"The Need for Hope" - a Sermon inspired by Gary Bouma (and his book "Australian Soul") & Lamentations 3:1-36

In reading the book “Australian Soul” by Gary Bouma – which looks at Spirituality in 21st Century Australia – I discovered that one of the greatest needs of Australians, if not the greatest need of all, is for a sense of hope. At the same time, Gary Bouma suggests that it is the Church – the Christian community – which should be well-placed to offer that sense of hope to society. If I’m asked now where we should start in our mission to the community and world, I’m likely to answer that the place to begin is in helping people discover and be nurtured in hope.

We know about those things that happen in life that tend to diminish hope. Interest rate rises, increased work pressures, ever-present bills, relational difficulties, alcohol abuse, gambling addictions, violence and crime, cancer, diabetes and other illnesses, congested roads, school and university stresses, and the whole complex area of bringing up children. Life can be really, really tough! People need to be able to see, feel and experience hope. Hope … that the future will be better! Hope … that there is some sense to be found within the difficulties of the present! Hope … that we are not forever bound by the mistakes of the past!

What is hope? Hope is expectation and desire combined. We need something and believe it will happen. We sense the strong possibility that what we desire to be the case will be so. Say that there is a really difficult troubling situation at work – to have hope is to see that there must be a solution and that solution will in time come to be. Hope is expectation and desire combined.

The Church should of course be well-placed to offer hope to society. Those that become Jesus followers should be able to model the reality of hope. Why??
· Because our life has been turned around
· Despite being subject to all the same strains and difficulties as everyone else, there is an implanted ability to cope and experience inner peace in the midst of turmoil
· We have certain promises about God’s availability to us, and increasingly we have testimonies of how God has met us at our point of need – we have trusted, and not been disappointed
· We know about and practice prayer
· We don’t have to live continually with guilt and shame, because we have been embraced by God’s re-creative grace.

Somehow, we have to translate what has become a reality in our lives, into something that can be recognised and adopted by those others who still struggle without hope. Gary Bouma writes “…hope is essential to all human life”. He goes on, “Without hope we wither and die”. Hopelessness leads to depression, to being debilitated mentally, physically and socially. A lack of hope leads to destructive behaviours. If there’s no hope then nothing really matters any more. Your own well-being doesn’t matter, and neither does the well-being of any of those around you.

How can this missing hope be found? We could easily just say ‘they need Jesus’, but what they really need are demonstrations that believing in Jesus actually works. The only thing that can cure hopelessness is hope itself. And while a person, no matter how depressed, actually takes another breath, or takes the trouble to get up in the morning, there remains a flicker of hope that can be fanned into flame. Human beings generally have the capacity to endure severe suffering and still go forward – in this there is great hope in itself!

The Book of Lamentations from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) contains raw expressions of despair, grief and mourning. These date from the 6th Century BCE when God’s People (from Judah) bewail the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. They would be written, collated, and repeatedly spoken, to express the people’s torrential emotions about their plight. Their city had been taken, the temple destroyed, people killed, and many taken into exile. These laments were representative of a whole nation of people mourning for lost nationhood, for lost lives, for lost homes, for lost livelihoods, for lost spirituality, for the loss of God.

In typical Hebrew thought processes, we see that this nation of people interpreted their perilous situation as a judgement of God against them; they would belatedly come to understand the repercussions of God’s people ignoring God and going their own way. These people had repeatedly put on the appearances of religious practices whilst treating their neighbour unjustly. The OT “Prophets” are full of examples of this type of behaviour. The scriptures are clear on where the responsibility often lies when things go off track in life.

But we also know that bad things happen to those seeking to do good just as easily as to those only serving themselves. This is because we live in a world that generally operates in ways that don’t follow God’s ways, and everyone suffers accordingly. Everyone is subject to economic injustice, disease and violence. We cannot really know that because someone is doing it tough that they deserve this to be so – it may well be quite the opposite. They may well have been oppressed for doing right as much as for doing wrong. And so we don’t judge, we just love! And so we don’t remain apathetic, but seek to end injustice. And even those we know to have offended against others or even against ourselves personally, we hope that they can turn their life around. For these are the attitudes of Jesus – check them out in Matthew’s Gospel starting at chapter 5.

The emotions or feelings expressed in the early verses of Lamentations 3 include: darkness, isolation, imprisonment, sickness, peril, bitterness, fear, confusion, worthlessness and self-pity. We then see in the verses 16-18 expressions of being at the lowest point possible in life … crawling around in the ashes of one’s own life, grinding one’s teeth on the hard ground, anxious, completely unhappy, loss of any sense of self or meaning in life, all hope gone! Verses 19-20 express that such desperate feelings are continuous and totally debilitating … “wormwood” is a bitter herb, and “gall” is bile, indicating being sick to the stomach, or having a bitter taste in your mouth.

But then … something comes forward in the memory – verse 21! This bitterness and hopelessness now intersects with truth. I really do know something that will get me out of this! Would you read these words from verses 22-24 with me >

"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’"

Fortunately these people had been schooled in the truth [which reminds us about the great value of Christian Religious Education in schools today] that they were able to strongly fall back on. They also had witnessed the reality of this truth in former days.

I’m sure we have found words like these comforting, reassuring and hope-giving in our journey as well. When we are at our lowest for whatever reason, we are assured that God is still there for us. Whenever we fall short, God’s mercy intersects with us. Indeed God’s mercies lift us from the failings of yesterday toward positive thoughts about the possibilities of today. God’s faithfulness to us never diminishes. God always has our best interests at heart. We read, “The Lord is my portion” (v.24), meaning the Lord is everything to me – which leads to feelings of great “hope”.

In the verses that follow we enter an acknowledgement that God is ready to respond to those who seek Him and bring them salvation. Sometimes our long term benefit is served by enduring difficulty and turbulence, seeing how God can bring us through such times as better people. Don’t ever think that God has forgotten you! Don’t ever think God has given up on His world! God sees everything, God notes all injustice, and God is compassion! Reflect on verses 34-36. God draws close to the afflicted, and God will raise up people to speak for them and address their needs.

For so many people today however, such sentiments are far removed from them. When the bottom falls out for such people, there seems to be just about nothing left. So it is the Church, the Christian community, the Jesus followers, who have to offer what we have had the privilege of coming to know, experience, and value so highly.

But even saying ‘just put your trust in God’ is not enough – in fact this can be seen as a pious platitude. This is because so many people have no framework in which to understand trust. As Gary Bouma says, “Our images of trust in God derive from our experiences [of] trustable relationships with others”. This would include: parents, elder figures, teachers, doctors, community leaders and pastors. For some, any trust they might have had in others has been thrown back in their face in the form of abuse. They may only know distrust. And such mistrust may have been turned toward God, even though it was only other humans at fault. We have to admit that various agencies of church in the past have been culpable in actually violating and destroying trust themselves. We have to acknowledge this, repent of this, apologise for this, be cleansed of this, and rise above such past misdemeanours to re-establish ourselves as conveyors of hope!

If you haven’t ever experienced a relationship of trust it would be hard to know where to start in trusting God. So many people need to see ‘trust’ not just talked about, but actually lived out, if they are ever to experience ‘hope’. And so it is that the community around us need us to be modelling how we effectively put our trust in another, completely confident of beneficial outcomes … thereby living out the reality of our hope in God. Again Gary Bouma writes, “If you want to peddle trust in God you must provide a trustworthy community”.

Many people around us are struggling; many feel isolated and live in fear. A lot of Australians are materially well off, but still far from happy. Some are bitter over broken relationships and lost opportunities. Our testimony should be that, despite everything that comes upon our path, God loves us. We show the reality of God’s love by exhibiting a level of peace within an anxious society. We are not removed from the difficulties of life, for if there was no darkness around us, how would our light shine out. We show this light by addressing the spiritual side of life as a greater priority than the material side. Each one of us should be doing this relationally with those around us. Also collectively we can offer opportunities for people to come into contact with trusting, hopeful people, and thereby learn about God.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead …" (1 Peter 1:3).