Sermon Tone Analysis

Pentecost 16

LWML Sunday

Mathew 12:18-21

September 28, 2003

*“Hope for the Nations”*

*Introduction*:  “Well I hope so!”  Hope is a beautiful word but what does it mean?

A child may say, “I hope I have a teacher I like,” or “I hope that I get a good grade.”

A teenager may declare, “I hope that my friend will like me,” or “I hope I make the team.”

Some of us may say, “I hope that I will do well at my job,”  “I hope my boss notices my hard work and get the raise.”

And we often hear farmers say, “I hope we get some rain.”

There are a lot of people in the world whose hopes are minimal.

Their cry is simply, “I hope that I can find something to eat.”

I hope that my mother doesn’t die and leave me alone.”

“I hope I can find some clear water to drink.

There are many things to be hoped for.

With hope there is always a vision, a picture in the mind of what it would look like if we got what we hoped for.

None of us hopes for what we already have.

Our hope is molded by what we can’t see, what we want to be, and what we believe can be.

Carl Braaten, in his book, /The Future of God/ says, “The message of hope is that man is in distress.

Hope is an SOS signal.

A person does not hope if there is nothing wrong or lacking, just as a ship does not send out an SOS distress signal unless it needs help.”

*Looking For Hope*

            In the verse preceding the text, Jesus is in the temple where there is a man with a paralyzed arm.

I am sure that his heart was full of hope that Jesus might heal his arm.

In his mind, perhaps he could see an arm that was whole, that worked naturally.

Perhaps he could see himself picking his child up, holding it in his arms, the way that God intended.

In verse 15, our text tells us that many people followed Jesus.

In this crowd there must have been people with many different ailments, all of them filled with hope that Jesus would touch them and make them well.

Our text simply says, “Jesus cured them.”

With Jesus their hopes became reality, their visions fulfilled.

Hope is the fuel for life.

Without hope a man dies.

Hope is a universal desire.

It is not something that is only experienced in the United States; all nations, all people on earth are looking for hope.

The sad reality is that for the majority of us, our visions are often built on physical or material hopes.

We search for meaning to life but don’t know where to look for it or how to find it.

Like ships wandering at sea with a broken rudder or no fuel, our sinfulness and helplessness overwhelm us.

We know our human dilemma.

Our sin has separated us from our only hope, our God and creator.

As long as our hopes are focused on what we can do for ourselves or on what other humans can do for us, we continue to wander aimlessly in the ocean of life.

As long as our SOS distress signals are directed to ourselves or to other human beings our hope is directed and misplaced.

Dr.

Curtis Richter of John Hopkins University, discovered that if you hold a rat firmly in your hand (I don’t recommend you try this at home, anyway), so that no matter how valiantly he struggles he cannot escape, he will finally give up.

At that point, if you throw the rat into a tank of warm water, he will sink and not even try to swim.

The rat learns to give up, to not struggle and to give up hope.

On the other hand, if you throw another rat into the water, one that does not feel that his situation is hopeless, that rat will swim to safety.

There are people all over the world who have given up.

They have no hope.

They are sinking and drowning, having lost their vision; they have even given up looking for hope.

* *

*Finding Hope*

            Our gospel text today is full of hope.

The man with the paralyzed arm found Jesus and when he did, he found hope.

The crowd followed Jesus and they found hope.

The concluding words of our text simply say, “In His [Jesus] name the nations will put their hope.”

Like a boat in distress, this morning, once again our SOS signals have gone out to God as wee confessed our sins and expressed our hopelessness.

We know that there is no way out for us.

We, nor anyone else could repair our floundering ship or keep it from destruction.

As we come here, our cry is directed to our creator.

We know that without Him there is no hope.

Here we find our visions fulfilled, our rudders repaired and new hope as we here that our sins have been forgiven in the name of Jesus Christ.

We received His absolution, spoken through the mouth of the pastor.

To which we could shout, like Peter, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

The message of Easter fills our vision once again, and we are insured that there is indeed a reason to have hope, not just for now but for eternity.

It becomes clear again that to have hope means to have a future.

To have Jesus is to have eternity.

When we look to Jesus on the cross, and His empty and open tomb, we understand that hope doesn’t rest on and idea; it rests on a living person, Jesus Christ.

Man does not create hope.

It is a gift from God.  Hope is not grabbed on to by our hands or our minds.

Rather it is seized by the hands of faith, and this too is a gift of God.

Remember 1Corinthians 13:13?

Paul writes, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love” These three are inseparable.

You need faith to have true hope.

God uses our faith to give us the vision of new life in Christ, to envision eternal life in heaven, and to envision a God who loves us and forgives us.

*Sharing Hope*

            But it’s not just about us.

Paul says, “What remains are faith, hope and love.

But the greatest of these is love.

Now why would Paul say that the greatest of these is love?

The answer is clear: It is love that gives hope away.

We wouldn’t have hope if it weren’t for love.

“For God sp loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.”

It was His great loved that moved Him to give us His Son Jesus Christ, the source of all our hope.

Next we remember that it was the overwhelming love of Jesus for us sinners that compelled Him to give His life for us on the cross so that we can have hope.

Love produces hope, and once we have hope, hope produces love.

This is God’s work in us and it leads us to love and give hope away.  1 John tells reminds us, “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.”

He wants us to be the source of hope for the world.

God wants all nations to have true hope, the hope that is found in Jesus name.

He leaves that challenge in your hands and mine.

In Matthew 28 HE commissioned us to go and make disciples of all nations.

As we experience the Love and hope that God has given us, as we know again the forgiveness and salvation that God has given to us, it is not something that we tuck down into the storehouses of our hearts and minds, keeping it just for ourselves.

Goad gave us this hope to give away.

We may stagger a little when we hear the challenge to reach “all nations.

For years we have been sending missionaries across the borders and oceans and doing our best to support them.

In His love God has reversed this; today, instead of us just sending missionaries to the nations, He is bringing the nations to us.

They live in our communities and our neighborhoods.

Our Old Testament lesson speaks to us.

“In those days, ten men from all languages and nations will take hold of one Jew…and say, ‘Let us go with you because we have heard that God is with you.’”

That prophecy is coming true before our own eyes.

People from all nations are seeing the hope that we have.