I changed the last third of this sermon drastically between services. I didn't like how it flowed and I felt like the ending was too impersonal and long. The part about the study I condensed and in it's place I shared the story of someone who is bringing hope to others.
Jeremiah
29:11-14 (NRSV)
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord,
plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then
when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search
for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you
find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from
all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and
I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Have you ever been on the top of a mountain?
Not just on top of a mountain --- but have you been on top
of a mountain on a clear day?
It is one of the most amazing things, because when you are
on a mountain --- or on top of a skyscraper --- or in an airplane ---- YOU CAN
SEE FARTHER THAN YOU CAN SEE.
Too many of us however suffer from a deficiency
We can't see
farther than what is in front of our faces.
If we want to thrive, we desperately need to be able to see
farther than we can see.
The author of proverbs understood this when he wrote:
Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)
Where
there is no vision, the people perish
Nothing happens without vision.
The world hungers for people with vision à
for people who look farther than
they can see.
An
African American pastor led a thriving church.
Many of
its members were actively serving the surrounding community. Asked the secret
of his success, the pastor responded,
“I hold
a crown above my people’s heads, and watch them grow up into it.”
That’s
the power of vision.
Sometime
around the year 7 BCE, the planets Jupiter and Saturn appeared very close
together in the night sky, casting a bright glow similar to that of a single
large star.
The
following year, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were also closely aligned.
Some
scholars believe one of these two events produced the bright light in the sky
the biblical wise men followed when they came to Bethlehem two thousand years
ago.
You know
the story.
What
fascinates me is this: hundreds of thousands of other people living in that
part of the world saw the same bright light in the sky, but they did not leave
their homes to go find the newborn king.
What was
different about these magi?
VISION
These
magi were searching for something that was real
something
that would transform their lives.
For the next couple of weeks, we are going to talk about
what Ridge Church is all about.
Who we are ---
And what drives us to do what we do.
The mission statement of Ridge Church is the same mission
statement that all United Methodist Churches have:
Ridge Church exists to make
disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
Pretty simple and pretty obvious for all Christians
As Christians we want to become
Disciple for Jesus who seek to change the world
It is our Vision however that sets us
apart.
Our Vision defines how we are going to go
about becoming Disciples for Jesus
Our Vision is the crown that we hold over
your head and watch you grow into it.
Our vision is also pretty simple:
We of Ridge United Methodist Church are
united with Jesus Christ in His ministry of compassion for all people by
offering HOPE, UNCONDITIONAL LOVE and MEANING FOR LIFE.
For the next couple of weeks we are going to look at those
three key components of our Vision
Today ---
HOPE
Next Sunday
--- Unconditional Love
January 29th
--- Meaning for life
When we talk about Hope --- there are primarily two types of
hope that we speak of
1. We
believe that with Jesus' help --- WE CAN transform the world and make it a
better place
2. We
believe that death is not the end --- that God has something more for us
More often than not, the church likes to focus on the second
kind of hope --- but the truth is it just is --- there is nothing we can do
about it --- It is God's promise for us.
It is the first one, that, together with Jesus --- that we
can help make happen.
If you can, try to remember how you felt
when you heard the news about each of the following events:
- The
massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado
by two students in April 1999;
- The
killing of five young girls and the wounding of five others in an Amish
school by a lone gunman in Pennsylvania in October 2006;
- The
slaying of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech by a deranged student
in April 2007;
- The
killing of 6 at Northern Illinois on Valentine's day in 2008
- The
gunning down of 13 people at a community center in Binghamton, New York,
by a lone shooter in April 2009;
- The
killing of three women and the wounding of nine others by a lone gunman at
a fitness center near Pittsburgh in August 2009;
- The
murder of 13 soldiers on the grounds of Fort Hood in Texas, November 2009.
- Six
killed when gunman tries to assassinate US Congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords in Tucson Jan 2011
- Twelve
killed at Aurora Co movie Theater -- July 2012
- Newton,
Ct 27 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School Dec 2012
- Boston
Marathon bombing last April
- 12
killed in the Washington Navy yard, September 16, 2013
If you are like most people, you
experienced a sense of deep shock and dismay on hearing the news of those
events.
But unless you were personally connected to
a victim of one of the subsequent tragedies, it’s likely that each one had
progressively less emotional impact on you.
Mass killings -- defined by the FBI as four
or more victims, not including the killer -- have occurred across the U.S. at
the rate of about one every two weeks since 2006
In fact, by the time the last of these was
reported, your reaction may have been little more than a sad shake of the head
and a weary utterance of:
“Come
on, not again!”
And you probably turned your attention away
from the news much more quickly than you did after Columbine.
Not surprising is it?
We lived through 9/11
Our news is filled with reports on bombs
and deaths from the war on terror, and drive by shootings from our own back
yard.
On, the TV and internet we have witnessed
such awful stuff that our shock threshold has been raised.
Now when we hear of such tragedies our
reaction is more controlled.
Following the Virginia Tech shootings,
columnist Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal,
commented on this growing numbness to bad news.
He suggested that it may be that as a
nation we have reached “tilt“ with tragedy.
By TILT he was referring to the old classic
pinball machines which would stop working if you banged on them too hard.
Sure
you could bang on it pretty good --- but there were limits.
It seems like, as a people we have been
banged on pretty hard.
Later in the same column he wrote:
“Our
capacity for shock at genuine violence has been recalibrated.”
It is sad, but true.
When tragedies become commonplace, it just
isn’t humanly possible for us who are at a distance from them to experience the
same level of emotional distress as those who are close at hand.
And our lessened reaction has nothing to do
with not caring or a lack of empathy.
It is simply that we have a survival
function that causes us to become protective of our emotional energy.
We cannot continue to dump it out day after
day on extreme events and have any left for daily living.
And so a kind of numbness creeps in, and to
some degree, it needs to.
It’s a defense mechanism that keeps us from
reaching our personal tilt point.
That said, such numbness also gives us a jaded view of life,
a pervasive pessimism that whispers to us
that the cards really are stacked against us,
and that no matter how much we think we’ve
organized our lives, the forces of chaos and destruction will ultimately
prevail.
We hear some of those whispers after almost
every one of these shootings.
Some commentator says the incidents should
reignite the debate about gun control --- Certainly that was the assumption
after New Town --- but those of us who have been around awhile find ourselves
thinking something such as:
Yeah, this latest tragedy might cause some
debate, but even if some changes are made, it won’t make the kind of difference
we need. People who are determined to kill others will always find a way to do
so.
But do you hear in that admission deep
pessimism --- that nothing could have prevented it,
or
something like it ---
that neither arming everybody nor disarming
everybody would make much difference?
That’s a fatalism we don’t wish to surrender to, but it nibbles at the edge of
our minds when we contemplate awful things.
Fully developed, it can cause us to doubt
God’s existence, or at least God’s goodness.
And while we begin to wish we could do
something, we know that nothing will change.
Do you hear the pessimism in that?
“We Wish it could come true,“ which
implies, --- but it we know it won’t.
That is the problem, when we can’t see
farther than we can see.
So, how do we find hope in the world today?
As we live on this side of eternity, what we need to know is
that God is still here in this life, that God has not left us, that God is our
shepherd, God has plans for us.
Did you listen to the words from Jeremiah?
Jeremiah 29:11-14 (NRSV)
For surely I know the plans I have
for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a
future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will
hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all
your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your
fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have
driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I
sent you into exile.
God reminds us that it is in community --- when we gather
together with others that we can find hope.
We support and encourage each other.
Following the Virginia Tech shootings, the
university reacted by holding a convocation, by creating a place for people to
come together and talk about God.
In an essay on Foxnews.com about the
tragedy, religion correspondent Lauren Green wrote,
“So where is God? He is in the prayer vigils. He is in the
rivers of tears flowing from everyone affected. He is in the community coming
together to offer support to the families. He is at work in the love and
strength people are offering each other. God is with us.”
We shouldn’t discount the power of
corporate worship to help us when numbing news bombards us.
A recent study by a Harvard researcher, in
conjunction with a UC San Diego researcher, gives us some evidence in that
direction.
In 2003, this pair gained access to some
old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts.
They were the handwritten records of 5,124
male and female subjects from a heart study done in that community in 1948,
looking for risk factors for heart trouble.
It wasn’t so much the heart information
that caught the attention of the latter-day researchers, but rather some
clerical information on the forms.
The original Framingham researchers had noted
each participant’s close friends, colleagues and family members simply so that
if the participant moved away, the researchers could contact the friends to
locate the participant.
Looking at that information, the 2003 researchers realized it could be transformed
into a detailed map of the human relationships of those folks.
Two-thirds of the adults in Framingham had
been included in the first phase of the study, and their children and
grandchildren had participated in subsequent phases.
Thus, almost the entire social network of
the community was chronicled in these old records.
It took nearly five years to input all that
data into a computer format, but once that was done; the current researchers
were able to construct detailed diagrams of the social networks of the
Framingham residents.
As they began tracking those people as an
interconnected network rather than as a mass of individuals, they discovered
that the social networks influenced the behavior of the people involved, even
as the participants spread out over a larger geographic area.
Because the study had kept track of the subjects’ weight, the current
researchers first analyzed obesity trends.
They found that in 1948, fewer than 10
percent of the residents were obese.
By 1985, 18 percent were, and today, 40
percent are.
That equates with national trends, but
looking at it from the social-network angle, the researchers realized that
while the whole group discovered fast food at the same time, the social-network
effect was what caused obesity to begin to spread, almost like a virus.
In other words, when your friends change
their eating habits, it’s likely that you will, too.
They found a similar trajectory with smoking. In the early 70s, 65 percent of
Framingham residents between the ages of 40 and 49 smoked regularly.
But
by 2001, only 22 percent did.
The researchers found that friends and
family had a positive influence, and that people quit together.
Both eating habits and smoking are behaviors, but the researchers went further
and found that such things as happiness are also influenced by our social
networks.
Because the original study asked people to
describe their moods, the latter research showed that essentially, happy people
have happy friends and unhappy people have unhappy friends.
In other words, gloom is contagious, but so
is joy.
It doesn’t take much thought to apply that same dynamic to people who worship
together.
One thing that helps us maintain hope when
soul-numbing bad news is all around us is that we’re coming before God in
company with others who share that hope.
There have been enough awful tragedies caused by somebody with a grudge, or
paranoia or evil in his heart, or a desire to get even or whatever, that we
assume similar things will continue to happen from time to time in some place
in our society.
Evil is real, sin rages in people’s hearts,
madness descends, despair begets chaos.
What’s more, there’s no guarantee that we
or our loved ones might not someday be among the victims.
But standing here among the people of God, in the place of worship, we can
sense the truth: that good is stronger than evil, that there is something --- something
--- that cannot be taken from us because God has given it to us.
And furthermore, we together know that
nothing --- nothing --- can separate us from the love of God.
It’s that knowledge that helps us not tilt when bad things happen.
We at Ridge Church offer hope to people by
being hopeful ourselves.
By looking for the positive,
By being creative in our search for
solutions to life’s problems
By helping one another to see, farther than
we can see
