Elma United Methodist Church

Hoping for Things Not Seen

Elma United Methodist Church

Hoping for Things Not Seen

Dan Shelly

Elma United Methodist Church

June 4, 2006

(Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:22-27)

 

Isn’t that a beautiful picture of the Northern lights breaking through into the nighttime sky?  I’ve had the privilege seeing the Northern lights several times in my life although they were never quite as spectacular as the lights shown in this picture.  I particularly remember though the first time I encountered them.  I was probably around 25 years old, in the Navy and driving on a road in Scotland around 3:30 in the morning.  We were on our way back from fixing a remote radio transmitter and driving along a ridge overlooking the small village of Stonehaven on the North Sea when all at once we could see everything around us as bright as if it were the middle of the day.  But this brightness was different because absolutely everything was a brilliant shade of bright green!  It lasted for a few seconds and then, just as quickly as it happened, it was gone, and we were driving once again in the pitch black of nighttime.  We were both so startled that I almost crashed the LandRover I was driving.

 

And I think that’s just how unexpected it must have been when the Holy Spirit broke through on that first day of Pentacost. It had been 50 days since the resurrection of Jesus, and suddenly as the followers of Jesus gathered together, God sent the Holy Spirit in a new and mighty way.  That event marked the beginning, the “Birth Day,” of the Christian Church.  And I suspect that Jesus’ followers were just as surprised by this event as we were when the Northern lights suddenly broke through and lit up the world all around us in Scotland.

 

Our Scripture today tells us that while they were gathered together, “there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”  And then something remarkable happened.  If you remember from the Old Testament, the story of the tower of Babel, there mankind tried to build a tower up to the heavens, to be like God.  To confuse them and frustrate this effort, God caused each of them to speak a different language and they could no longer understand one another.  Well at Pentecost, just the opposite happened.  God gave Jesus’ followers various languages, but the Holy Spirit allowed them all to hear and understand one another as if it were one language.  At Pentacost, God reversed the division caused at Babel, brought all of Jesus’ followers together as one people, and allowed them to form the beginnings of the one true Church – the body of Christ.

 

Before the Holy Spirit descended upon them, looking around that room you never would have imagined that this rag tag bunch of folks, fishermen, reformed prostitutes and tax collectors, healed lepers and workers from the fields would ever amount to much, much less be about to start a religious movement that would one day transform the World.  But that’s what’s so amazing about God.  God doesn’t always use the people and the resources that WE would chose to help bring about the Realm of God here on Earth.  In fact, more times than not, it is exactly the people we least expect who God uses in wonderful ways.

 

And I think that’s the point our scripture from Romans today was trying to make.  Paul wrote: 

 

By hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?

 

It doesn’t take much faith to step out onto a massive structure like the Golden Gate Bridge, with it’s huge steel girders and concrete pylons sunk deep into the earth.  But how many of us would have stepped off that cliff along with Indiana Jones in the movie “The Last Crusade” when he was asked to take a leap of faith? Or how many of us would even feel comfortable stepping out onto an old rope bridge stretching out over a gorge when the other side was shrouded in fog so that we really couldn’t see where it went or what it was attached to!  That would just be way beyond our comfort zone, it would go against our common sense, it wouldn’t be safe and you Mom definitely wouldn’t approve! 

 

But you know, in a sense that’s what it means to be people of faith.  God asks us to put our trust in things that make no sense to our logical minds.  God asks us to hope, to wait in faith, to wait for the Holy Spirit to break forth in our midst and in our lives.  And that’s counter intuitive to how we would go about it.  So often we think we need to fix ourselves before God can use us.  Sure God uses lots of other people, but somehow we think that we’re not really good enough yet, we have too many skeletons in the closet, too many weaknesses, we’re too flawed to be any good to God.  In fact, if people really knew just how many problems we had, they wouldn’t even want us here in church.

 

But that’s the amazing thing about God.  Using us to be about God’s work even in our less than perfect state, in fact specifically BECAUSE of our unperfect state allows God to be God, and allows others to see God at work within God’s people.  

 

It reminds me of the story of the old water pot. 

 

A Tibetan woman had two large pots and each of them hung on one end of a long pole which she carried across her neck.  Each day she would go down to the river and fill both her pots up with water.  Then she would start the long trip home. 

 

Well one of the pots was flawed and had a crack in it, the other pot was perfectly formed.  And always by the end of that long walk back from the river, the cracked pot arrived at her home only half full of water while the perfect pot was always full.

This went on daily for two full years, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.

After 2 years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. The pot said "I am ashamed of myself, I feel worthless because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house."

The woman listened gently and patiently and only smiled at the pot.  Then she asked that cracked pot, "Did you ever notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?" "That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them."

"For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table." Without you being just the way you are, there would not have been this beauty to grace my house."  And for two years, all of the people of the our village have enjoyed the flowers that spring forth because of your flaws.

You see we each have our own unique flaws. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. And often it’s these very same things that we often consider flaws which God uses to bring a blessing to someone else.

 

In fact in 2 Corinthians Paul writes: “We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

 

God uses us just the way we are.  There’s nothing we have to fix or change about ourselves first.  There’s nothing we need to hide from God, in fact there’s nothing about ourselves that we CAN hide from God, God knows us better than we know ourselves, and God loves us, really loves us, just the way we are.

 

All God asks is that we open ourselves up to accept that love.  God asks that we invite the Holy Spirit in to our lives and that we wait upon the Spirit to work within our lives in God’s time and in God’s way.  Again Romans tells us, “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  We don’t see ourselves the way God sees us, but wait upon the Lord with Patience and with Faith.  Like those first Christians, wait with expectation that God’s Holy Spirit will descend upon you and work through you, in spite and because of all your cracks and flaws, that others may see your good works and come to know the God of Love and redemption who shines forth through your life.

 

God wants to do a new thing in the world, to bring about wholeness and healing for all of creation, and he’s looking for a few crackpots to work with!  May you be filled with God’s Spirit this Pentecost Sunday and may God’s light and God’s love shine through each and every one of your cracks and flaws for all the world to see.