Yet we hope

God's Good Earth: Hope and Healing
Psalm 85:7-13; Isaiah 58:6-7, 10-12; Romans 8:18-25; Luke 2:27-33

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We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.

Wow! Wow.
In this world . . . in these days . . . that’s a big ask.
How can we hope, and still be honest?

Throughout this worship series we have tried our best to be honest.
We called it “God’s Good Earth” on purpose, because it is good.
It is beautiful.
It is diverse.
It has renewal and regeneration built into it.
It has so much going for it.
But we didn’t pull any punches describing the trouble we’re in.
We are unfortunately fighting against this good earth.
And often winning the fight.
Our destructive actions are incredibly powerful.
They are eliminating species, destroying ecosystems,
and changing climates.
The point of no return is right around the corner,
and we don’t seem to have the will to change.

And that’s just talking about the natural world.
What if we throw politics into the mix?
Entire societies are in a chaotic and violent meltdown,
and no one knows how to stop it.
Hong Kong, Syria, Bolivia, Israel-Palestine,
Afghanistan, and on and on.
Whole nations are blowing up.
And we might even wonder if ours is next in line.

So, let’s talk about our reasons for hope.
Let’s get happy, what do you say?
_____________________

No, really. Let me repeat my opening lines.
We are called to hope.
Our primary Christian call is
to live in hope,
to proclaim hope,
to invite others to hope.

If we can’t do it now, then,
have we ever been able to do it?
Because this is not really the worst of times, historically.
In terms of loss of human life,
World War II was the worst conflict ever.
In a six-year period, nearly 80 million people died.
Can we even imagine that scale of loss of life today?
The Chinese famine of the late 1950s killed over 20 million.
If we want to feel overwhelmed,
there are endless lists of historic human catastrophes.
Look them up.
Boggle your mind.
They make our times look blissful in comparison.

But in all those situations we Christians
had something positive to say and do.
We people of faith and goodwill did not stop hoping then.
We made sacrifices, we got to work
to relieve human suffering
to rebuild lives and societies.
Some of those humanitarian projects live on today,
because our acts of hope flourished and grew.
And vibrant churches still exist in many of those places,
because some of our proclamations of hope resonated,
took root in those cultures, and bore lasting fruit.

But here we are today, again, in dire straits,
and feeling hopeless.
Why?
Have we forgotten our reason for hope?
Well . . . come to think of it . . . what is it?
Why should we hope?
On what basis can we hope?

And by hope, I don’t mean wish.
We all wish things were different.
No, hope.
A confident sense of grounding.
Trust in a good that is larger than ourselves.
A good that will triumph someday.

Let me head right into this topic that is a spiritual minefield.
We can so easily step onto something we shouldn’t.
Maybe it’s our fear of these spiritual mines
that keeps us from even trying sometimes.

What we don’t want is an excuse not to act.
What we don’t want is denial.
What we don’t want is spiritual escapism.
I get it.
We’ve all seen that, and we rightly reject it.

The topic of our relationship to creation
is that kind of spiritual minefield.
Some Christians expect the kind of heaven
that’s meant to get us off this evil physical planet earth,
and into some glorious other-world . . .
and they expect this heavenly rescue soon,
when Christ will come and whisk us away,
and the evil earth will burn up,
getting what it deserves for its sin.
So . . . there are some Christians who think that
caring about our planet is misdirected,
that it takes our attention away from heaven.

In the same way,
when we speak of hope in the midst of catastrophic human suffering,
we are tempted by escapist thinking.
The road to salvation must take us out of this place altogether,
to “the sweet by and by,”
“where all the saints of God are gathered home . . .”
because “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”
“and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”

There is truth embedded in those words.
But . . . are these our only options?
Must we either
put our hope in a spiritual escape
orchestrated by a God who removes us from earth to heaven,
or
put our hope entirely in the human potential for goodness,
so that if we all try harder and change our behavior,
the world will be healed.

Is there another path toward hope and healing?
_____________________

Yes, there is.
It is God and human beings acting in concert with each other.
It is divine and human collaboration . . . co-laboring . . .
working together.

Here is our theology of hope.
Let me first point it out in scripture.
Then spell it out for our times.

Isaiah the prophet assured God’s people
that their actions and God’s actions were intertwined.
We heard from Isaiah 58 today.
When we loose the bonds of injustice,
let the oppressed go free,
share our bread with the hungry,
bring the poor into our house,
and clothe the naked like we clothe ourselves . . .
then the light of God will shine,
Yahweh will make us like a well-watered garden,
and the ruins will be rebuilt.

The psalm writer exults in Psalm 85,
that “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.”
This sounds like God and humanity reconciling,
in a cosmic divine-human kiss.
It says, “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
This is the image of divine and human collaboration.

Yes, and according to Paul and to writer of the Gospel of Luke,
it is perfectly good and right to look to the future for our hope.
Looking to the future for hope does not avoid the present.
It does not lead to inaction.
It is a simple trust in God and God’s work.
It is confidence that as we do our part, God will do God’s.
It is to anticipate, with expectation,
the psalmist’s vision of the divine-human kiss,
when reconciliation happens,
when our brokenness is redeemed,
when, as apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8,
creation itself is freed from its bondage to decay,
when it no longer groans in unfulfilled longing.

In the Gospel of Luke today we saw old man Simeon find true hope.
He found it in a future he knew he would never see.
As he held the 8-day-old infant Jesus in his arms,
he was filled with the hope he had longed for.
He said to God, “I can die in peace now.
For you have let me see your salvation.”
Yes, it was in seed form.
It was a helpless human infant,
soon to be a refugee to Egypt.
But in that baby Simeon saw God’s salvation.
And he could die in peace,
knowing this divine-human kiss would happen.
_____________________

So let’s bring it to our day now.
With the earth on fire, metaphorically, and in some places, literally.
With creation and human society in a deeply broken state,
where is our hope?

Well, again, here is our foundational theological assumption.
Believe it . . . or not.
This is our confession as God’s people.

Things are badly broken in creation
because we abused our power and broke things.
The fall of humanity brought us here.

And God’s primary purpose is to
repair, redeem, reconcile, and restore the shalom
that God intended all along at creation.
And God’s purpose is ultimately unstoppable.

And despite our failures,
we humans are still God’s first choice as partners in healing.
It is a partnership that is happening now,
poking up here and there,
surprising us like an early spring crocus.
It’s not fully there yet,
but it will ultimately culminate in the divine-human reunion,
a cosmic kiss of reconciliation.
So we live in hope for that day,
and practice for it now.

Yes, we have another option.
It seems kind of anemic in comparison.
Since things are going badly as a result of humans behaving badly,
we can put our hope in better behavior by human persons
and having the economic and political systems of the world
repent and turn toward virtue.
So we appeal to our innate human goodness as our salvation.
If that doesn’t work, well, then, we’re doomed. And creation, too.

And it doesn’t seem to be working.
Despite the best of intentions,
and the best expectations of each other,
we don’t seem to be moving toward our own salvation.

So . . . where is our hope?
It is in the future God already created,
where human beings and God collaborate in mutual love—
We look forward to God’s ultimate salvation and restoration,
and we practice for it now.
We do not put our hope in escaping from God’s good earth.
Nor do we hope in the potential of humanity to heal itself.

We hope in God,
who is at work now to save and redeem the broken creation,
and who created us to collaborate in this work.
_____________________

That is our theological frame of mind
as today we issue a call to praise and Thanksgiving
for God’s abundance in the harvest,
and as we issue a call to stewardship,
as we prepare to offer the first-fruits of our harvest.

Every year on this Sunday,
we do a collective act of thanksgiving and hope.
We bring our regular offerings and offer them in worship to God.
And we bring our First-Fruit Faith Promises,
a statement of trust in God’s provisions,
and a statement of hope in God’s future.

You know,
our annual congregational spending plan is not just some
institutional exercise of financial management and budgeting.
Sure, call it that if you want. That’s not untrue.
But theologically speaking, it is much more than that.
It is placing our hope in God’s future.
It is being strategic about collaborating with God.
Part of God’s healing work, as we heard in Isaiah,
is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
bringing the homeless into our house for shelter,
and giving freedom to the oppressed.

We actually plan for these acts of collaboration in our budget.
Each of our gifts is a way to join together and join with God.
And that is not just putting a spin on it, to make it sound good.
Look carefully at our spending plan.
Ask questions about it.
Not just the parts of it we send away,
and we send a lot away in mission, locally and globally.
But ask questions about our spending on this building.
How are we using this building?
Is it really for ourselves?
Or in service of our divine-human collaboration?
Who is coming in and going out of it, and why?
In the course of a season,
you will see many in our community
being blessed by this building,
thanks be to God.
And ask questions about our grants for education
and faith formation,
and find out whose lives are being impacted, and how.
And ask questions about our spending on staff.
Find out how your three pastors and office staff
and other staff,
are touching the lives of our neighbors,
and those living on the margins,
or our own members who struggle with life.

Everywhere I look around PVMC,
I see us practicing now,
for God’s ultimate healing and reconciling work.
And I thank God for that.

If giving to the work and ministry of Park View Mennonite
is not an investment in this divine-human collaboration,
then I have no idea what is.

I hope that we all together can
live in hope,
proclaim hope,
and invite others to hope.
Just as God has called us to do.

—Phil Kniss, November 24, 2019


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To live again

Death and Resurrection, All Saints Day
John 12:23-26; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-44a

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It wasn’t really intentional to have this worship series on creation
overlap with other special days in our church calendar,
but when we got to planning it,
and mapping out the themes,
it became obvious there was a seamless connection
between three other special Sundays
that circle around every fall,
and this sustained focus on Creation.

Partly, because Creation, as a theological theme,
is one of the most expansive, and central to understanding God.
There is very little we can talk about as people of faith,
that doesn’t, in some way, circle back to creation theology.
It makes sense,
because our very identity and vocation as human beings
was set out for us in the Creation narrative.

No surprise, for instance,
that we used World Communion Sunday,
the first Sunday in October,
to reflect on the role that the nations of the world play
in God’s relationship to the created earth and its peoples.

No surprise, either, that our annual fall focus on stewardship,
a few weeks from now,
will tie right in to Creation theology,
since God invited us, Genesis 2, to be stewards of the whole cosmos.

And no surprise that All Saints Sunday, today,
a beloved annual remembrance of those who have died,
will also be enriched by holding it
alongside our celebration of Creation . . . and . . .
that our celebration of Creation will be enriched,
by holding it alongside our remembrance of the dead.

As followers of Jesus,
and as worshippers of the Exalted and Risen Christ,
we all know that resurrection is a major theological theme.

But, resurrection is not something that’s easy and straightforward
to grab hold of,
or make perfect sense of,
or fit nicely into an airtight philosophical framework,
especially in our modern rationalistic and scientific age.

Theologians and Bible scholars have been arguing over the nuances
of resurrection,
since the beginning.
Even Jesus got into the argument,
with the different religious parties of his day.

It’s challenging.
But it will not do to dismiss it.
It is absolutely central to Christian theology,
and (I would argue) absolutely essential
to the practice of daily Christian discipleship,
of following Jesus.
We must do the work of finding a way to incorporate resurrection
into our own faith framework.
Without resurrection, it’s more than a stretch,
to identify ourselves as part of the Jesus movement.

Okay,
but what, exactly, am I asking us to affirm?
And how does this connect with Creation?

I won’t stand here and tell you
exactly how to articulate a theology of resurrection
that qualifies you to call yourself Christian.
That’s between you and God.

But I will tell you what I think is
a sound, and fruitful, and biblical metaphor to use,
to begin to grasp the good news of resurrection, and embrace it.

That metaphor is in Creation.
Scriptures themselves turn to creation for help in this.
They don’t get all up in the air philosophical about it.
They get down in the dirt.

They talk about soil and seeds, about decay and renewal.
Jesus himself addressed the issue with this metaphor.

Leading up to chapter 12 in the Gospel of John
there was a growing unrest swirling around Jesus.
And apparently it centered on the resurrection of Lazarus,
Jesus’ friend who died, and who Jesus resurrected.
This event—whatever it happened to be—
catalyzed some strong reactions.
It strengthened the love and adoration of the crowds for Jesus.
And it intensified the resistance of the religious leaders
against Jesus.
So as the pressure was mounting,
and things were getting more dangerous for Jesus,
he started talking to his disciples more about his own death,
and resurrection.

He said, in the text we read this morning,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a single grain;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Those who love their life lose it,
and those who hate their life in this world
will keep it for eternal life.”

Of course, we know biology today
a little better than the writer of John’s Gospel.
We know a seed doesn’t literally die in order to sprout.
There is always life in that seed.
But that dormant life needs a specific set of conditions,
in order to enter into a new and modified form of life,
one that will start to expand, and push up through the soil,
and grow into a fruitful plant,
and produce more seeds like itself.

That was Jesus’ explanation of resurrection—
an ever-transforming, ever-changing and growing
and fruit-bearing kind of life.
_____________________

And quite some years later,
the Apostle Paul, in the prime of his ministry journeys,
wrote a letter to the church at Corinth,
because they had sent him a letter asking him
about this mystery of the resurrection.
They didn’t know how it worked.
They said, in chap. 15, v. 35, “How are the dead raised?
With what kind of body?”
Sounds like the same sort of conversations
Christians have been having ever since.

So Paul wrote back, saying, essentially,
“Don’t be stupid!”
Actually, it was a little more harsh than that.
The NewRSV has him replying, “Fool!”
I think what he was saying is, “You’re asking the wrong question.”
Don’t worry about the “how” of it.
Just look to creation.
You will see it everywhere.
You will discover that life, and life eternal,
is woven by God into Creation itself.
Here’s what Paul said, words we heard a few minutes ago,
from 1 Corinthians 15—
“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be,
but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.
But God gives it a body as God has determined,
and to each kind of seed God gives its own body.”

By design, creation has a built in cycle of death and life.
When we sow,
that is, when we take a risk and go all in with God,
life will come from death which ends a life
that came from death, which ended a life,
that came from death, and on and on.
The life that emerges after a death,
is a different sort of life.
Don’t expect endless continuation of the same.
Expect transformation.
Expect new creation.

So it will be, Paul says, with the resurrection of the dead.
Not the same, but something new.
A body that is sown is perishable.
But it is raised imperishable.
Two different things.
As different as a cold, hard, brown, lumpy, Iris tuber is,
from its slender and tender green Iris stalk,
and its delicate and breathlessly beautiful Iris flower.
Same life, different form.

Does that answer the whole mystery?
Of course not.
That is not our task—to explain away the mystery.
It is our task to embrace the life that is,
and the life that will yet be,
the life that is beyond our ability to imagine.

Those of us who live by this mystery,
lose no sleep over our inability to explain it.
Rather, we go back out and keep planting.
We trust God to be about bringing forth life.
Always.
Not always in the way we expect.
And even, not always in the way God wants to see life unfold.
Unjust death and premature death still happens,
and God laments that as much as we do.
But the trajectory of the God of Creation,
is always toward life,
always toward resurrection.

So we keep going out.
We keep digging holes in the earth,
We keep dropping in seeds and bulbs.
We keep covering them with dirt.
And we keep waiting, hoping,
that life will one day show up again.

And usually, it does.
And sometimes its beauty takes our breath away.

This is how Creation works.
This is how God works.
_____________________

One of things we do at Park View, as we live with the mystery,
as we wait, is to remember.
We bring the names to mind of those who have died,
while associated with Park View Mennonite Church.

Those who have died since last All Saints Day,
are pictured here on the front table,
and their names will be read aloud.

All those who died, since our beginning as a congregation,
are listed in the bulletin insert, by year.

Some died too soon,
or under circumstances that cannot be considered just or right.
Some died beautifully, and in what seemed to be a good season.

No matter how, or when, the death came,
the trajectory of Creation,
the arc of God’s activity in history is the same.
It is toward life.
It is toward beauty.
It is toward wholeness.


—Phil Kniss, November 3, 2019

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