Evidence of Grace: Hope

Romans 5:1-4
February 23, 2011

A few weeks ago, Irv Welling passed along what is said to be a Cherokee story he heard recently at an awards dinner. The story goes like this. One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. The grandfather said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.” The one you feed.

It occurred to me when I read that story that it could stand for our entire MidWeek series on virtues as evidences of grace and vices as obstacles to grace based on Steve Shoemaker’s book The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. It all depends on which wolf we feed. Tonight, I’m talking about feeding hope. Not having hope; not finding hope; not needing hope; but feeding hope.

In the Bible, hope is presented as something God gives. The prophet Jeremiah wrote to the people of Jerusalem who had been exiled to Babylon, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). God gives hope, Jeremiah says. As that verse from Jeremiah implies, hope is always about a future with God that stands somehow in contrast to or in tension with the present. Whatever the circumstances of the present may be, hope holds out an alternative future in the plan of God for welfare and not for evil, for shalom and not for ra‘, the Hebrew text says.

The apostle Paul calls God “the God of hope” who will “fill you with joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Shoemaker points out that “In the New Testament, hope is always a noun [or a verb], hope, never an adjective, hopeful, or an adverb, hopefully; [because hope] is far more than some subjective feeling we conjure up. It is a power given us by God, the God of our hope” (Shoemaker, p. 174). Hope is a power given to us by God. It is like a wolf inside us—if we will feed it.

God is our hope, the source of our hope and the object of our hope. “Hope in the Lord,” says the psalmist (Psalm 130:7; 131:3). “I hope in the Lord,” says Paul (Philipians 2:19). Hope is not some vague, wishful and wishy-washy feeling that “everything will be O.K.” Hope is a persistent and tenacious conviction of the soul that God really is at work in all things for good (Romans 8:28), even when you and I cannot see the good for which God is working. After all, Paul reminds us in Romans 8:24-25, “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Ah, patience. There’s the rub. In an era of fast food, fast cars, fast facts, fast internet, fast money, fast games, fast answers, fast weight loss, fast living, fast-acting, fast and furious, we do not hope for what we do not see because we wait for nothing with patience. The problem with the hope that comes to us from God is that it does not come as a gift on a silver platter to privileged and entitled people who are impatient and in a hurry. “Lord, give me patience, and give it to me right now.”

Hope comes, says Paul in Romans 5:1-4, from the long, slow work of the cultivation of our character which comes from the expansion of our endurance which comes from our experience of suffering. God sows hope like seeds in the dirt of our lives, seeds that must lie in the dark, underground, in order to germinate and sprout, to be cultivated, watered, fed, weeded, trimmed and pruned only eventually to be harvested as ripe and full-grown hope. The quote from Steve Shoemaker's book that has been at the top of our MidWeek order of worship for this series speaks of all of the virtues and of each of them. So, hope “is a gift from the Creator, an evidence of natural grace, and [hope] is also a habit, a discipline consisting of difficult choices and the day-by-day, step-by-step determination” to choose hope. In other words, to “have hope,” we must “feed hope.”

We must day-by-day and step-by-step determine to choose hope among the many options we have for relating to ourselves and to God and to others and to the world. I say to myself, “In this situation, I can choose cynicism; I can choose despair; I can choose apathy; I can choose anger; I can choose retribution. I have many choices, and I choose hope. I am going to feed hope.”

Ezekiel saw a vision of a valley of dry bones, the bones of Israel in exile, who cried out, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost!” But in that valley of dry bones, Ezekiel heard God say, “I will put my Spirit within you and you shall live!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the valley is exile or illness, a broken family or a broken heart, a lost job or a failed test, God puts God’s spirit within us for life. In Egypt, Israel cried out to God under the murderous oppression of Pharaoh, and God raised up the voice of Moses, who demanded for God of Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether Pharaoh is a political tyrant or an exploitive workplace, an abusive parent or spouse, or homelesseness or hunger or poverty, God’s spirit is always on the side of liberation. In the Easter story, we, like the women who were there, are asked, from the empty tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the tomb is in a garden or a graveyard or a failed marriage or a faded dream or an addiction or a dead end of one sort or another, God’s spirit is always on the side of life.

That’s the voice that gave Martin Luther King, Jr., the spiritual fortitude to announce on the night before he was assassinated, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .
With this faith I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” We are all in the business of carving “a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” Carving a mountain of hope from a tunnel of despair takes a tenacious faith in God that God is working for good regardless of how things look at any given time or place. It takes passionate confidence that in the end, God’s kingdom will come, God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And it takes faithful listening to the voice that gives us reason to choose hope.

Which wolf in you will win? The one you feed. So feed hope.


Photo by sometimesong. Used under license of Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sometimesong/

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Bread for the Journey: The Roundabout Way

Exodus 13:17-22, Matthew 28:19-20
The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany 2011


It never was a straight line. It never has been. It never is. It never will be. Our biblical ancestors Abraham and Sarah left the city of Ur in southern Iraq, the book of Genesis says, to move north and west up the Euphrates River to Haran in modern-day Turkey. And from Haran they were called to Canaan, and from Canaan they traveled to Egypt, and from Egypt they returned to Canaan. It wasn’t a straight line.

Our biblical ancestors the sons and daughters of Jacob/Israel fled drought and famine in Canaan to settle in Egypt in the Nile Delta until they were no longer welcome there and were driven out or escaped from their home away from home to begin a forty-year journey to return to a land of promise generations old. It wasn’t a straight line.

Our biblical ancestors Israel and Judah were subjected to successive waves of Assyrian and Babylonian domination until they were exiled and dispersed throughout the Fertile Crescent from Egypt in the south to the Transjordan in the east and Asia Minor in the north and Babylonia in the northeast. It wasn’t a straight line.

Our biblical ancestors, the “holy family,” as Mary and Joseph and Jesus are sometimes called, fled to Egypt for safety out of the murderous reach of Herod the Great. And when they returned home, we are told, they did not settle in Joseph’s ancestral town of Bethlehem south of Jerusalem as he had hoped, but instead took up residence in the north in Galilee in Mary’s backwoods village of Nazareth, the kind of place about which it was asked, “Can anything good come out Nazareth?” (John 1:46). It wasn’t a straight line.

The Via Dolorosa, “the way of sorrow,” the path that Jesus walked carrying the cross, zig-zags through Jerusalem’s Old City with falls along the way. The biblical journey of faith never was a straight line. It never has been. It never is. It never will be.

Did you know that in the 1800s, “fewer than half the [American] population claimed membership in a local congregation” (Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven, p. 30). By the 1950s, however, “at least three-quarters of Americans belonged to a local house of worship.”But the 21st century is beginning to look more and more like the 19th century than the 20th century as church membership in the U.S. has slowly but steadily declined since its all-time high in the 1950s.

In his book titled After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s, the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow argues that a spirituality of a place—location, habitation, domicile—has been replaced by a spirituality of journey. “In settled times,” Wuthnow writes, “people have been able to create a sacred habitat and to practice habitual forms of spirituality; in unsettled times, they have been forced to negotiate with themselves and with each other to find the sacred. Settled times have been conducive to an imagery of dwellings; unsettled times, to an imagery of journeys (p. 4).

We live in unsettled times, don’t you think? Our lives are conducted in comings and goings that would have made our grandparents and great-grandparents dizzy and confused. Singer-songwriter Carole King characterized the unsettled times of our personal lives and our spiritual lives alike forty years ago when she sang, “So far away, Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” We are all on the move, traveling, changing, growing, declining, uniting, separating, arriving, leaving. “One more song about moving along the highway. . . . If I could only work this life out my way. . . . Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Carole King’s ballad about a long-distance love affair is also a ballad about the spiritual condition of unsettled times.

But what if it never has been about staying in one place? What if the 1950s in America were an anomaly, and oddity, an outlier that we have mistakenly benchmarked as “the norm” against which other eras are measured? What if it never was about the location in Ur or Haran or Canaan or Egypt or Bethlehem or Nazareth or Jerusalem? What if it always has been about the journey not the place?

What if Exodus 13:18 were at the core of our understanding of our relationship with God as individual persons and as a people of God? Listen again to the beginning of Exodus 13:18: “God led the people by the roundabout way.” “The roundabout way.” It never has been a straight line. It never is. It never will be. The journey that we are on with God as individuals and as a people of God is and has always been and always will be the roundabout way. God leads by the roundabout way, Exodus 13:18 says.

It’s important to understand that in Exodus 13 “the roundabout way” is not an endless circle of confusion or being constantly lost and bewildered. Verse 21 makes it quite clear that God is leading along the way. In the wilderness, God’s constant presence and leadership is depicted in the external and visible sign of the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night “so that they might travel—journey—by day and night.” The journey of our biblical ancestors in the wilderness, however threatening or difficult or conflicted it was—and it was threatening and difficult and conflicted; just read the books of Exodus and Numbers to see how easy it was not—that journey always in the presence of God and under the leadership of God.

In the New Testament in the twenty-eighth chapter of the gospel of Matthew in what we have come to call “the great commission,” Jesus is decidedly less pictorial, decidedly less concrete; but Jesus is no less direct in his assurance of the presence and the leadership of God among the people of God. “Remember, I am with you always,” Jesus says (Matthew 28:20).

As I have told you a number times, a fascinating aspect of the great commission is that in spite of the fact that it is popularly translated as a command to go on a journey—“Go therefore,” the great commission in Greek does not begin with an imperative verb, a command, but with an infinitive in a circumstantial clause. The great commission does not command us to go on a journey; it presumes that just as our biblical ancestors were on journey, so are we. “As you are going,” Jesus says. “Along the way,” Jesus says, make disciples and baptize them and teach them.

And there lies the mission of the church in unsettled times. The church is not an end in itself. The church is a means to an end. As Wuthnow put it, “Instead of drawing people in to do God’s work in the organization itself, [churches] need to send people out to do God’s work in the world” (17). In other words, there is still a place for the church in a spirituality of journey.

The church is the place on our journey where we learn who we are and whose we are. The church is the place on our journey that we learn that our relationship with God, neighbor and self are all of a single piece of the woven fabric of life. The church is the place on our journey where we learn the spiritual disciplines of prayer and the study of the Bible and openness to the Holy Spirit who sustains us on our journey. The church is the place on our journey where we learn that we are called to serve not to be served. The church is the place on our journey where we discover a community of support and care along the way we travel. The church is the place on our journey that equips us and sends us out to do God’s redemptive work in the world. Without a church, we are Christian nomads, vagabonds, vagrants. It is the church that teaches us to be at home on the move as citizens of God’s creation sent to do God’s redemptive work in the world.

From Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt, from Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth, from Antonia Fortress or Herod’s Palace to Golgotha and the Garden Tomb, the journey is the thing. As we go, along the way, the we are discipled to disciple; we are baptized to baptize; we are taught to teach; we are called to call; and we are fed to feed.

And that’s the bread for the journey: fed to feed on the roundabout way that God is with us and leads us.

Photo by Liu Tao, used under license by Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Bread for the Journey: Daily Bread

Matthew 7:7-12
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany 2011

“Wherever the road is turning, there is bread for the journey.” “Pass the Word around: Loaves abound!” 420 loaves, to be exact. Take a look at last Sunday.



This week, hungry adults and children were fed with Bread for the Journey that you provided. I was in a meeting this week and remarked to someone that I was a little anxious that it had taken longer than we had anticipated to bring the bread to the Lord’s Table. “No, no!” he said. “It was wonderful! They just kept coming. They just kept coming.” On Monday, Loaves & Fishes delivered all 420 loaves to Project Host. That’s how Loaves & Fishes works: “mobile food rescue” to feed people who are hungry.

I suggested last week that our primary focus was changing in our consideration of the stewardship of our lives from our bread for our journey to other people’s bread for their journey. To move from our bread for our journey to others’ bread for their journey is not a socially driven shift in focus or an economically driven shift or a politically driven shift. It’s a theologically driven shift in the narrowest sense of the word “theological”: it’s a God-thing.

It’s right there in this morning’s gospel lesson, in Matthew 7:11: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Matthew 7:11 is a hard verse for some of us for two reasons. The first reason is that some of us resent it when Jesus or anyone else speaks of us human beings as being “evil.” As early as the fourth and fifth century, two roads diverged in the theological woods, and which one you choose to follow makes all the difference in what you believe about human beings. The great North African theologian Augustine popularized the doctrine of original sin that has led Christian theology down a road called “the total depravity of man.” That’s the “you-who-are-evil” path; and its followers always shout, “Hear! Hear!” when they hear it.

The other road in the theological woods of the fourth and fifth century was walked by a Celtic monk named Pelagius whose view of humankind and creation was very different. For example, Pelagius wrote, “There is no creature on Earth in whom God is absent. . . . When God pronounced that [God’s] creation was good, it was not only that [God’s] hand had fashioned every creature: it was that [God’s] breath had brought every creature to life.” That’s the road called “inherent divine goodness,” and if you are on the “inherent divine goodness” path, you are inclined to shout, “I object” when you read or hear expressions such as “you who are evil.”

Now, in fairness, I have to tell you that these are not two equivalent roads in the history of Christian doctrine. Thanks to the insistent theological politicking of the great Augustine, Pelagius was condemned as a heretic; and you might say that “North African theology” has dominated “Celtic theology” ever since. But many of us in this congregation are more Celtic than we might have thought, and so when we hear “you who are evil,” we at least squirm a bit, even if we don’t shout out, “I object!”

The second reason Matthew 7:11 is a hard verse for some of us is the masculine reference to “Father in heaven” who gives “good things to those who ask him.” Thousands of years before Augustine and Pelagius argued with each other over original sin and total depravity and inherent divine goodness, two other roads diverged in the theological woods. The earliest evidence we have for the human religious imagination includes both the masculine and the feminine in its understanding of the Numinous, Ultimate Reality, Divinity, God. In time, however, there was a fork in the road, and Mother God and Mother Earth were sent packing down a path of obscurity, while “Father knows best” became theology’s superhighway. This is especially so among us Protestants who banished even Mary “the mother of God” from the path we take.

Those among us who are troubled by the whole male domination thing squirm at least and sometimes shout, “I object!” when we come to assertions of the fatherhood of God, just as others of us squirm at least and sometimes shout, “I object!” when we come to assertions of the motherhood of God.

But none of us should permit the core teaching of Matthew 7:11 escape us because of our reactionary affirmations or reactionary objections on the divergent roads we walk. The core teaching of Jesus in this verse says that we human beings do indeed know enough about what is good and are indeed capable of doing what is good to feed children when they ask for food. We know enough not to give them a stone when they ask for bread.

Whether you are on the total depravity road or the inherent divine goodness path, whether you are on the Mother God trail or the Father God highway, you know enough about what is good and you are capable enough of doing what is good to feed children when they are hungry. All around us in society there are horror stories about individuals and families who have failed to exhibit the capacity to know and to do what is good, but those egregious cases do not absolve you and me of the responsibility we have to know and to do what is good.

The same Jesus who said, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35) said, “I was hungry, and you fed me” (Matthew 25:35). The same Jesus who is “the bread of God” that “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33) said, “feed my sheep” (John 21:17).

No member of this congregation in the twentieth century cut any wider a swath through Greenville and this church than Schaeffer B. Kendrick. An attorney, a faculty member at Furman, a proponent of civil rights, a person of faith, a purveyor of wisdom, and a raconteur of the highest order, Schaeffer Kendrick insisted nearly twenty years ago that this congregation should lead the way in efforts to alleviate hunger among children in our community.

It is because of Schaeffer Kendrick’s challenge that the large basket sits in the “Come Unto Me Window” in this Sanctuary, and it is because of Schaeffer Kendrick’s challenge that green plastic bins to collect non-perishable food items sit at the primary entrances to this facility. It’s not a stretch to say that “Mission Backpack” is the result of Schaeffer’s call to feed hungry children. If for twenty years we have been hearing what we know is good and what we are capable of doing, then wouldn’t it just make sense to take the next step in doing it. No more stones for hungry children. It’s bread instead, and Mission Backpack is a way to make it so.

When my grandfather was a boy growing up outside Ogden, Utah, he worked for a farmer he called “Uncle Henry.” “Uncle Henry” was no relation, but “Uncle” said a lot about how much my grandfather thought of him. One evening, my grandfather was with a group of older boys who decided to raid Uncle Henry’s watermelon patch under cover of darkness. My grandfather says he felt pang of guilt about the plan, working as he did for Uncle Henry; but he didn’t have the nerve not go along with the older, bigger boys.

The watermelon patch was behind the house, so once it was dark, the boys made their way down to the river, and from there they slipped across the fields up toward the house. They climbed over the fence, and each of them felt around until they found one of a size and shape they wanted. Back over the fence they went, but one of the boys tripped and fell with a thud that alerted Uncle Henry dogs that something or someone was out there. The boys took off running, but they were no match for the dogs, of course. But they didn’t need to be. All they needed to be was bigger and faster than my grandfather, and they were. When the lead dog reached him from behind, it knocked him down and snarled at him momentarily—until it recognized who he was, and then it stood over him licking him in the face while the other dogs milled around wagging their tails.

Moments later, a lantern appeared and there was Uncle Henry standing in its glow among the dogs. “What’s going on here?” he asked sternly. And then he saw my grandfather and a broken watermelon lying just out of his reach. Uncle Henry shook his head and said quietly, “Victor, all you had to do was ask.” “All you had to do was ask.”

They are asking. All around our community they are asking with their words and with their eyes and with the growling in their stomachs. They are praying in the same words we are: “Give us this day our daily bread.” And it does not matter one whit which road through a theological wood we are on. It does not matter a hill of beans what our social or economic or political convictions may be. On this one, we know what is good and we are capable of doing it. It's the next step in the Schaeffer Kendrick Challenge twenty years later.

So as the call goes out to pray and shop and pack and deliver and give for Mission Backpack, I hope you will take the next step in bringing bread for the journey, not our bread for our journey, but bread for the journey of others. After all, the same Jesus who said, “I am the bread of life,” said, “I was hungry, and you fed me.” The same Jesus who is “the bread of God that “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” said, “feed my sheep.”

“Wherever the road is turning, there is bread for the journey.” “Pass the Word around: Loaves abound!”


This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.