"When Hope Is All You Have"

 Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 2007
    The Rev. Charles Holmgren 

Scripture Romans 8: 14-17    

The first time that I saw the mountains, I pulled over to the side of the road, and sat there for a while.  I was going to Seattle Washington in 1961 for my Ordination.  I was in the middle of Montana when I first saw the Mountains: Wow!  I fell in love with the Rockies.  Since then I have visited them, and have lived in the mountains.  They are awesome.  But now I live in the desert.  It speaks to me a lot about my faith.  You walk in the desert this time of year and it is full of beauty.  The flowers of the cactus are in their splendor.  The Indian Paintbrush appears that it will last forever in its bright vibrant colors.  But they will be gone in a few days.  The dry winds and the dry air and the lack of rain will make that array of color a past memory.  That is like life.  We must learn to cherish and treasure those moments of hope and wonder that can be short lived.  The fourth fundamental in my series of the fundamentals of faith is hope.

            Today we, as a church, are celebrating the festival called Pentecost.  Many believe that Pentecost is the time when the early Church was born.  In fact, many would say that it is the birthday of the Church.  Whether or not this is historical fact is really a moot point.  We know that at some point the early followers of Jesus began to proclaim a vocal witness to what they had experienced in their relationship with the man Jesus.

              Following the death of Jesus it would seem that life for those early followers must have been like a desert.  Their hope had been dashed.  Their dreams were smashed.  And their leader was lost.  That must have been pretty barren for them.  Then Pentecost occurred.  For those early followers, Pentecost was like the desert in bloom.  There was new hope, new life, new dreams, new purpose.   

            The early Christians, following Pentecost, asserted that what happened was something that changed their lives.  Whether the change occurred when “the Holy Spirit came upon them” as recorded in the Book of Acts, or the change was because they finally realized that their experience of this Jesus was life changing, doesn’t matter to me.  

            We live in a world that seems to be ruled by fear.  Some of us remember when fear did not dominate our lives, rather it was hope.  I acknowledge that there are things in our world that are frightening and more than likely merit our fear.  However, it seems to me that the Pentecost Spirit is built in hope not fear.  Those early followers were proclaiming how their experience of the presence of Jesus had made their life full.

            While life is a continually changing experience there are some changes that go to the very core of being counterproductive with our religious belief system.  How do you equate fear with St. Paul’s quote, “These three things abide: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these if love.”   I believe fear is inherently incompatible with hope.  We all experience insecurities, but that is different than fear.           

            I don’t see the Bible as a book of prescriptions from Dr. God; rather, as Marcus Borg has stated, the Bible is like a lens through which we may see God.  Like any lens it is influenced by our experiences, our limitations, our frustrations, our failures, as well as our hopes.  And like a lens it will help us to see things more clearly and allow us a focus.  You look like a fuzzy mess when I take my glasses off; but when I put them on again you return to focus.  Pentecost became a lens for those early followers.  They finally saw more clearly the meaning of their experience of this Jesus with whom they have lived and worked.   They had been feeling sorry for themselves and were focusing on their fears and the bad things that might happen to them.  On Pentecost, in some way, their lenses were cleaned, or their eyes were cleared and they put into action the hope that Jesus had given to them.  The same challenge comes to us.  We can feel sorry for ourselves, or we can accept the hope that comes from the gift of the Spirit in whatever our “Pentecost experience” is.  How does this translate into how you live each day?   As I see it, Pentecost is a choice between hope and fear.  The flames of the Spirit can touch our lives and lead us to find strength and hope and cast out our fear.