Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Let us pray.
Dear Heavenly Father, open our ears to your words. We are here even lower than we have been for many, many years, buried beneath ash and pain and destruction and our own homes in some cases, and a guilt and regret for all the things we should have done before. O Lord, open our ears to your words, you who are everlasting, sturdy, dependable, always there for us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
The reading this morning is from Romans 8:22 to 27.
Now we know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies, for in hope we were saved. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what one already sees. But if we hope for what we do not see, we will wait for it with patience.
Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought. But that very spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. And God, who searches our hearts, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Good morning, everybody.
I want to start off today by telling a little story that I have not told very often. In fact, I had to get Lynette permission to tell this story because it is the story of my son's birth from just over a year ago.
Lynette and I had decided that we were going to try for a home birthday. And I know that's kind of untraditional or maybe the most traditional thing possible, but for a number of reasons, it felt like the right decision for us. We watched all of the video courses and we met with our midwife. And I learned all of the counter pressure techniques so that I could at least try not to be useless in there when the time came. We were actually really excited and hopeful for this birthing experience to pan out just the way we had envisioned.
When the time finally came, Lynette weathered three days of contractions and 28 hours of active labor that stretched over multiple sleepless nights.
That baby just wasn't coming.
We found out later that our son had pulled his little fist up next to his head and he just refused to move it. So utterly exhausted. And with Lynette in a lot of pain, we finally made the decision late at night to go to the hospital and get the epidural and see if that helps. So we had A nice, calm, relaxing drive to Huntington. No, that's not how it happened. We had a chaotic, panicked, speeding drive from here to the hospital with Lynette in the passenger seat, groaning and screaming and hanging onto that little handle above the window and. And me playing out some sort of action movie fantasy, going on 48 hours with no sleep. I'm not going to say I was running red lights, but I might have been treating them more like stop signs, kind of a look both ways and go kind of deal.
I was gripped with this fearful thought that this baby would not come for the past three days. Watch him come in the car right now.
Thankfully, he didn't. But Lynette was feeling it. I mean, she couldn't stand. She could barely speak between contractions. So we peeled up to the front of the hospital. I jumped out. I helped Lynette get out of the car and up through the doors. And I don't think for a second that the valet service may have already ended for the night or that I should probably turn off my car or at least lock it.
Thank God our midwife followed behind us 30 minutes later or so and discovered our car there in front of the hospital, running with the door still open.
She recognized it. She turned it off, locked it up for us.
So we rushed inside, and they made us fill out a bunch of paperwork, which Lynette was not happy about. She was like, we need this baby to come right now. We don't have time for this. But as the doctors finally came in and we were able to look at everything, they discovered that the baby's heartbeat was decelerating during each contraction. And no matter what they did, he seemed to be stuck in the birth canal.
So it was an emergency Caesarean. I was instructed to wait in the hallway while they prepared Lynette for surgery. I was all alone. Nothing I could do to help except sit there and pray.
And I wish I could tell you this morning that I held on to this unshakable faith that everything would be okay. God's got this. I wish I could say that I sang hymns in the hallway and praised God, but I didn't. I think I accused God of some things. Something along the lines of, like, what are you doing? Why are you letting this happen? I feared for the worse. What if the baby doesn't make it? What if there's complications with Lynette? What if. What if the baby survives, but there's some sort of irreparable damage?
And then I got to the point where I just had no words left. Nothing I could say could capture what I was feeling in the moment or what I needed from God.
I was exhausted and all I could do was groan in desperate, helpless reliance on forces outside of my control.
Please, please, Jesus.
Has anyone else felt a sense of that these past couple weeks?
Or maybe at other critical, desperate times in your life when words fail and it feels like you're just clinging onto hope by a thread?
Now this story has a happy ending. I can praise God. The C section was successful with no complications. Baby and mama were both healthy. You'll probably hear him scream at some point today. We actually just celebrated Luke's first birthday right before Christmas. But man, I will never forget that feeling of helplessness, running out of words to pray, sitting in that hallway with nothing but a desperate hope.
This passage we read Today from Romans 8 is about hope.
And I think sometimes when we talk about hope, we might imagine hope being kind of this, like, giddy excitement, you know, like a kid on Christmas Eve just hoping for that special toy to be under the Christmas tree in the morning. I love that kind of hope. There's a place for that.
But that kind of hope doesn't always describe my relationship with God or the realities of life.
Other times I feel like in Christian circles we kind of talk about hope in a way that can almost be dismissive. I don't know if this has been your experience, but I feel like I've heard people use hope to brush aside grief or disappointments or any emotion that isn't happy. We gotta have hope. Keep your head up. We can't lose hope, right?
And I think it's well meaning and there's some truth there. But I'm not sure if that is the full picture of how Scripture describes hope.
Romans 8:22 starts by saying, we know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, groaning under the weight of a broken world. We see it in earthquakes and floods and the aftermath of war, and yes, in fires. Groaning, knowing this isn't the way the world was meant to be.
And not only creation, Romans says, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. We who Christ has already begun a good work in, groan along with creation, longing for the completion of what Christ is going to do. We groan, we grieve. We feel deep in the core of who we are that things are broken, that there's a better reality out there that's coming. But this isn't it.
It's like Feeling this great homesickness for a place we've never been, and yet we recognize it. We long for a reality here in our world that is not our full reality. Yet, Romans goes on. For in hope, we were saved. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
You see, hope is about what we don't possess. And this is actually what I love about hope. You can't have hope without admitting something is wrong. Something is missing. Of course it is. There's gotta be something better than a world where wildfires rage and bombs continue to fall and children starve and injustice goes unchecked. There's gotta be true hope doesn't demand that we stick our heads in the sand and insist everything's okay, everything's fine. In fact, true hope says everything is not fine. That's the only way we can have hope for something else.
Church, let me tell you.
Your grief is not a sign hopelessness or lack of faith.
Your grief is not a sign of hopelessness or lack of faith. In fact, the Bible says the Spirit groans with you.
Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought. But that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep to for words.
All of creation is groaning, and we are groaning. And the Holy Spirit is groaning with us, grieving with us, praying with us, hoping with us. Just imagine that the third person of the Trinity, God. God, self interceding for you, praying for you.
God knows what you're feeling and what you're afraid of and what you've lost and what you need. And God is great. Groaning with you, translating those prayers when words just don't begin to come close.
I don't know about you, but there's a comfort in that. For me and Church. This is the whole crux of the matter. This is the only reason why we hope. It's not because we're naturally optimistic people. Hope has nothing to do with optimism. It's not because we look at our circumstances and see the way things get better. If I just do this and that, then I see a way out. No, this kind of hope isn't playing the odds. This kind of hope is recognizing who God is.
Later, in Romans, Paul goes on to say, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in God so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our God is a God of. Of hope. That is who God is.
And when we trust in this God, hope overflows from us not by our own capacity for positive thinking, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, who groans with us even when we have no words left, even when we've lost all strength to carry on, even when we're filled with grief and have nothing left to give, the God of hope still fills us with hope past the brim, overflowing to our communities and those around us. And we can grieve and we can be disappointed and we can be angry and we can be lost and confused and scared, and we can still have hope because that's who God is.
You cannot separate hope from God. You cannot lose hope any more than you can lose God and my beloved friends, you cannot lose God.
My favorite verse in the whole Bible comes right after the section we read today, Romans 8:38. Paul writes, For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I can add, not fires, not winds, not blackouts, not droughts, not depression, not anxiety, not moments of wavering faith, not exhaustion, not guilt, not grief. Nothing can separate us from the unwavering, unstoppable love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, empowered to us by the Holy Spirit.
This is what our hope is in.
We see this love play out in the cross, and we see this hope come to life in the resurrection. And through the resurrection we receive a promise that God will make all things new, all things for you and me, all of creation.
In just a moment we're going to sing a hymn that hopefully, you know My hope is built on nothing less and I want to pay special attention to the lyrics today.
My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Blood and righteousness. Verse 2 says, when darkness veils his lovely face I rest on his unchanging grace in every high and stormy gale My anchor holds within the veil his oath, his covenant his blood supports me in the overwhelming flood when all around my soul gives way he then is all my hope and stay over the last couple weeks, I have felt my soul give way on numerous occasions.
The gut punches as I hear news about so many of you and what you've lost. Seeing videos and photos of the devastation, piecing together the repercussions of this tragedy on so many aspects of life, from school to churches to jobs to homeless rates to the environment.
But as we grieve it all.
We can rest on the unchanging grace and hope in Jesus, looking back at who God is, who God has always been, so that we can look forward.
Our God is a God of hope, and our hope is in Jesus.
Pray with me.
Dear Lord God, we thank you for being big enough to hold all of our grief and anger and disappointment and confusion.
We thank you for being a God of hope through it all.
God, we pray that we would overflow with hope, that that hope would touch not only our lives, the lives of our families, our friends, our communities, our neighborhood, the people who need it, that they would get a glimpse of your unwavering, unchanging love.
In Jesus name, Amen.
