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Finding Hope

/ Simon Hansford / Leave a comment

The news is unrelenting, compelling. The final throes of the presidential election in the United States are being played out and the improbable – indeed what some believed, impossible – has happened. I will leave it to more able and seasoned commentators to ask the why and wherefores of electing Donald Trump and not electing Hillary Clinton.

I want to ask about hope.

It seems that, for many who chose to vote for Mr Trump, hope was a motivator. People hope their lives will change, that their lot will improve. Some hope that their country will find a new direction, or perhaps return to what they believe their country looked like before. Before President Obama, or the Presidents Bush, before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, before the Twin Towers, before globalisation, or just simply, intangibly, before.

For many, life has become increasingly hard, and the changes with which they are confronted have become remorseless. It is these people who have found no sense of hope with what they perceive as “the system”, so they have turned elsewhere, leaving a fractured system in their wake. Systems are, by their nature, dispassionate, whether they are markets, or computers, or flow charts.

The people who believe they are ignored, or rejected, have chosen someone they hope will attend to them. Those who believe they are regularly placed last have elected someone they hope will place them better than last.

It is too easy – and false – to typecast these many millions of people as uneducated, or racist, or wrong. The temple erected for them by the system, of trade liberalisation and market worship, has proved an empty shell for many who were told to believe. Is it a coincidence that Jesus prohope-nearphesies the fall of the temple immediately after an impoverished widow puts her last coins in the temple coffers?

Hope is realised when people know they have value – and any system will fail them there. The best sermon means nothing if the preacher has no integrity – integrating words spoken and life lived. Anyone who claims to offer hope by blaming others, by scapegoating or punishing, is not offering hope, but hatred.

The temple is not worthy of your faith. You’ll find no hope in a building, you’ll find it in God’s act in Jesus Christ. Jesus did not simply notice wounds, he healed them. He did not simply name the lost, he embraced them. Jesus did not simply identify the broken, he identified as one of them, and in so doing, saved us all.

On this day, when I don’t understand how this result can have happened, I place my hope in the one who invests everything in the whole creation – to give life.

This I believe, and therefore I have hope:
the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end.

Telling Stories

/ Simon Hansford / Leave a comment

As we wander further into these parables which Jesus offered about the Reign of God, I found myself wondering about what happened next. There are these earthy, mystifying stories about yeast and seeds of all kinds, hidden and discovered treasures, banquets for everyone.

Surely one of the reasons the parables have lasted is that they ask – even require – something of us, and the essentially elusive nature of them is that even though the images and the language appear familiar, there always appears something more secreted within.

So when they heard these parables, did the crowd go home and forget them, or 1525024_684201968268610_2101234615_ndid they wrestle with them? Did they head back to work, or to the pub, or the saleyards and tell their friends what they had heard? When they were shocked by the parable of the Samaritan, or angered by the equal-wage-paying landowner, surely they argued about it after worship?

Parables like this week’s story of the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus, at his door, ask questions of us which grow increasingly uncomfortable the longer we consider them.

It’s not just about money, though it is about money. It’s not about eternity, though eternity gets a guernsey. It’s also about how – and if – we change. The rich bloke is on a rotisserie and he still thinks Lazarus, who is in the harps and angels section of the plane, is his servant. His concern is for his brothers and not for those who suffer in the life he has just vacated.  The parable, like so many others, asks us to consider changing how we live.

Surely, it’s the urging of the Spirit of God; it’s reading and addressing Scripture and engaging with others on the same journey. It’s paying attention to what God says and seeking help from God to live it out.

The parables encourage us to talk about our faith, about the implications of God’s action and presence in the world. When the reign of God is measured out in coins, sheep and recalcitrant children, it has something in common with the common things of our lives. Sharing our faith needs to be a conversation, not a shouting match, or an argument with no shared ground.

What if Jesus told them this parable, “The reign of God is like the worldgospel-offensive wide web. It’s beyond our touch, and yet it is everywhere, influencing our homes, our work, our lives.” Suddenly we have a point of conversation that is relevant to the people we know.

Jesus Christ’s presence in the world makes sense now – not only in an agrarian culture two thousand years ago, or in the highly churched Australia of the 1950s.

Is following Jesus like being on Twitter, or is there something more involved? A young friend once mentioned that “we need to download the Holy Spirit into our emotional hard drives”; that probably makes more sense to most of us than being “baptized in the Holy Spirit”.

When we find ways to converse with our friends about our faith, then we can share about our wasteful, extravagant, generous and forgiving God in stories that are part of their lives and not just ours.

Let’s keep the conversation going.