Make it a Combo Please

Pictured, courage and hope. Ill let commenters say which is which.

Those who write on the church blog generally do not comment on the sermon from our Sunday worship service but I would like to break that habit today with a few comments on how two different sermons fit together.

Two weeks ago I was the preacher. My wrap-up was that as Christian people together in the church we need two types of courage – the courage to make changes when needed and the courage to persist in something we're already doing when that's needed. With those two types of courage, we do two things together – worship God as shown in Jesus and care for each other. Everything else we do grows out of those activities and is made possible by those two types of courage. If we are missing either of those activities or either type of courage, the other stuff we do has a hard time holding together even if it is good and important. Since then several people have suggested core functions that I may have left out – evangelism, prayer, and the courage to stop doing things to name three. We can keep talking about what exactly the core functions are as time goes along but what I was getting at was that there are a few things at the core of our practice of faith together that form a foundation for the rest.

Then this past Sunday, Pastor Russell gave the first of a three-part series about hope. The first one was hope as shown in the story of creation from the beginning of the book of Genesis. He and I haven't talked about the rest of the series but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the second one will be hope demonstrated during the life and teaching of Jesus from the gospels and the final one will be hope as we look forward to God's fulfillment of the created order from the end of scripture in the book of Revelation [Editor’s note. You’ll have to wait and see like everyone else, Jeff].

Russell put his finger right on the important bit at the beginning of scripture and how it connects to our lives and I hope he will excuse my spin on what he said. God made the world and it was good. God made the various plants and animals and everything else and they were good too. God's image became part of the created order when people came on the scene and they were also good. At the end of the week as God steps back from the work of creation, looks at everything, and it is all not only good but VERY GOOD. So the inanimate stuff is good, the critters are good, the plants are good, the people are in the image of God and they are good. Plus, the whole system works together as it's supposed to and not only is each person and thing good but the whole system is very good.

That's the starting point. Everything else that happens afterwards rests on a starting point of goodness and pleasure. God makes all the stuff, all the living things, the people, and then rests in satisfaction. That is hopeful. It is good for us to rest with God right there in the story. The world is good. The stuff that lives and grows is good. People are not only good but in the image of God, created and creative. All of it working together is even better. It is very good.

Extending beyond what he said in the sermon, to stuff that happens later. Things go sideways. People trip up in the same ways that we trip up. Things don't work out with the garden which also happens with our projects. People blame each other and themselves which leads to treating themselves and each other badly. The earth and the plants and creatures become sources of difficulty and fear and sorrow. Work comes to include labour and hardship. People are afraid that there won't be enough so they fight against each other. Having kids comes to include pain and fear. The kids don't see eye to eye which leads eventually to murder. Returning to the presence of God is clouded by fear and pain as death clouds that transition. It's not all good anymore.

But those things all come later. They are secondary. The world does not start out in fear and desperation. Total depravity from the start is not a thing. The world begins in creative satisfaction and celebration of goodness. The image of God into which we are created remains with us as we trip up and as we are redeemed back to our initial purpose. The world begins in hope and hope sustains it and sustains us through all the tripping up that comes afterwards. When we hope now we hope for what both has been and will be. When God's redemption comes in Jesus, people are not saved into some mysterious disconnected alternate universe. We are saved into the hopeful goodness that God created us for in this created hopeful order that we live in now. All of creation, as the apostle Paul notes, groans as it expects to be brought both forward and backward to the goodness that God created it for. When we look forward to however it is that God plans to work in the future we rest on a hope that isn't random or disconnected. It's the hope of the created and creative role that we were made for in the first place in a created and creative world formed by a created and creative God. Hope is our foundation.

Those two sermons need each other and are connected although we did not plan them together. So it is with the mysteries of God. Hope without focus and courage can spin off in directions that don't make sense or get spread out so thin that it collapses. Focus and courage without hope can become a dictatorship or a clear path to nowhere. But focused, courageous hope in God's good guidance and presence is what sustains the church and each person in it through all manner of hard times. Hopeful, courageous focus is what brings people together to form a group that goes beyond a bunch of individuals to become the bride of Christ, the church in ways that we can't describe or fully analyze but are invited to form and become.