Helpless Hopefulness

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. Holy Gospel according to St. John, the 16th chapter.

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Jesus said, A little while and you will see me no longer, and again a little while and you will see me.

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So some of his disciples said to one another, What is this that he says to us? A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me, and because I am going to the

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Father. So they were saying, What does he mean by a little while? We do not know what he is talking about.

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Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him. So he said to them, Is this what you are asking yourselves, what

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I meant by saying, A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me?

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Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice.

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You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.

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So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our

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Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. From the Gospel according to St. John, chapter 16, verse 16.

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Jesus said, A little while and you will see me no longer, and again a little while and you will see me.

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Let's pray. God our Father, we long to see our Lord face to face, even as Job of the

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Old Testament longed and hoped to see him, and knew that that truth would yet come.

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Yet in this life, so often our eyes are clouded by the things of this world, and so we pray to the end that we might endure to see our

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Lord face to face. You would sanctify us as we hear your word. Your word is truth. Amen.

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I remember the night very well. It was a transition in my life.

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My mother and father were going out for the evening, and we were left with my aunt and uncle. This was not an uncomfortable place for me, and in fact

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I was raised in a way with my cousins on that side of the family that we used to come and go from my auntie's house as if it was my own.

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We in fact lived over the road for over a year, and our phone number was shared between two households.

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I then had both of my cousins from that side as my groomsmen, and count them still to this day as my best friends.

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It was not unusual to be in that home, and it wasn't a place of fear. And yet something very strange took place that night.

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You see, I was blessed to have a very safe and very secure childhood. When my mom would say to me as a child,

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I'll be gone for a little while, I could bank on the fact that she was going to be back very, very soon, and there was great security in that.

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And if I'd mucked up and my dad said, I'm going to come back, and if you haven't fixed that, I was very much certain that he was going to come back and things ought to be in line.

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And there was also a certain security in that discipline also. But that night, that wasn't the reality.

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I remember it so very starkly. I remember where I was sleeping, in Uncle Terry's office in their house.

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I remember fiddling with the bottom drawer of his roll -top desk and looking between the lace curtains of the window, waiting for mom and dad to come back.

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And I was filled with a certain dread. For the first time in my life,

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I realized that that security wasn't a given. That when mom said she was coming back in a little while, there was a distinct possibility that they would not.

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I became aware that night that there was a reality that one day

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I would be without my parents. To this day, I'm blessed to be near them.

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And for the first time, only three weeks ago, my mother had all her grandchildren in her own kitchen, now that we've all moved nearby.

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What joy that night was, and this week we'll celebrate her 70th birthday. So that day has not yet come to pass.

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But as little children, it is very easy to trust. In fact, we are so helpless that we must trust, and we must be dependent.

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But as we grow older, the reality of this life tends to set in. And those things that we believed were absolutely sure, well, they start to teeter a little bit in our minds.

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And so very often, like that night, we can be filled with dread. And that's no different to what we see in our gospel reading tonight.

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Well, this morning, pardon me. Jesus calls us to be like little children, and yet the disciples elevate their own understanding above Jesus' words, and rather than resting in the promise that He will be seen again, they question, wonder, and already teeter on the edge of hopelessness instead of helplessness.

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Whereas Jesus, by His words, calls us to find in ourselves a certain helplessness that finds us in complete dependence upon Him.

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To set the scene for this reading, this is the very night that Jesus was betrayed. This, in fact, takes place probably before they go to the

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Garden of Gethsemane. John's gospel doesn't delineate as clearly as the others do, but it is in that same environment in which

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He had given to them the promise that as they ate bread and drank blood, as they instituted the supper of His own body given for them and His own blood shed for them for the forgiveness of sins, so He speaks these words.

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These are no less confounding and for those disciples no less bewildering.

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Consider it. Of course, these men had walked with our Lord. We might poo -poo them and think, well, how could they have any doubt?

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How could they have any wonder that Jesus' words would come to pass? They had seen the miracles.

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They had seen 5 ,000 men, not counting women and children, fed with humble loaves and humble fish with 12 baskets left over.

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They had seen the blind see, the lepers healed. They had seen the invalid made to walk again.

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How could these men possibly doubt? Yet these men also witnessed Peter sinking beneath the waves as his faith failed him.

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They had been given to doubt constantly throughout and this very night, the night that our

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Lord was betrayed, they would turn to their own reason and find themselves helpless and not only helpless but utterly hopeless.

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It would be this very night that Peter would swear he'd never forsake Jesus despite Jesus' words that, well, he would.

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Jesus proves himself faithful and Peter proves himself weak as we are weak, faithless of himself as we are faithless in ourselves.

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Peter even goes so far as to think that he would protect Jesus somehow, that he would be the arbiter of power and by cutting off the high servant's ear, prove himself to be the protector of God.

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Quite the opposite of who God is for us. God, who is the fullness of all goodness towards us, represent or given, pardon, not only represented but physically given in the person of his son.

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Yet our lives are entirely bound up in the same motions, in the same attitudes, in the same emotions that disciples went through that night.

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We ought not be too quick to poo -poo these disciples because we too live in this very same cycle.

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We hear the word of Jesus, we say absolutely, we'll stick to it, absolutely,

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I trust it completely and then it's not two steps out the door of the church or two steps past our baptism as we grow a little older, not two steps past our confirmation and we begin to wonder perhaps the world is valid.

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Perhaps these points of doctrine that the liberals raise or the

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Pentecostals raise or other groups raise have some validity leading us away from God's word.

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We look towards the shiny baubles of this world that, well, like so many Christmas baubles in the bottom of the bucket that you always find a few broken ones, they never last all that very long.

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Our whole lives are like this. We begin in absolute helplessness as God comes to us entirely of his own volition to make us his own.

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In fact, he comes to us to bury us with Jesus into his death and raise us anew to newness of life.

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That is how it starts for the most of us, completely helpless babes where God is for us and God comes to us through his word and through his water, bound to that word.

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So we see him with our ears and we receive him as helpless babes dependent that we will indeed see him as he has promised that his word then proves itself sufficient throughout our childhoods.

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So very often, though for some, of course, it goes awry early on, though it is inevitable that we find ourselves changing.

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We find ourselves growing older as we hit our teenage years. The natural rebellion tends to take over and the lights of this world become a blaring thing of so many moths attracted to it.

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Do teenagers run that not one of us could say that we had not been at least a little attracted to them and others more so than those fortunate to have walked the straight path, the narrow path.

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There's no doubt as we grow older, our bodies change and we grapple with the sense of authority and the changing of our hormones as we reach a certain maturity where God intends us to transform into those who would then be heads of homes or mothers to teach children and so on and so forth.

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Servants of the church, both men and women together as we grow into these new roles so often that changes bound up with the world's gaudy spectacles that would draw us away from God's word, even as we come into conflict with our own parents as a symbol of God's authority within the family.

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Our lives are indeed bound up with this cycle of doubt as we grow older.

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And yet this full cycle comes around again. And I've just moved a thousand kilometers with my whole family, we packed up an entire household, five people all into trailers.

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We've driven, I've now done 15 ,000 kilometers, what would that be in miles?

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11 ,000 miles, 10 ,000 miles, something like that. We've driven from Victoria to South Australia and back again with trailer loads of things and lifting heavy loads.

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Now, even as a young man of 42, I kind of wished I had my 30 -year -old back and my 30 -year -old legs because they would have done it quite easily.

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As we age past, as we take on the responsibilities of family, as we raise our own children, and if we are not blessed to have children, as we take our roles in society, as we become, as we heard in our gospel reading today, servants, whether it be of a boss or whether it be of the church or whether it be literally indentured servants in other nations, fortunately in the

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West, we don't have this kind of servitude anymore. But even as these roles come upon us, we become very aware of our weakness.

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We become very aware of our helplessness. As our bodies grow tired quicker, as we find ourselves being slower to sleep and earlier to rise, as our bladders will not let us sleep until 11 o 'clock on Saturday morning like so many 16 -year -old boys, this reality is not ours as we grow older.

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So our helplessness becomes more and more clear. And there is a danger in that, that our helplessness turns to the hopelessness, that we place our hope in the things of this flesh, that we think that our bodies ought to endure perfectly as if we were 18 -year -olds with the scraps that would heal by morning.

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We hope, we believe, and we desire that we ought to live eternally on this mortal sphere.

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That is indeed what the promise of creation was in the first instance. But now, since the fall, like the disciples, we lose sight.

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We lose sight and we fall into hopelessness as we look to the things of this earth, as they fade from us, whether it be our own bones, our own muscles, our own backs, whether it be in the defiance of our own children, difficult bosses as we heard in our epistle reading this morning, whether it be difficult relationships.

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More starkly, as we then age even further, our hopelessness is borne out as we bury our loved ones, our friends and our family.

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And with mum turning 70, it won't be that long until we say goodbye to my own mother, and you've all been through this.

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We become increasingly aware about helplessness as the day comes when we will ourselves pass from this mortal coil into glory.

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The danger is hopelessness. The hopelessness that we face often binds us to the efforts of our own bodies.

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As Peter's hopelessness in the face of the crowd gathered to take Jesus away led him to strike out with the sword, so often we are led into the sin of anger and violence as we fight against the fall that we have before us.

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Our helplessness too often leads to a hopelessness that leads to all manner of sin, whether it be greed, whether it be hatred of a neighbor, whether it be hatred of our brother, whether it be hatred of God in so many cases when a beloved is taken too early from this world.

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But this is not what we are given to be as Christians. Our helplessness is not to be one of hopelessness.

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Our helplessness is to be one of dependence as a little child. This is what

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Jesus is calling us to in our text tonight. It's what he called his disciples to in and addressing them in this way.

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A little while and you'll see me no longer, and again a little while and you will see me. Bewildering words bound up in mystery.

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As Job pronounced, I will see my Messiah with my own eyes, so we know this to be by faith and so we are called to depend on the means by which that faith is conferred to us.

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Romans 10 says, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. And so we should embrace the helplessness that is before us and use it to be dependent on God's word, to be dependent on the word of Christ and find in him the richness and the fullness of the hope that is before us.

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This is so very thoroughly important for the words that Jesus says, how this is to take place.

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He says, you will be sorrowful, you will weep and you will lament, but your joy will be complete when you see him again.

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Your sorrow will turn to joy, he says. Joy and happiness are not the same thing and this life is constantly a life where we are surrounded by sorrow.

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We are constantly surrounded by weeping and lament. Lament is not ever a bad thing, not always a bad thing either.

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We have a whole section of Psalms in the Bible that are Psalms of lament where we are guided to cry out to God, where are you?

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Come and save me, Lord, be my guide, Lord, be my savior, Lord, be my help.

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These Psalms are so very prevalent and here we find joy in Jesus' words, not separate to find ourselves in some kind of euphoric happiness, but right in the very midst of weeping and lamenting and in sorrow, we find ourselves in joy where we find ourselves dependent on the word of Christ and his promise.

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Well, that's easy you might say, that's easy for you pastor, you've been trained in this word, you've memorized the good whack of it, that's all very well and good for you, but how might the average

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Christian hold on to this hope? How might the average Christian be led away from despair in helplessness and towards joy and hope in this helplessness as we wait to see

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Jesus with our own eyes? Well, this is again bound up in Jesus' actions for us.

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This is why the Easter season is so long and so joyous even though we might sorrow in the midst of it.

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We know that we will see him again, we know that his word will come to pass because it has never failed before and even while the disciples were bewildered that very night and acted according to their own desires and their own reason,

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Peter even going so far as to reject his Lord with reasoned fear for the crowd that would crucify him coming for his own skin, well our reason would fail and our faith must endure and it will endure because it is not only grounded in God's word but it is carried in it and his word has never returned empty and it has never failed.

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Jesus' promises have come surely true and they will forever and they have come true for us already as his words came true for the disciples from Maundy Thursday to his resurrection again that very

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Sunday. Just three days later, what joy they must have felt, how great that would have been we might say and yet that word that came true that they would in a little while see

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Jesus again is our very hope even now. That little while might have been three days for his disciples, it may well be well 60, 70, 80 years for us in this mortal coil or it may be 2000 till the coming again of our

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Lord but the little while is not the problem, the promise is the problem.

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If we get caught up on the little while we run into trouble but if we get caught up in Jesus saying you will see me, we find ourselves at rest in this life, we find ourselves with hope in this life because the disciples indeed did see him.

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Job indeed did indeed see his Lord, we will indeed see him and for a while we see him as through a mirror dimly.

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We will yet see him in coming weeks, we will see him in word through our ears, we will see him literally in bread and wine.

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We'll not only see it as it comes to us this gracious gift but we will touch it and taste it and we will see that the

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Lord is good and his promises endure to eternity. And so we are stayed in this faith when in helplessness we cleave ourselves to the promises of God and there is no greater promise than this that your

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Lord did die for you and he did rise again and he was seen by the brothers and he was seen by 500 witnesses and he is seen by my grandmother and he is seen by your loved ones who have gone on before you and he will be seen by you with your very own eyes and there is no greater hope than that.

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So don't give yourself over to reason when you face this quest conundrum of a little while or give yourself over to reason even when

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Jesus says this is my body and this is my blood but give yourself over to helplessness and find in your weakness in your helplessness the full help that comes from the word of God that endures for you and in you until you see

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Christ with your own eyes. Thanks be to God. Amen. Kungsvinger Lutheran Church 15950 470th

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Avenue NW Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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