Hope Deferred

 “Hope Deferred”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, Dec 1, 2013

Text: Luke 1:67-79 // Series: Hope: More Than a Wish

Good morning.  Welcome here, friends.  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and it is our privilege and pleasure to have you here with us as we launch into Advent. 

Have you ever wondered not so much about what IS in the Bible but about what’s NOT in the Bible?  Take for example, the single page between the close of the Old Testament book of Malachi and the opening words of the New Testament book of Matthew.  If you have a Bible, turn there and have a look at that page.  We know from history that over 400 years transpired on that single page.  Why is none of it recorded in the text of Scripture for us?  Apparently, since nothing of divine importance got written down or included in our Bible, Protestant Christmas have come to call this the 400 years of silence.  We end the Old Testament chronology with the work of Nehemiah around 430 BC, the writing of the prophet Malachi and then divine silence.  No prophets forth telling the word of the Lord.  No supernatural intervention in human history that we are informed about.  No angels visiting anyone that we know of.  Nothing.  All is eerily quiet for more than 400 years on the heaven-to-earth communication front. 

But the earth is hardly quiet during this 400 year period!  We know from ancient writers and historians that the Jewish people were subjected to brutal hardship under Syrian rule from 175-164 BC.  But the Jews could only stand so much and so they created a kind of black ops militia lead by a priestly family named the Maccabees (that’s him on the right).  These freedom fighters led a guerrilla war against Syria, eventually overthrowing them and gaining independence for the Jewish state.  The Maccabeens then held an 8 day cleansing of the temple of Jerusalem which is the origins of the feast of Hanukkah.  So if someone asks you later what you learned at Jericho this morning you can surprise them and say “I learned about this history of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah!” 

But despite the efforts of the Maccabeans, things didn’t stay peaceful for long.  The region descended into civil war and the famous Roman General Pompey, seeing his chance, conquered the Jews again in 63 BC.  Because of the years of unrest, the Romans appointed a governor named Herrod, who ruled with notorious force and cruelty.  So this is the backdrop to the first Christmas: this is how the New Testament opens.  Hope is at an all-time low.  The people of Israel had been by God that He would send a deliverer.  A Saviour.  A rescuer.  But for 430 years, no one came.  Nothing changed.  In fact if anything, their situation got worse and worse! 

But then, all of a sudden, the silence is broken.  But it’s broken in the most unusual and quirky fashion.  God doesn’t send a prophet to the whole nation; He doesn’t speak to the king or even to the religious leaders.  God breaks into the very personal reproductive history of a very old barren couple who live very far out in the sticks.  He’s a Jewish priest about to work his last big shift.  He and his wife are facing the additional weight of being childless in their advanced age – she has been unable to conceive – and the worries about who would provide for them continue to mount.  While he was working his shift, he was chosen to enter the most holy place in the sanctuary of the Lord and burn incense. And while he is in there, suddenly, an angel appears to him.  430 years of nothing and then boom – an angelic visitation in the very spot in the temple the Macabeans had fought so hard to preserve.  You might think that God had a special message for the nation.  Not really.  God says to the man: your very personal, very private prayer has been heard.  God is going to give you and your wife a son!  And you are to name him John.  400 plus years of silence and God breaks into human history to tell an old geezer that he and his wife will have a baby but don’t give him any beer.  The old man has what I think is a reasonable response: “are you talkin to me?” How can this even happen?!  I mean I’m old, my wife is old… begging you pardon Mr. Angel, sir, but are you sure you got the right message to the right person?”  The angel is more than a little ticked off at the lack of faith and says to the old man “Because you won’t believe me, you’ll be unable to say a word until the day of your son’s birth. Every word I’ve spoken to you will come true on time – God’s time!” (1:19-20 The message).  This is the angel Gabriel, whom we learn just a little later on delivers the news of another pregnancy to Mary, the mother of Jesus.  430 years waiting for an assignment, and when Gabriel finally gets one, the old sap to whom he appears in all of his angelic glory doesn’t even believe that it is going to happen! 

After all this, the couple puts their hope and confidence in the promise and character of God.  And despite her old age, she conceives and gives birth to a son.  Let’s pick up their story in Luke 1:58-66. Follow along with me…

I can’t help but contrast the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and their son John with my own views on and experience of hope [Our Views on Hope]

I don’t know about you, but I don’t seem to have the patience that Zechariah had.  I’m like a little kid who can’t wait for Christmas morning – if something is coming to me, I want it NOW or better yet, yesterday!!! So

What do you and I do when what has been promised is a long time coming?  What do you do when God is silent for 430 years?  What do you do when God makes you a promise in your life that isn’t coming to fruition?

As I see it, you and I have a couple of options:

1. Give up hoping altogether – many people have experienced and wrestled with this sense of disappointment with God.  That somehow His promise is invalid and so they give up hope altogether. Option 2:  
2. Lower or change our expectations – we tell ourselves, maybe God didn’t promise that to me or maybe I misunderstood.  We settle for something less than what God has for us.  People do this all the time, churches do this all the time.  Lower expectations to meet reality as opposed to believing that God has more for them to do.
3. Force things to happen in our way & time – This was the option the Macabees choose.  If God wasn’t going to fulfill His promises, they were going to build an army and make it happen by force!  We may not do something that drastic, but we sure do have ways of setting aside hope with a view to making our own vision of the future.  But there is a fourth option that people of faith have chosen throughout history and is certainly evident in the witness of Zechariah and Elizabeth.  Despite circumstantial evidence to the contrary and 430 years of silence, they eventually learned to
4. Persist in believing in the character the promises of God

The reason that this is an option for people of faith is that for those who know and walk with God is that Hope: is More Than a Wish

Listen as Zechariah reflects on his experiences in Luke 1:67-79, the text will be up on the side screens  [Media Note: Scripture is on 3 Slides]

The focus of Luke 1 and the experiences of Zechariah and Elizabeth is to remind you and I that God is faithful to His promises.  This prophetic word that comes to Zechariah as he is filled with the Holy Spirit reminds us of three key components of biblical Hope.  This first component is that

1. Hope is Built on trust

Biblical hope is not on wishful thinking or pie in the sky kind of stuff.  Hope is grounded in a fundamental belief and that God can be trusted.  And that

God is actively working to fulfill His promises, even when He seems silent

Here I think back to Meg and my experiences as a newly married couple some 15 years ago.  We were working on two big projects – one was purchasing a home and the other was our desire to have children.  Neither were going particularly well.  We were living for an indefinite period of time in a friend’s basement because the people we were purchasing our townhouse from were having a place built and it was way behind schedule so we were getting pretty discouraged.  And we had been trying for more than 3 years to get pregnant and that wasn’t happening.  And I can remember being angry with God and frustrated and asking Him “God, what do you want from me? Do you want me to learn something in this process?  Can we learn it NOW and then we can move on?” And I can remember reading in my Momentum Journaling one morning in Psalm 113:9 and the verse said “ [God] settles the childless woman in her home as the happy mother of children.”  It was as if that verse leapt off the page to Meg and I that morning. And my sense as I read it was that God was saying to me, “Brad, you can trust me with both of these items in your life.  I will do this.”  Though my circumstances hadn’t changed, Meg and we both made a decision to trust God on the journey we were on.  And God was faithful to His promise to us.  Within that year, both of those dreams and things we had asked God for came to fruition.  Zechariah frames it in this way:

- “He has visited & redeemed His people just as He promised” (1:68,70)

God has done this all before. That’s one of the values of regularly reading the stories of God’s faithfulness to His people in the Scriptures.  When God’s people were in trouble in Egypt, God raised up Moses to deliver them.  When the needed deliverance from oppression He raised up Judges.  When they needed spiritual leadership, God raised up a priest in 1 Samuel 2:35, when they needed a King, God raised one up in 2 Sam. 3:10.  The Biblical text reminds us to take hope in the character of God who is faithful to us, even when He seems silent and distant. Because God can be trusted with the circumstances of your life and mine.  He is faithful.

The second characteristic of hope we see in Zechariah’s song of praise is that 2. Hope is Robust.  It is active and strong!  Some people think of those who hope as being weak or unable to cope with the hard realities of real life.  They see hope in God as escapist.  But Hope shouldn’t cause you to retreat from life and wait, but rather to engage!

Look at the purpose of hope, as expressed in Zechariah’s song:

- “We have been rescued from our enemies so [that]    we can serve God without fear…” (1:74)

The goal of Zechariah’s hope isn’t to retreat from the hardships of his life or to look only to some future hope in heaven.  He wants to experience hope in the here and now.  He wants to serve God without fear in holiness and righteousness for as long as he lives.  This is a present hope, a hope that is breaking into the present reality like the rays of the sun breaking over the mountains.  We are getting a taste or a glimpse of our future hope now which prompts us to serve and love God and others more and more.   

But we also have to realize that just because Zechariah utters a prophetic word about the arrival of Hope, doesn’t mean that his circumstances magically or instantaneously change.  When he is finished his prophetic utterance and he looks out the window or when he went to bed that night and lay his head on his pillow, Rome is still in charge. Herrod is still on the throne. The bleak political and social situation of the Jewish people is still bleak.  Nothing demonstrable has happened. No instant change has occurred.  And this brings us to our last observation about hope…  That 

3. Hope is patient

Not only patient for 430 years, but now this promised deliverance isn’t going to occur overnight.  Yeah, John is born so that’s pretty awesome that they have a child but the bigger longings that his hope asks for are still unrealized for Zechariah.  This is because, much as we don’t like it,

Things come to fruition on God’s timeline (which is usually different from our own!)

- “Because of God’s tender mercy, the      morning light from heaven is about to       break upon us, to give light to those          who sit in darkness and to guide us to      the path of peace” (Luke 1:78-79)

Hope has been declared, but it doesn’t immediately materialize.  It is deferred yet again.  Even after 430 years of waiting, God’s people have to wait awhile longer.  Deliverance every hateful hand isn’t a present reality.  A clean rescue from their enemy isn’t a done deal.  And I think that for me, this is the biggest challenge of hope deferred. 

As human beings, it is natural to get our hopes up.  Expectations rise. Promises are that much closer to fulfillment.  BUT they aren’t here yet.  This is the Tension of Zechariah’s world and our world.  And while we wait, we face the same temptations we talked about before – to give up, to lower our expectations, to force the issue, or to wait for the timing and keep trusting in the character of a God who keeps his promises. 

The temptation I face is being patient in affliction and joyful in hope as Romans 12:12 says.  The rays of hope may be breaking in, but it isn’t a full sunrise yet.  This is the very real challenge of hope.  It may be real, it may be substantive, it may be rooted in the character and promises of God, but it may still be a long, long ways off.  Which makes it feel vaporous. Elusive.  Discouraging.  Zechariah felt it.  Elizabeth knew it – she was reminded of it everytime she heard the laughter of a child or forced a smile at the news that someone else was having a baby but not her.  The Jewish people felt the weight of hope as they lived under brutal foreign rule for generation after generation.  You and I feel this too.  It hurts. 

But if it is worth hoping for, worth hoping in, we have a resource to cling to – a God who will be faithful to His promise never to leave us and never forsake us.  A God who will be faithful to His character, even though it seems like He is distant and silent and far away.  Because Hope is more than a wish.  It is a promise rooted in the faithful character of the One who always keeps His promises.      

As a way of remembering the promises of God, we are going to partake in a time of communion.  And I’m going to suggest a few possible responses for you today.  First, is the response for the curious or the seeking person.  You might be here to try and get to know God more or find out more about what it means to have hope not only for the life to come, but also for this life.  It would be our privilege and joy to explore that with you today to assist you in making the most important decision of your life.  To choose to place your hope and confidence in a God who is worthy of your trust.  You may have been let down by other relationships and the circumstances of your life may seem bleak, but you need to know that God is gracious and compassionate and He is near to the broken hearted.  Today may be the day when you say “I choose to put my hope in Christ and trust God with my life”.  If that’s you, our prayer teams would be happy to walk you through that process.  You can come talk to me or to the person you came with.  And then move to the communion table.  If you are not a person who has taken this step, we would respectfully ask you to refrain from participation in communion today. 

For those who have taken this step, let me suggest another response: Communion as a way of saying “Thank You”.  You may have been through a challenging circumstance – health challenge, difficult parenting situation, work transition, financial stress and God has walked with you through that time.  As you come to the table today, remembering the sacrifice of Jesus, take a moment of gratitude to say Thank You for leading me through that experience, Jesus.  Thank you for walking with me.  You may want to take a moment before you go to the table to pray a prayer of thanksgiving…

A final response, you may be in need of hope today.  You may feel you are slipping – that God is distant and silent.  You may not have the faith to believe.  Let us stand with you and pray with you today.  You may want to take communion as an act of faith saying “God, I put all my hope and confidence in your finished work”. 

Here at JRCC, our practice is come to the front. Juice represents blood spilt, bread represents Christ’s body broken for you.  Gluten free option.  Michael and the team will come and sing two songs as we respond.