Christian Pathway

The thing I want to talk about today is hope. In the dictionary, Hope is defined as the desire that the thing you long for will happen.  I would call that secular hope. However, Christian hope is different because Christians have something more than desire, they have the certainty that things will get better. That all things will be made right.  Our hope means that we can only be pessimistic or sceptical about very short-term things. Because in the blink of an eye ( in God’s terms ) hope’s dreams will arrive.

They say that the crucial difference between a goal and a dream is a plan.  We as Christians don’t live in the context of God’s dream we live in the revealed knowledge of God’s plan.  

Tonight we see the goal of God, to make everything come together as it should be.  Tonight we see by the deliberate action of God the arrival of Jesus Gods plan put into action.   This arrival was god’s plan driven by his goal, which is to make things right. For us, it is the arrival of Hope.  After tonight despair is banished, replaced by the unique certainty of Christian hope.

Tonight in a stable Hope joined us and was made real.  This was not an accident, a blip or an outlier in history.  This was and is the sure and certain action of a plan being enacted by a living God. A God that had more than a dream of hope he had a plan and the essential part of the plan happened tonight when God became a small helpless baby, born to a refugee family, and left to a scared family, with nowhere to go.  

The lesson here is that Jesus is hope made real in a hopeless place. The pessimists, the skeptics would have seen only fear and desolation and predicted bad outcomes.  Jesus shows us the inaccuracy of that mindset.  The raw facts on the ground leaves a secular person with only the context on the ground for facts.  Christians have a wider view. We know that pessimism has been banished and hope has removed the darkness, and it has not been overcome.

I heard a question once, how would you behave differently today if you knew that you could make all your dreams come true? How much more unencumbered from doubt and self-loathing, and anger?   I think it would change you a lot, if you knew that boss that holds you back, the person who made you doubt yourself is wrong, the anger inside from a 1000 missed chances would subside because you know it doesn’t matter in the long term.   Christians live in that place because we can never lose hope, because we know in the long run we do arrive at a place far beyond our dreams. 

This brings our hope into the now, we can never act, or feel or be defeated. This changes us.

The reality for Christians is our hope, is forward-looking and forward-moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The hope that arrives today is not something that happens at the end of time. It’s happened and happening now. Our hope is not a postscript to life  or an element of Christianity, but it is the medium of the Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.”

We live in the dawn of a new day, when you wake up tomorrow you can never lose hope because God’s plan made hope real tonight. We live in the dawn of a new day, where hope should be part of who you are.

That is the driver of who we as Christians are , a catalyst for how we behave. Hope is a thing we participate in and invite others to do the same. 

We are asked to be part of God’s story, and bring hope with our hands and our feet.   He also wants our hearts and our love, and he wants them suffused with hope.  Then our job is to come into every dark space and lighten that space with our hope and our action. His light shines in the darkness and has not been overcome, because hope can never be extinguished from our hearts from tonight. God’s love made a plan, and God’s plan gave birth to hope.  We now know as Julian said ‘All will be well, and all will be well and all manner of things will be well and we know that because of what happens in a stable tonight.
Amen