Sermon for April 27th

Not too long ago there were many questions about what direction this church, Saint Peters, should go in the future. Should there be a part-time pastor or a shared ministry with another church or denomination? What kind of leader did you all want or need? Was there enough people coming to church here to make this a viable ministry? Should you follow the advice and suggestions of your synod leadership or follow a different path? Many of you wrestled with these options and decisions a lot during those long twenty months.

God had some amazing plans for both Saint Peters Lutheran Church and you, the people who worship here. Instead of losing your identity, God gave you a new sense of your hope even as you dealt with various kinds of suffering, fear and anxiety. It appears that God gave you all some strong convictions, the council, the call committee, and the congregation. A very specific sense of hope. But what was this hope and how did you get it?

We often think that hope comes through positive thinking or something like this. Or maybe by coming up with fancy new vision statements that talk about how glorious we would like our church, our community or ourselves to look. We hope in ourselves and our abilities to make things happen. But, despite many popular beliefs, hope isn’t kindled by getting excited enough to start a fire in your soul. Hope comes out of suffering, out of despair and even out of death. As Samuel points out, “The Lord kills and then he makes alive. He brings down to the grave and then he raises up.”

What was your hope and how did you get it? Hope, for Saint Peters, came out of twenty months with no full-time pastor, lots of soul searching and many hard decisions. What was your hope? I’m not sure how you would put it in words, but this is what I have been hearing. God’s Word was needed here. There was ministry to be done here. Here at Saint Peters Evangelical Lutheran, a little church out in the country, in Cornwall Village.

What was your hope? There was hope that God’s Word was needed not only for the people of Saint Peters, the adults, the children, the high school youth, the families, but also for the community. There was hope that God’s Word could be shared with people who lived in and around Cornwall who had never heard or believed in Jesus Christ. There was hope that God’s Word could be shared with the surrounding communities: Kent, Sharon, Falls Village, Canaan, Lakeville, Salisbury, Torrington, Warren, New Preston, Bantam, Litchfield and Goshen.

You called out as a congregation to God and lived through a difficult twenty month journey full of both hope and suffering. During that time, from what I have heard, you often had to do what your namesake, the original Saint Peter, talks about in the second reading today, you had to “make your defense before others to account for the hope that was in you.” It would probably have been easy to just let someone else make decisions for you, but God gave you a different kind of hope. Sometimes you had to defend your hope in front of others who disagreed with you. And if this hope had been created in some committee meeting, as a way to make yourselves look better, you wouldn’t have had much to stand on, but this hope was forged in the fires of suffering. This was more than a hope for survival but a hope to serve.

God gave you hope once in the midst of suffering. A hope that there was ministry here to do in Cornwall and all of Northwest Connecticut. What are God’s hopes now for Saint Peters?

How can we know, you might say? Maybe this all sounds very wishy washy to you and you want something more concrete. How can you know? Well, I’m glad you asked. God doesn’t want you to speculate about what he thinks, or make something up that sounds good—God has revealed his promises for you, his hopes and dreams. But in order for you to listen, you need to know how God speaks. Where can you find God’s Word? How can you know what he has revealed?

First of all, God’s Word is present in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus points out your sin, since he was crucified for your sake, and he points out your final hope, the resurrection of you when you die one day. Our hopes and dreams usually look quite wonderful and flashy—something glorious. God’s hopes and dreams often look different. They are hidden in suffering. God sent Jesus to die for you to give you faith. Jesus was glorified in crucifixion. Faith. Crucifixion. Not fancy for hopes and dreams. Jesus makes it clear that it’s not up to you, or Saint Peters church, or any church to save anyone. We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. God does the faith making. God gets the glory, not us. You don’t have to hope in yourselves or your own ideas and abilities. You may hope in God.

God also speaks to you in another way. Through the Bible. You can listen to God by reading the Bible or having it read to you. You can hear God’s hopes and dreams, his promises revealed, throughout the pages of the Bible. For instance, he said to Abraham, “You shall be the Father of many nations.” He said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Reading the Bible, God’s Word, helps you to be able to understand how God speaks. Knowing the stories of the Bible makes it easier to discern God’s hopes and dreams and differentiate them from your own. God may or may not do what we dream, but he has bound himself to keep the promises he has made and revealed. However, not every promise and demand is for you, so you must learn to distinguish when you are being spoken to.

This is why God also speaks through the spoken word. As Paul says in the book of Romans, “Faith comes through hearing.” God has called me to be your pastor and speaks to you using me, even with all my faults and sins. It is my call to study God’s Word proclaimed in the past, and speak it again for you today. Reading that Jesus forgave sinners in Galilee is one thing, but I am now applying that promise to you. Today, you can be assured that you have been made right with God on account of Jesus. God’s promises aren’t stuck in the past, they are present tense. And when you hear me speak those words of promise, you can trust that those words are God’s words and not my own.

Listening to the sermon, and the children’s sermon, are ways to hear God’s hopes and dreams for you. Listening to the hymns sung and the liturgy is another way to hear God’s promises. I pray that you will come to worship as often as you can to hear God speak to you. So that you can hear God’s hopes for you and this church’s ministry.

Another way God speaks is through people other than preachers and pastors. Martin Luther called this, the care and consolation of the saints. “For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, “Jesus says, “I am there with them.” When you are gathered together in your homes or at the park or at a council meeting, take a moment to pray for Saint Peters and to discuss where God may be leading your church’s ministry. What are God’s hopes and dreams for Saint Peters? What has he revealed in his Word?

This does not mean that just because you have a very religious dream one night that everyone needs to jump on board your one particular idea. We are listening for God’s hopes and dreams, not our own. We are listening for God’s promises. Then we will hold him to those promises! God may indeed be pulling you in a particular direction, but if that is the case. Pray continually about it. Ask others to pray about it. It might take some time. Test your ideas with the Bible in front of you during a daily devotion. Test your ideas when you listen to a sermon or a sing a hymn.

Here at Saint Peters, there are opportunities for you to get comfortable hearing God’s Word. Tuesday nights, starting in May, you can come and learn God’s Word in the Bible. Sunday mornings you can come and hear God’s Word sung and preached. After church you can come and have fellowship with others. Between services, at Lutheran 101, you can come and learn to hear the difference between what God does for you and what he demands from you. Thursday afternoons you can come and pray to God for hope during a group prayer time. These programs are available to strengthen your faith and knowledge of what God’s hopes and dreams are for you and your ministry here at Saint Peters. God does not expect you to have hope, he gives you hope.

God has blessed this congregation with hope before and he will do it again. But we aren’t hoping for our own glory. We aren’t hoping for our church’s glory. You don’t need to hope in yourselves, you may hope in God. And since he was glorified by dying on a cross, we shouldn’t expect to get too far into the future without a great deal of suffering as well.

Martin Luther said that suffering was one of the marks of the church. But, as Paul says in Romans. “We even boast in our sufferings knowing the suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” This is how God works. Always finds a way to create life out of death.

The Israelites constantly reminded each other about how God had brought them out of Egypt and carried them through the forty years in the Wilderness. I want to constantly remind you that God has indeed seen you through these last twenty months and is still working. God says in the book of Jeremiah, “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” God does not expect you to have hope already or to know exactly where this ministry should go from here, he has revealed his promises to give you hope. You don’t need to hope in yourselves, you may hope in God.

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth says the Lord; it shall not return empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”