isn’t just something we hope for some day.  We see how that transformation has already become.

And the best part is verse five: “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.“  Unlike all our other hopes, this one does not disappoint because it’s not grounded in something as changable and unstable as pleasure, position, possssions, people or even ourselves.  It is grounded in an unshakable God who as at work right now in my life.  Not just some day, but right now.

The secret to happiness, then, is not to give up on hope.  Nor is it hope for hope’s sake.  The secret to happiness is putting your hope in something that’s worthy of bearing it.

Or should I say someone?

Element of Fun/Positive Environment:

We wrapped up our Mythbusters series with the best video of all.  In it we turned a student invisible and launched a chicken from a canon at our church bus.

I said we wrapped up with this, but we actually will have one final Mythbusters episode next week featuring outtakes from the series.   The best part?  Shooting is finished and I finally got to get rid of the goatee.

Worship Set: O Praise Him, Blessed be Your Name, The Solid Rock, God of this City

Favorite Moment: Tough one here.  I really, really enjoy teaching about the radical optimism of grace.  It really is a huge part of who am I am, and what I believe.  I just hope students can grab hold of it before the world (and sadly a good part of the church world) tells them “Don’t get your hopes up.”

Then again, it was a blast shooting video, especially this week when I turned my teens loose with the camera and had them direct a number of the shots.  They did awesome!