Family Service Sunday 26th October – led by Mike Findley
Shock! Horror! Mike admitted that he didn’t prepare a different Service each Sunday. He had his themes and adjusted them for each congregation. It was autumn, and Mike’s first prayers gave thanks for all the good things we experience in autumn. And his Reflection had a certain ‘autumnal feeling’ to it.
His theme for the autumn was hope. We didn’t hear enough about hope, and without hope, we had nothing – we were hopeless, in the original meaning of the word.
We were given two descriptions of hope. The first, that everything depended upon the presence or absence of hope in the soul; that all the activity of man presupposed a hope of attaining an end. The other, that Christian hope was the expectation, sureness and certitude that the awakened soul rested in God. It was the source of living peace and that power to carry on through life.
Psalm 33 talked about human hope versus God’s hope. Compared with the hopes they might get by putting their trust in God, human hopes were nothing. The reading from 1 Peter 1 was about a living hope that came from the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, hope of an inheritance in heaven that could not perish.
Were these the right sorts of hope, or did they both have problems, Mike asked?
In Psalm 33, the hope was for this world. Most Jewish people of the time had no concept of eternal life and put their trust in God because it would bring them wealth, a long life and peace. And often as not, they were disappointed. The hope expressed Peter’s letter, for life after death, had been described as “Pie in the sky when you die”. So there were criticisms of both of these types of hope.
Mike thought that the average man in the street was not looking at a long-term future. People in their 40s and 50s were enjoying life (or trying to) and hoped for simple, regular and mundane things like the safety to bring up a family.
Mike told us (not for the first time) that he was on a faith journey, a spiritual journey. He had a destination and was on a path – a journey into the heart of God. And it was not to be a solitary journey; he was to bring others with him. He knew he couldn’t get there by his own efforts, but there was grace, a gift from God through the death and resurrection of Jesus, that enabled him to get there. It was not something to believe in the head; it was feeling in your heart and acting accordingly.
He didn’t believe in death: when we died one door closed and another opened. He’d always felt part of something that was longer than just life here on Earth and was on that journey.
If you believed that you were on a journey that didn’t finish in this life, of necessity you had to believe in the resurrection of Jesus in some form. Bible stories were inconsistent: in some parts of it, it was a normal physical resurrection, and in other places Jesus appeared and disappeared through locked doors. Whatever he was, it wasn’t a normal human body. Paul had said of resurrection, “we are all changed, we will have spiritual bodies rather than physical bodies”, and Jesus, answering a question about what it would mean for a man who had had multiple wives, had said, “it won’t be like that at all, it’s different”. To those who were there, the resurrection was real, and it changed their lives. But if you didn’t believe in the resurrection in some form, everything ended on Good Friday. There was no hope, only death.
Mike felt that the Bible was rather caught up in traditional Jewish thinking, which couldn’t contemplate anything spiritual, or a realm other than this one. The resurrection would have to take place at the end of time, which was imminent, and the bodies would rise from the dead.
Mike’s hopes were neither just for this life, nor solely for the life to come. The key was that if we let God into our lives, we became new beings here and now, and it carried on into the future when the body gave up. It was not “pie in the sky when you die”, it was a new life that started now and changed attitudes, priorities, hopes, and expectations.
So did Mike actually hope? He’d have to say, no, because hope required uncertainty about the future and he was confident about the future. Confident that this life was not an end and confident that he would be given strength to do the things that God wanted him to do as he walked hand-in-hand with God through his life. A life that didn’t end; a life full of confidence, purpose and direction; full of love, that should radiate out to other people.
So, hope could be replaced by certainty. It was difficult for people who didn’t have that certainty and many people just had a hope for the future. But if you put your hand in God’s hand and walked together through life, that strength would become greater and greater. The hope would be progressively diminished as certainty got greater and greater.
So hope was essential for people; but it was the belief in where you were going and that you would have God’s presence with you to face whatever was thrown at you in life that was the Christian hope, hope that came from experience of God’s presence with us.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 