March 8, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

      Let us pray.  Almighty God, redeeming Lord, renewing Spirit, send your blessing upon your people, that we may grow mature in faith, hope and love. Renew our spirits that we may have the strength of will to work for the renewal of our world. Lead us and equip us to serve those for whom the world has little understanding and less care. Grant us grace to resist evil fearlessly. As you renew us day by day, so through us work to renew hope for the hopeless, love for the unloved and peace to the troubled. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

      Two New York entrepreneurs decided to see if some money might be made by introducing bungee-jumping to Mexico.  They fronted some venture capital to build a platform, where people who like "extreme sports" could dive off and spring up and down just like they do here in the states. 
 

      When it came time for the trial run, the two men climbed up the platform and looked down on the gathering crowd. They knew what they had to "do," but decided to shoot fingers to see who got to "do it." 
 

      The entrepreneur who "won" (or "lost," depending on how you look at it) put on the harness and dove off, hoping for the best. When he bobbed up the first time, his partner noticed that his nose was bloody. When he came up the second time, it was obvious that one eye was turning black. When he came up a third time, part of his ear was missing.  
 

      He yelled out to his friend, "Are you okay?" On his way down a fourth time, his partner yelled back, "What's a piñata?"

      Hope against hope.  Jesus managed to do his best in the midst of the worst. As life teaches us time and again, the worst situations can often produce the best in us as individuals, as a church, and as a society.

      Have you ever asked yourself why it is that the biggest disasters always seem to coincide with events upon which we pin so much of our hopes? Conveserly, the times we are convinced will be the absolute best often turn out to be the very worst.

      How many of you have experienced big family get-togethers – Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July – that start out fun, but then turn into fiascoes? Perhaps Cousin Jim still won't talk to Uncle Frank and the stains from Aunt Margaret's pie will never come out of the carpet. Weddings are another time when bombs of both tiny and titanic proportion are regularly detonated. The number of things that go wrong on wedding days – cakes dropped, rings lost, blazing heat, torrential rain, flowers delivered to another planet – is about equal to the number of people who wish they had just eloped. Which is one of the reasons why I ask every potential bride and groom that come to see me why they just don’t go to a justice of the peace and save themselves, their families and friends all of the money and headaches that are about to be unleashed as they begin a new chapter in their lives.

      Sometimes it seems that whenever we expect the best of times, we get the worst of times instead.

      "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  You have heard and read those lines before from Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. And these three words "Life is difficult" will also go down in history as one of the most famous first lines of any nonfiction book. Let me give you one more hint of who penned them if you haven’t already guessed.

      You got it. "Life is difficult" are the opening words of one of the best-selling books of the '80s and '90s: The Road Less Traveled (Scott Peck, 1981). “Life is difficult.”  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  We expect the best of times but get the worst of times instead.

      Thankfully, the reverse is also true. How many people, having perched comfortably somewhere in the great American "middle class," find themselves looking back on their early scratching, scrapping, starving, struggling days and suddenly realize that those were in fact the best of times?

      What makes life so full, so rich, so wonderful is that we can never completely filter out the bad from the good or the good from the bad. There is always a little bit of both on our plate, spicing up our diet in unexpected ways.

      If this "mixed grill" doesn't sit well with some who like to divide things up into neat categories, then consider this: There are two types of people in the world – optimists and pessimists. An optimist is a person who doesn't know any better. A pessimist is a person who doesn't know any better.  Yes, you heard me correctly.  Both the optimist and the pessimist don’t know any better.

      A steady menu of similar kinds of experiences should create in all of us the same response as God's promise did in Abraham. Already an old man when he first hears God's call, Abraham obediently begins his long, wandering search for a home based on God's promise. Now, when God promises that he and Sarah shall have their own son, Abraham believes. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Abraham's faith enables him to "hope against hope." And out of the worst conditions – extreme old age and barrenness – God brings the best to Abraham and Sarah, their son Isaac.

      Few people combine the best and the worst in themselves as explosively as Simon Peter. The first called among the disciples, Peter was always in the forefront of whatever was going on. In a miraculous moment of insight, Peter correctly identified and confessed Jesus as "the Christ." But, it is also true that no one but Judas betrayed Jesus more than Peter. He slept through Gethsemane, ran away at the first sign of trouble, and then vehemently denied Jesus three times.

      Yet, it is out of Peter – one who might easily be called the worst disciple – that the best eventually comes. Jesus takes the very man who is often the worst at understanding what Jesus is talking about (a trait that inspires Jesus to rebuke Peter with a "Get behind me, Satan"), and entrusts him with the very best he has to offer – the very church itself (Matthew 16:18-19).

      Jesus manages to do his best work under the worst possible conditions. After entering Jerusalem, Jesus gathered his disciples for one last meal together. There he revealed to them, "Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me" (Matthew 26:21). Then, with full knowledge of the weaknesses and treachery lurking at their table, "Jesus took ... bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples and said, 'Take, eat, this is my body'" (Matthew 26:26). On the night where all the very worst of their fears came true, Jesus gave his disciples – and all of us as well – the best of himself.

      This is the promise of the gospel. All of us, even and especially at our very worst, are promised that God can do with us the best. It is that promise that enables us to live on in faith continually "hoping against hope."

      Throughout history the worst has repeatedly produced the best.  For example:

      On his way to death, Christian father Justin Martyr penned words of faith and love that have endured for 19 centuries.

      Out of his experience with corrupted, dry-bones, institutionalized faith, Martin Luther re-read his Bible and breathed the air of Reformation back into the church.

      Lying on his back, his "canvas" curving overhead, Michelangelo produced the glory of the Sistine Chapel.

      Stone-deaf Beethoven composed music so moving that it brought audiences to tears.

      Ministering in New York's "Hell's Kitchen," Walter Rauschenbusch shook up the church once again with his call for a "social gospel."

      Feeling called to give back some of the many gifts he had been given, Albert Schweitzer took his considerable talents to a tiny, isolated mission in Africa and stayed on, even in the middle of war.

      And yet there is more.  The Salvation Army intentionally targeted the very worst in society as their concern.

      Choosing the very worst slums of Calcutta for her mission, Mother Teresa's order now reaches millions as a witness for Christ's love and compassion.

      The Good News of the gospel is this: The best has come, the best is with us now, and the best is yet to come.

      And that best is to be found in the person of Jesus.  Jesus, for the Christian, is the supreme revelation of the Holy: born in a stable, a carpenter's son; crucified as a criminal. He was born and died not on days which were holy, but on days which were made holy by the way he lived and died on them.

      Jesus did not live in the Holy Land. The land was made Holy by the way he spent his day-to-day life there.

      It was from the raw material of the everyday and the ordinary that Jesus fashioned holiness. And for ever after, for the Christian -- wherever we are; whoever we are; whatever the time and the day -- that moment presents us in our decisions and responsibilities with the raw material of holiness -- out of which the holy has to be fashioned in response to God. (Eric James, Holy, Holy, Holy, Word Over All: Forty Sermons, 1985-1991, London: SPCK, 1992, p. 13.)

      If life has taught us anything, it should teach us this:  That one day in the not-too-distant future, we will look back upon this time in our lives and say in all honesty and sincerity, “We thought it was the worst of times; in fact, it was the start of the best of times.” Amen.