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Sermon on Hope

Sermon on Hope

Scripture: PSALM 62: 1-8 (the New Oxford Annotated Bible)

For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall never be shaken. How long will you assail a person, will you batter your victim, all of you, as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence? Their only plan is to bring down a person of prominence. They take pleasure in falsehood; they bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse. For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.
Where to start? I am not a minister; I have not been to divinity school. I would not even consider myself especially knowledgeable of the Bible. My sermon title "Hope in an Ordinary Family" came to my mind while walking with a friend at 5:30 one morning. I had been asked to preach during the summer, I agreed and Chris (Emery) needed a title. So I thought, why not? It "sounds" like a sermon. After all, hope should be easy to talk about. Barack Obama has a book out "The Audacity of Hope." So does Harry Hutson - "Putting Hope to Work". Maybe I could read those over the summer and glean some wisdom. We're in a recession, if we don't have hope now, when would we have it? And what about war? Hope goes hand in hand with war. However, the summer went on and this sermon became harder and harder to write. I didn't really have an agenda, an idea or even three talking points!

So I did what I should have done at the beginning, when writing a sermon, go to the source. The Bible. What not a Psalm? After all, I consider them the easiest to read - they are really just songs or prayers, probably written by ordinary people like you and me. Although I have a hard time equating anyone who wrote something that ended up in the Bible as being ordinary. Time has a way of making people extraordinary. And that just plays into my title "Hope in an Ordinary Family."

I also considered having this sermon be autobiographical - how hope affect my family, your family, our friend's family. We're ordinary, right? Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. I guess time will tell.


So let's explore hope. It is a concept that we all know, but would probably all have a hard time defining. I hope that I'm going to get a good night's sleep. I hope that my kids are going to be well behaved at coffee hour. I hope that Milan is going to still have a job if there are layoffs. I hope that my friends in Iraq and Afghanistan are safe. I hope that our country can pull it together again. I hope that we can live in a just and kind world. This hope goes from the mundane to the existential. Is hope active - a verb? Or it is an object, a noun? (on a side note, I have spent that last 4.5 weeks, intensively learning Czech, so nouns and verbs are very much on my mind. I can only hope that some of what I am learning stays in my brain!).

The American Heritage dictionary defines hope as "to wish for something with the expectation of its fulfillment or to expect and desire." So what did our psalmist hope for? "For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him." He (or she), was leaning on God for support. It doesn't sound like the world was a pretty place then, just as parts of it are not for us now.

Hope in an Ordinary Family. What defines ordinary? Back to our friend, the dictionary, "commonly encountered; usual" or "of no exceptional ability, degree, or quality; average." When I first thought of this title, I was thinking about myself, just living an ordinary life. I'm not a lawmaker, a humanitarian or an activist, I'm not famous or rich. I'm not, as my brother once told me, "one of the beautiful people." (this being when I was about 12 years old and struggling with trying to blow dry my hair). So I would consider myself ordinary. But yet to read the description from the dictionary, I don't feel just average. And neither would I describe any one of my friends here at Pilgrim ordinary either. To my children, I am extraordinary. Hopefully, to my husband, I am the same! Each of us at Pilgrim has contributed somehow to make a difference in the world, therefore, to someone we have helped, we are extraordinary. But in the context of this sermon, we are ordinary. We will probably not win Nobel prizes or have a Kennedy legacy. We are just like those followers that sat and listened to the psalmists and struggled, just as we do, to put our hope in God and to live the way he wants us too.

I have often wondered what a family was like back in the Biblical days. Somehow, I don't think the term "family" meant just a mother married to a father and one girl child and one boy child. I like to think of families back then as large and boisterous and loving and accepting of each other. Did they consider their church friends family? The whole village? Or was the whole village actually related?


I consider our family pretty ordinary, but then again, Milan and I have 3 children, all close in age. Maybe that is not too ordinary. Or if you consider our larger family, Milan is an only child. Is that ordinary? I have 4 brothers - let me tell you, that was NOT ordinary growing up! But regardless, each of us this room is part of a family. You may be single, childless and parents deceased, but you still have a family. If you have friends, if you are involved in a church, if you are part of any type of community, you are in a family. I don't think there is really a definition of an Ordinary Family. Family represents those that love us and that we love.

I guess I found my three points. Hope, Ordinary lives and Family. So let's we go back to our scripture and think about "For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him." This writer offers hope to all the ordinary families out there. "Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us."

As you go about your life this week, I hope you will have time to think about hope in an ordinary family. We may have ordinary hopes or an ordinary family or a hopeful family. Whatever the case may be, God is hearing our hopes and if we can put all our trust in him we can expect that we will live extraordinary lives.

Thank you.