This is the “Summer of Hope” at Luther
Memorial Church. What is hope? Hope is current confidence in a better
future. I often suggest that the method of
hope can best be represented by the acronym, “I-HOPE.” Those letters stand for:
·
I—Identity:
who I think I am shapes my hopes.
·
H—Help:
hopeful people get the help they need and give the help they can.
·
O—Optimistic
thinking styles: people of hope see possibilities rather than problems.
·
P—Pathways
to the future: hopeful people are open to alternative life paths.
·
E—Ends
or purposes that matter.
I want to focus on the second letter, the “H” in “I-HOPE.” Hopeful
people get all the help they need and give all the help they can.
At our worship today we talked about the centurion in
Luke 7. He is a prime example of a
hopeful person. He is a man of power and
authority, of influence and impact, of worth and wealth. The Jews of the area report his reputation to
Jesus. “He is worthy of having you do this for him,” they declare, “for he loves our people and it is he who
built our synagogue for us.” In
modern Jewish terminology, he was a “righteous Gentile.” He had earned the right of having Jesus’
attention.
The centurion was also unaccustomed to
asking for help. Look at the little
autobiography he shares. “”For I am also a man…with soldiers under me;
and I say to gone, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes,’
and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.’” He is a man used to giving orders and being
obeyed. He is not a man in the habit of
asking another for help.
Asking for help is one of the hardest
things most of us can try to do. If
we’re honest, many times we think something like this. “There is no way I am going to be dependent
on someone else like that,” we think. “I
don’t want any help. I don’t need any
help. And as far as I’m concerned,
people who ask for help are weak and needy.
I’d rather suffer and die than ask for that kind of help.”
In the ancient world, asking for help
was an admission of weakness. It was a
mark of dishonor. Asking for help put
the centurion in Jesus’ debt. Asking for
help made Jesus his superior. And he was
willing to do this to get what he needed for his slave.
It is any wonder that Jesus marveled at
his faith! The centurion treated Jesus
as a man with God’s authority. The
centurion put himself aside and got the help he needed.
Hopeful
people get all the help they need and give all the help they can.
How is it that Jesus praises the
centurion’s “faith”? Martin Luther
defines faith in God as the willingness to trust God for what we need. Luther discusses this issue in the Large Catechism. He explains the First Commandment—“You shall
have no other gods.” He does this by
first asking a question: “What is it to have a god? What is God?”
I want to quote his answer:
“A god is that
to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of
need. To have a god is nothing other
than to trust and believe him with our whole heart…That to which your heart
clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.”[i]
Luther expands on this as he explains
the Lord’s Prayer. “To pray,” Luther
writes, “is to call upon God in every need…By invocation and prayer the name of
God is glorified and used to good purpose.”[ii] God expects us to ask for God’s help. That is how we treat God as God.
This pagan is a prime example of Reggie
McNeal’s indictment of the church. I
shared that indictment a few weeks ago, but it’s worth sharing again. “The North American church culture,” he
writes, “is not spiritual enough to reach our culture.”[iii]
We church people have become functional
atheists. We intellectually assent to the idea that God exists. We are glad that Jesus died and that the next
life is managed for us. But we don’t
really believe that God can make any difference in this life.
This pagan had more trust that Jesus
could heal than church people do. “I tell you,” Jesus declares to the
crowd, “not even in Israel have I found
such faith.” I pray that this critique is not one that sticks for long to the Church in North America.
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