Agents of Hope
Notes
Transcript
Living Hope
Living Hope
Over the past several weeks we have been really focusing in on the ways and means to cultivate a hopeful spirit during times of trouble. While we are all in a similar collective situation, each of us is facing different individual realities. We all face a life that is much different than a few long months ago. So we have talked about the kinds of disciplines that we need to find and keep hope, and things that threaten to tear down our hope. The main point of all of these discussions can be summed up in our focusing Scripture for the series: 1 Peter 1:3 which says
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
We have been given new birth into living hope. New birth, taken from an old and hopeless state and put into a new state, a state of hope because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But what does a living hope mean? That word for “living” implies action. It can also be understood as ‘behave.’ So we have been brought from a state of hopelessness into a new state where we allow the reality of Jesus’s resurrection to drive the way that we behave and act. The resurrection wasn’t something that Jesus experienced for his own gain. So likewise, our hope is not something that we experience just that we can sleep well at night. Jesus came bringing a message of his new kingdom, a reality that is here, but that has not been fully realized. He has invited us into that hope that we have for the future, and calls us to start living by the ethics of the kingdom to come. We have been born into this new hope, so that we can be Agents of Hope to the world around us. What that means is that we are called to live and act as if that hope has already been fully realized.
Ruth
Ruth
I can think of no better example of what this looks like than the story of Ruth. This story takes us back to before Israel had a king, to the time of the Judges where the nation was really just a loosely affiliated confederation of 12 tribes derived from family lineage. That detail is going to be important later, so just know that to an Ancient Israelite family relations meant everything. A man named Elimelech and his wife Naomi lived in Bethlehem, but flea to another country to the east called Moab because there is a famine in Israel. They left everything behind, their land, their tribe, everything. At some point Elimelech dies. Now typically this could spell disaster for a woman in the ancient near east. Women didn’t have rights like we are accustomed to. Naomi’s status as a widow would typically leave her homeless and destitute. But luckily she had adult male children who could take responsibility for her. Those sons married two women from Moab - Orpah and Ruth. But then both sons die. All 3 women are left widowed, with no real hope of making it on their own in the land of Moab. The younger women have the option of returning to their own father’s household for provision and protection. Naomi pleads with them to save themselves and return home, and she plans her return to Bethlehem in hopes of living off of the scraps left behind in the fields of the farmers. So she says these words to her daughters in law:
Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.
Some of this dialogue probably sounds strange, so understand this. Israelite law quite progressive for its time. While in most cultures the widows and the orphans were just out of luck, the law that God gave through Moses provided provisions for these folks who were marginalized by the customs of the Ancient Near East. It was the responsibility of a brother to marry his brother’s widow if he died in order to keep her in the family and provided for. Naomi had no other sons however, so she is saying “what will you do? Come with me on the long shot that I both get remarried and the bear sons that will be obligated to marry you? Go home to your own daddy and start again. And then there is just this moment where the despair of Naomi is on full display. She feels rejected by God. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Everything she touches turns foul. Everyone she loves dies. These women who have become her daughters will surely face the same fate if they remain with her. Perhaps she feels as though abandoning the Promised Land has invited God’s wrath upon her, but regardless her goal is to make sure that the buck stops here. Go girls, get away from me… I’m poison. Ever felt that way? Have you ever felt the full weight of your mistakes, to the point where you place so much blame on yourself that your only recourse is to cut everyone off to save them from the mess you have made from your own life? Naomi is saying there is no hope for me, and there is no hope for you if you stay with me.
Now there are 2 reactions to this… the smart one and the reckless one. Orpah says goodbye and returns to the safety of her own family in Moab. Ruth clings to Naomi. She refuses to leave her side. And together they journey back to Bethlehem to the land where Naomi’s dead husband’s family lives. When they arrive there they essentially live off of the land. They don’t have rights to any of the land that they had left all those years ago. So this is the plan they have to survive:
Now Naomi had a kinsman on her husband’s side, a prominent rich man, of the family of Elimelech, whose name was Boaz. And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain, behind someone in whose sight I may find favor.” She said to her, “Go, my daughter.” So she went. She came and gleaned in the field behind the reapers. As it happened, she came to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the family of Elimelech.
This is another one of the parts of the Law of Moses that was put in place as a social safety net for the disenfranchised. It was law for farmers to leave a portion of their crops for the widowed and orphaned to take from so that they could survive. Also, any male family member of Naomi’s husband could restore Naomi’s status through marriage either to her, or to Ruth. So Ruth’s plan is, I’m going to submit to a life of humility, of scavenging the fields. Worst case scenario, we eat, best case something better happens. Well as luck would have it this man, Boaz, is rather taken by Ruth and her faithfulness to Naomi, whose return to Bethlehem is the talk of the town. So he instructs his people to take care of her food needs.
When Ruth returns to Naomi, Naomi tells her to go to Boaz in the night and essentially risk social embarrassment by laying at his feet while he sleeps. Its about as potentially scandalous and humiliating as it sounds. When Boaz wakes and finds her, she essentially asks him to marry her. Just picture this. You meet someone on your property one day and they seem nice. And then later that night you wake up and find that they’ve snuck in to where you sleep and when you are done freaking out enough to ask them who they are, their response is “will you marry me?” I don’t know about you but I’ve seen that movie, it doesn’t usually end up well right?
But check out Boaz’s response:
He said, “May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter; this last instance of your loyalty is better than the first; you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich. And now, my daughter, do not be afraid, I will do for you all that you ask, for all the assembly of my people know that you are a worthy woman.
uhhh what. This is where the culture gap kind of betrays us, so we gotta just go with it. The point is, Boaz is like hey I’ve been watching you. You left everything to come and care for Naomi. You humbled yourself to glean from my fields. Now you have risked humiliation to come seek my hand. You’ve done all of this out of the loyalty that you have to Naomi.
The word that Boaz uses for loyalty is חסד and typically it is used to describe God’s faithfulness to the covenant that he has made with Israel. It is often translated “steadfast love.” Boaz sees that Ruth shares one of Yahweh’s attributes!
And so the story goes on
So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.”
The term used to describe what happens to both Ruth and Naomi by proxy is “redemption.” Boaz has brought these two widows, one of them a foreigner, back into the family and into the nation of Israel. They are no longer outcasts living on the fringes of society, they are fully included in society. They are redeemed. And not only that, but this son that Ruth has born is King David’s Grandfather. This is the line that will unite the nation, and eventually give birth to the Messiah Jesus.
But let’s just take a moment to reflect of the character of Ruth. Ruth displays hope throughout this story. Naomi in the beginning calls herself forsaken by God, she is hopeless, sending those closest to her away. But Ruth stays. She shows loyalty and love to Naomi just when Naomi feels that God’s loyalty and love has left her. And in the end she says not “blessed be Ruth who has not left you.” But Blessed be the Lord who has not left you, who is your restorer of life....”
You see Ruth was an agent of hope for Naomi. While she did a lot, put a lot of human effort in to staying with and seeing to the redemption of Naomi, what she ultimately did was give Naomi a tangible sense of who God is by modeling God’s חסד, steadfast, covenant faithfulness and love to her. And when the time was right she pointed all of the credit back on to Yahweh saying “this hope that you had in me was just a shadow of the hope that is found in God”
Agents of Hope
Agents of Hope
As God’s people we are called to be Agents of Hope. And I really love that term because I went through a period in my life where I was obsessed with secret Agent stories like James Bond and other spy stuff. What all of these Agents had, was a mission given to them by the highest authority in the land. So we too are Agents with a mission to bring hope to the hopeless. We’ve been given authority by God to image his hope to those who can’t see him yet. Take for instance this story from Mark’s Gospel.
When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
This scene is just incredible. Jesus is preaching from inside of a house, and people are so desperate to get this paralyzed man to him that they go up the back steps of the house to the roof and literally dig through it to drop this guy down for Jesus to heal. And it’s curious because it says that Jesus saw “their” faith. Not just the paralyzed man, but the faith of the community around him that fought tooth and nail to get their friend to Jesus. This man had no chance of getting to Jesus on his own, he couldn’t move. Yet because those around him were filled with the hope that Jesus could heal him, they were moved to action, to introduce their friend to this man who would not only forgive his sins, but heal him a few verses later. In one interaction this man’s status completely changes, he goes from outcast to a fully functioning member of religious and social life because those around him acted out on their living hope that this Jesus could heal their friend.
They looked at their friend and they saw his potential, if he only met with the one who could unlock it. but what does this look like today?
Scholars
Scholars
Crystal Jones is a woman who volunteered with Teach for America, and her first teaching job was with a first grade class in inner city Atlanta. What she found during the first week of school was that her students were all over the map developmentally. Mostly however, she found that many could not hold a book, know their ABCs, or have most of the basic skills needed to start to read, let alone achieve 1st grade reading proficiency by the end of the year. But Crystal observed her students and noticed something interesting. On the playground at recess, they flocked towards the 3rd graders who were also out there. They looked up to 3rd graders. They wanted to be 3rd graders. So she got to work, and she stood in front of her class and told them “by the end of this school year you are all going to be 3rd graders!” She instituted a policy of calling all of the students, and encouraging them to address one another with the title “Scholar _____.” Every day they would stand up and recite together “A scholar is someone who lives to learn, and is really good at it!”
What happened was a complete turn around of attitude. The students were united under their identification as scholars. They worked hard to achieve their goal of become not 2nd graders, but 3rd graders. 6 months into the year the entire class passed a test, they were reading beyond the comprehension level of 1st graders. By the end of the year they passed the 2nd grade reading test. The entire class was for all intents and purposes “3rd graders.”
Crystal saw these students, a nearly hopeless situation. She made a decision about them. They were 3rd graders in the making. She sold it to them, there was hope that, if they lived into their identity as scholars, that they would become 3rd graders. And then she created a community that supported that hope, and it became a reality.
And this is really who Jesus of Nazareth is. The incarnation of Jesus Christ was like God coming down to earth and being thrown into a first grade classroom. He surveys the classroom and we are all at different levels, some know absolutely nothing about the God of Israel, some are pretty advanced but still no one seems to be able to comprehend what the Kingdom of God is all about. But instead of just packing it in and saying they’re hopeless, they’ll never get it, he does the opposite right? He takes a group of folks and says hey you all follow me. I’m going to make you 3rd graders. And by the time that Jesus went to the cross, that rag tag group of 1st graders that he had understood enough to carry on his mission. And when he came up from the grave their hope was ignited and they were given a mission to go out to a world full of 1st graders and turn them into 3rd graders. He calls us disciples of Jesus, agents of hope.
What if at the start of every day we said “I am a Disciple. A Disciple is someone who lives to spread the hope of Jesus and is really good at it!”
Closing it up
Closing it up
These people are all agents of Hope. People who modeled God’s deep and affectionate love, his חסד for all people in order to introduce them to the life changing gift of being included in the family of God. These were all outcast, the people left behind by society, yet it was just when they were at their lowest that they were introduced to something that changed the trajectory of their lives forever… They had an encounter with an agent of Hope.
So what does it mean for you to be an agent of hope to the world around you? To live out the living hope that has been given to you through the resurrection of Jesus. Well it means that you have to be active, present, and even persistent in the way that you partner with God to bring his hope to the hopeless. You were not given hope to keep it for yourself, you were given hope so that you can BE HOPE.
I know that right now one person has come into you mind. Someone in your life who has lost hope, or who has never experienced the hope that is found in Jesus. My challenge for you this week is to see that person for who they could be in Christ. Then start praying for them, and start showing up in their life. Find out what it would look like for you to live out steadfast and faithful love to them. No expectations, just being there and introducing them to the qualities of the God who wants to bring them into his family.
I promise you that by living into your call to be an Agent of Hope in this world that you are participating in the incredible mission that God has to redeem and restore all things. I pray that as you go from this moment into the world that you will accept this responsibility and bring hope in the name of Jesus to the world around you.