Epiphany sermon on Hope 5th January 2014

I want to look with you this morning at hope.

Where there’s life there’s hope is a Latin proverb.

If it were not for hope the heart would break runs another proverb.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attaining her eternity wrote Herbert Melville.

God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ wrote St Peter (1 Peter 1:3b)

Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us wrote St Paul (Romans 5:5)

I am a man of hope, not for human reasons nor from any narrow optimism, but because I believe the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church and the world, even where his name remains unheard wrote Joseph Suenens.

These last ten days I’ve been curled up with Robert Harris’ Pompeii which Anne and I obtained after our visit last year to the British Museum Pompeii exhibition.  In his No 1 bestseller Harris paints a brilliant word picture of ‘a luxurious world on the brink of destruction’ as days run through August 79AD in the Bay of Naples to the day Mount Vesuvius exploded. His book was excellent company through our power cuts and through my cold.

In 1938 excavations in Herculaneum, like Pompeii covered by lava, uncovered a small cross imbedded in a wall on the second floor of a tenement. This is among the earliest evidence for the spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to the centre of the Roman Empire.

In this tiny room the words I read from Peter and Paul, martyred 13 years before in nearby Rome, would console an early believer facing death by suffocation. Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us…. the God who has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What is hope?

Wikipedia – the internet dictionary says it is the state which promotes the desire of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or in the world at large. This state Wikipedia describes of desiring positive outcomes is less than the Christian vision about obtaining the ultimate good things of God. As Wikipedia itself narrates: Hope in the Holy Bible means a strong and confident expectation and it goes on to quote St Paul in Romans 8:24-25: For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.

According to the Holman Bible Dictionary, hope is a "trustful expectation, particularly with reference to the fulfilment of God's promises. Hope is the anticipation of a favourable outcome under God's guidance... the confidence that what God has done for us in the past guarantees our participation in what God will do in the future.

There are three key or theological virtues in Christianity, faith, hope and love and it’s the neglect of the centre one that’s got me to address hope this morning as a fundamental element of our Christianity.

Hope in Christianity is no shallow optimism. This Sunday marks our entry into 2014 and a year’s commemoration of the First World War which did more than anything else to shatter the Victorian optimism that stemmed from the industrial revolution and the progress it brought. The Great War was at the start of a century of wars that ended with the Cold War, a century which saw loss of Christian hope and rise of totalitarian ideologies and cynical indifference to religion.

This Epiphany Sunday is a reminder of how Christianity stands or falls on vision, and the communication of vision, vision of God allied to a hopeful vision of humanity, and how the last century in the western world has seen a failure in this communication. A century ago you would only just squeeze folk in to St Giles even with the Victorian extension. Today, need I say more? And yet there are some signs of the tide turning the way of Christian faith.

I wonder how many villagers got to thinking at Christmas about the real Christmas, due to the hardships we all shared ten days ago? When you’re cold and hungry it gets you thinking ‘what’s the point?’ and clearly a good number saw a point in climbing the hill to Church. How many I wonder put faith in God here, prayed to him with us in the harsh circumstances we all shared?

This is the day that the Lord has made says the Psalm writer. If faith says today is God’s hope says tomorrow is God’s – that is my simplest definition of hope: faith for the future that’s to be worked out in love, the greatest of the three, because faith and hope steel the nerves to forget self and deliver love today and tomorrow.

A year or two back at Epiphany some of us picked up the second verse of Isaiah Chapter 60 which you heard in our first reading this morning as having a very special resonance for St Giles: For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

I wonder if that verse doesn’t still have enormous relevance as a word from him this 5^th January 2014? The loss of hope around us is a thick spiritual darkness. We believers, lit up this morning by the Epiphany star, are called to act and speak and be one with the Lord who rises upon us and whose glory appears over this village symbolised by the nightly illumination of our spire and its daily pointing up to him.

This eucharist brings us to kneel before Jesus Christ, not veiled in flesh, as he was to wise men, but as he is to us this morning, veiled in bread and wine in the Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood.

The Lord is here – his Spirit is with us - Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us…. the God who has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13