Hope in Times of Despair

The Way Forward is the brand new series that we started last weekend. Good morning, everybody. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. I hope and pray that you are well as you join us today here in Santa Cruz County or anywhere around the world. As Mark said, if you're not here in Santa Cruz, we appreciate your prayer for all the fires that are surrounding us in many ways today and your prayer for the church as we minister to the people that are right here in our parking lot and in our buildings. I really appreciate all those prayers and all your help.

Well, the series that we started last weekend was all about how we can find our way forward through the coronavirus and racism and bigotry and civil unrest and a divisive political season. How can we as Christians be a positive influence in our communities? And how can we have loving unity in the midst of all these many things that often feel like they're tearing us apart? We really need to hear about this. There's a lot in the New Testament about this. And then the fires happened.

I had initially planned to speak on, well, the theme verse for our whole series is Jesus telling us in Matthew 11:29, "Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart." And my initial plan was to just keep walking through the Gospels to look how Jesus dealt with divisive, tense situations with such gentleness and humility and wisdom. We were specifically going to look this weekend at how to have Christian unity in a divisive world. And do we need to hear that or what? But as I said, then the fires happened and our attention got diverted from all the division and the political unrest and so on to just how are we going to help people and how are we going to survive the tension of these fires?

So I am still going to get to this topic in this series because we really need to hear this. But for today I want to specifically address how to find hope in times of despair. What I want to do today is very, very simple. I actually want to return to the passage that Herman Hamilton talked about last weekend, our guest speaker as he kicked off the series, John chapter 11. I want to go to three very simple truths that we see here. I want to show you how Jesus with humility and gentleness and wisdom moves through the ruins of a tragedy and brings hope to some pretty stressed out people.

Now I won't recap the entire passage because Herman actually read every verse in this last weekend. But just a brief review from last weekend in this chapter, Mary and Martha are really facing the same problem we face today. Their brother Lazarus had been very, very sick and so they send word to Jesus to come and heal him. But Jesus doesn't show up at first. By the time he does, Lazarus is dead. He shows up and Lazarus's sisters are really looking at him with accusation in their voices and they're looking at this tragedy saying, you know, where were you Lord in the midst of all this? How could you let this happen? And how are we supposed to make sense of all of this?

And Jesus, you could say, walks into the smoking ruins of their lives with three things that help you and me make sense of tragedy and find hope in times of despair. Three very simple things that you and I can reflect to the people around us in times like this too. The first thing you see are the tears of Jesus. Watch this. When Jesus reaches Mary, one of Lazarus's sisters, she actually asks him a major theological question. She says in verse 32, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." She's asking, "Lord, why didn't you do something? You could have done something. You could have prevented this. Why didn't you?" And maybe that's a question that you're asking the Lord right now.

In response, Jesus can't even speak. As Herman pointed out last week, he doesn't try to defend himself. He doesn't go at her with a bunch of rationale and theological explanations. He can't even speak. All he can ask is, "Where have you laid him?" And they show him Lazarus's grave and then at the grave, the shortest verse in the Bible says two words, "Jesus wept. He just wept." And to me, this reaction has always been fascinating because when you think about it, Jesus really had two things that nobody else had in this situation and that you and I don't have in any of our situations.

First of all, he actually knew the answer to Mary's question. He actually knew exactly why this whole situation happened. He knew that in about 10 minutes they weren't going to be grieving anymore. They were going to be overjoyed. He knew that in about 10 minutes he was going to be glorified. He knew that in about 10 minutes it was all going to become clear to people this happened so that he could reveal his identity as somebody who had power even over death. He knows exactly how things are going to turn out. But when you and I are in tragedies like this fire, we have no idea. We don't have what Jesus had.

And then the second thing that Jesus has is actually power to change this situation. In fact, he has power to undo death. You and I never have power actually to undo anything. We can't unburn the forests or the buildings that have burned, but Jesus can actually undo this tragedy. So he knows exactly why it happened. He knows exactly what's going to happen. He has power to undo it and yet Jesus still wept. Why? Why would Jesus do that? Because he's perfect. Because he is perfect love. And he knows that this is the right thing to do for these people.

And there's two things that I learned from this. First, there is nothing wrong with weeping at a time like this. I mean, think of this. Jesus Christ was the most mature person who ever lived in history, right? And yet he is weeping. That means that crying at times is not a sign of immaturity. It's not a sign of weakness. It's not a sign of lack of faith. This week here at the church offices, I saw several of our leading church staff members, very strong believers, just put their head in their hands and sob, especially when they heard about the destruction at Camp Hammer.

My point is this. People who are more like Jesus don't avoid grief. People who are more like Jesus aren't detached from the things that they have lost. They aren't unmoved. They find themselves moving into the grief of the people who are hurting. And do you see what that implies for those of us, maybe you haven't lost homes, who haven't been evacuated in terms of how we respond to those who have lost things or who have been evacuated right now or living in the limbo of not knowing what's going to happen next?

Let me tell you a story. The Sunday after 9/11, nearly 20 years ago now with Manhattan still stunned and the wreckage of the Twin Towers still smoking, a pastor in downtown Manhattan, Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, he preached a sermon the Sunday after 9/11 on this very passage, John chapter 11, and I'm about to quote him freely in the next few minutes, but watch this quote. He said, "Jesus's tears here suggest something about our culture's need to always just fix it." And that's true. We have a culture that wants to just fix everything all the time, right? I mean that's the way it's part of American culture. We always try to fix things, but when Jesus weeps, he's going to fix things, right? He's gonna fix things.

But when Jesus weeps first, Keller says, we see that Jesus doesn't believe that the ministry of fixing things is enough. Jesus is also a proponent of what you could call the ministry of tears. There is a ministry of tears. I love that because listen, when it comes to helping our neighbors and our community through all of this, we are going to do volunteer work. We're going to help displaced people. We are going to feed the hungry. We are already doing that right here during Mark's announcements. I was out in the parking lot. Unfortunately, the audio didn't work out, but I was visiting with people. We've been having deliveries of like donuts and coffee and people are standing around and we're helping them with their immediate needs.

There's people who know that their homes are burned and they're just sobbing and that's great that we are helping them. That's all very good, but let's not just fix it. Let's also have the ministry of tears. Let's weep with those who weep. Let's let people process. Let's listen more and talk less and I love that I'm already seeing that in our evacuation village here at the church. People's needs are being taken care of and I was just out there and I saw Gracie, one of our church interns, and she had her arm around a young woman who is an evacuee here from Boulder Creek and she, this young woman, lost her home. Her home is burned down as well as the homes of all her neighbors around her.

Gracie didn't just say, "Hey, we got breakfast for you. We got showers for you. We've got toothbrushes for you. We've got some clothes for you." She also had her arms around this woman from Boulder Creek and as this woman cried, Gracie was weeping with her and was listening to her. That's powerful. I love that this got tweeted by Cal Fire yesterday about the CZU fire complex we're fighting here. They said a homeowner finds comfort while praying with a crew and you can see the Cal Fire crew holding hands in a little circle and this devastated, scared homeowner is finding, just for a brief moment, that even the Cal Fire crews know they got a ministry of fixing things but they also participate in this ministry of tears.

This is powerful and this is actually the first lesson from Jesus in times like this. There's actually a ministry of tears. Moving on to the second thing that we see here about getting through to Spirit might surprise you. It's the anger of Jesus. Jesus cries but also Jesus is angry and anger when well directed can be okay. It can move you forward. Verse 33, "When Jesus saw Mary and the others weeping, it says he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled." And the original Greek there means to quake with rage. And then moving on in verse 38, "As Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus it says he was deeply moved." And I read that the original Greek there means to roar or snort with anger like a lion or a bull. Again going to Tim Keller he says maybe the best translation would be bellowing with anger.

He came to the tomb. I'm not sure about that but I mean all of these verbs must mean that like at least his nostrils flared. And maybe when Jesus walked to the tomb he was literally yelling out in anger like no. And again that tells us that's okay. And this is so relevant to all of us because we're all going through this. People were already so stressed out about the coronavirus that they were snapping at each other in grocery lines and on social media and now this we're gonna have some angry people. But we need to direct it the right way.

Just this last Wednesday I was talking to a volunteer on our benevolence team and of course they're very busy right now and if you need help you can make an appointment with volunteers on our benevolence team. They can help you with things like food and medicine, some financial assistance. Just go to TLC.org/help for all the details. Well one of our volunteers for that benevolence ministry is a retired middle school teacher and she also sits on the board of a very nice mobile home park for seniors here in our county. It's a mobile home park for senior citizens. All right and I asked her how's it going and she said René everyone in the parks seems like they're so angry right now.

She said they're just walking around looking for things to be angry about. She said we've never had angrier renters, angrier owners, angrier disputes that we have to try to mediate as a board. She told me it's like everybody is walking around like this with a clenched fist and she says I tell them something that I used to tell the middle schoolers I counseled. She said I tell them look down at your posture right now. Your hands are actually physically doing this. She said I want to encourage you to try to just physically open up your hand and walk around with open palms. Palms open to helping others. Palms open to receiving help. Palms open in surrender to God. You don't have to go around like this inside. You can go around like this.

How do you do that? When your clenched fist is directed toward death and fire and destruction and prejudice and evil but when you listen when you start to see those things as personified in that darn person in front of you in the grocery store line or that person who just posted that tweet when you personify those things in a particular person that's when you get into trouble. Watch this in this passage Jesus is filled with rage but not against people. What does Jesus do with his anger? He is angry at death. He focuses his anger on death itself and this is the wide wise place to go with your anger to be mad at the problem, mad at death, mad at fire, mad at cancer, mad at disease, mad at destruction.

Remember the Bible says our battle is not against flesh and blood. So these are both very healthy parts of finding hope, accepting the tears. There's a ministry of tears, accepting the anger but directing the anger, accept and direct. And then Jesus gives us a third thing that you really need if you want to find hope in times of despair not just his tears, not just his anger but the promise of Jesus. And this is the same exact promise that Jesus gives to you and me today. Listen, if you are wondering what's going to happen to me today, what's going to happen to our forest? What's going to happen to my house? What's going to happen to us next? Listen to this verse 23, back when he first spoke to Martha, Jesus said to her, "You know your brother will rise again." And Martha answered, "Well I know that he will rise again in the resurrection and the last day." And Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die and whoever lives by believing in me will never die."

What Jesus is saying to Martha and to you and to me is this, I am going to turn this death into a resurrection because that is what he does. I want to tell you a story. This Wednesday, see if I can get through this without crying, we met Wednesday 3 in the afternoon with our camp staff. They had all just evacuated Camp Hammer hours before, many with just the clothes on their backs, nothing more. And now less than 24 hours later they knew it was confirmed they were all out of a home. Workplace, homes, gone, ashes. And Eric Swanson-Dexel, our camp director who's shown such great leadership through all of this, turns to one of his three daughters who was sitting next to him in the circle of maybe 20 people. And he says to her, "I want you to remember the meaning of your name, Phoenix. The bird of mythology who would die and burn up and then rise out of the ashes to new life." He said, "Phoenix, we named you that. We chose that name for you because our Christian faith tells us out of these ashes comes new life." And that's it. That is our hope.

Out of the ashes comes new life. And we're already seeing hints of it as Mark showed you earlier. Already we've seen some pictures. By the way, the area is still off limits, but already we've seen new life like they're in the field and they're in the trees. It's already like that the forest is shouting, "Have hope. We will rise from these ashes." And Jesus is saying to you, "Out of this fire, out of this stress, out of this destruction, and more broadly out of that mistake that you made, out of that divorce, out of that job loss, out of that economic downturn, out of this coronavirus crisis, God can bring new life." And Jesus, when he says this, he's not saying that he's gonna, you know, when Jesus says, "I'm the resurrection of the life," he's not saying, "I'm gonna take you to heaven someday. I'm gonna give you a nicer place someday instead of this bad place." What he's saying is he's going to heal this place.

He's going to restore this place. He's gonna take even the worst things that have ever happened to you and me in this place and transform them and make them whole again. To quote Keller again, "Resurrection means heaven is coming down to earth to make a new heaven and a new earth to make everything new. Jesus will restore everything that was lost and it'll be a million times better than you can imagine. Everything is going to be made right." And what's that gonna feel like? There's a great scene at the end of the Lord of the Rings book series, the return of the king, where the hobbit Sam, who had been caught up in a violent war and fire and a volcanic explosion and he's knocked out, he wakes up and the sun is out. It's two weeks later, he's in a beautiful place. He looks up, he sees Gandalf, who's the good wizard, almost like an angel character.

And here's what happens next. Sam said, "Gandalf, I thought you were dead, but then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" A great shadow has departed, said Gandalf. And then he laughed and the sound was like music or like water on parched land. And as he listened, the thought came to Sam that he hadn't heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment for days upon days without count. And it fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears and then as sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer. His tears ceased and the laughter welled up and laughing. He sprang from his bed. "How do I feel?" he cried. "Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel." And he waved his arms in the air. "I feel like spring after winter and sun on the leaves and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard." That's what it's gonna feel like.

You know Sam's question might be yours today. Is everything sad going to come untrue? Well, the answer of Jesus is yes. Of course, yes. Every tear will be wiped away and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or fear or fire or destruction. And what happens next in John 11 foreshadows this. Jesus goes to the grave of Lazarus, raises him from the dead and in just a few more days Jesus himself would be killed and then resurrected and all of that foreshadows the day that God will resurrect and restore the whole world.

And here's why I'm driving this point home. This is the main point of the message and don't miss this. To make sense of tragedy. Everyone seeks a storyline. A storyline. Consciously or subconsciously. We're all trying to fit all this into some narrative of the world to try to make sense of it. This is what human beings always do to try to make sense of the world. So what is your storyline? What are you consciously or subconsciously doing to try to fit what is happening into your meta narrative of life? And you got to be careful with this because these days many storylines that people are trying to tell us about go like this. This is someone's fault. We've got to blame this on somebody not ourselves of course and we direct all our anger to that politician, that agency, that person, that party.

And you got to be very careful here because often it turns out that the scapegoats were not who you thought they were. It's not usually that simple. There's the scapegoat aspect of the this is someone's fault storyline and then there's another form of the storyline that's about judgment. It's all my fault. These tragedies are all happening because I'm being judged or because we're being judged as a nation. That's the meta narrative that some people, and I'm hearing a lot of Christians saying this kind of thing right now. Like look at the coronavirus and the fires and everything else that's going on. Let's just think biblically about this theory for just a minute.

As Keller says, how do you decide whether or not God is judging you? How do you decide whether or not God is mad at you or mad at the nation or judging you, judging the nation? Do you decide by looking at how your life is going? And like if life's going bad, God must be judging me. No, of course not. Look, Jesus Christ was a pretty good person, wouldn't you say? And he had a lousy life. I mean he had so much unfairness and rejection and loneliness and death. Sometimes everything went wrong for him. So if you think I just lost my job, God must be mad at me. I'm going through a fire. I got sick. God must be mad. That's not how it works.

Listen, Jesus did not suffer for us so that we would not suffer. He suffered for us so that when we do suffer, and everybody does, he can redeem it. The gospel storyline that Jesus introduced to make sense of all of this is not, "This must be someone's fault. There is a scapegoat out there," and I'm not saying that things couldn't be managed better, you know, in this country. And the gospel storyline is not that this is God's judgment, and I am not saying that we don't deserve judgment. But the gospel storyline here for us today now is that out of this death, he can bring resurrection.

And you know, I was talking with some of the evacuees out in our parking lot about how those of us who are a little bit older and have more of a track record with God really have a lot of confidence in this because we've actually gone through a lot of deaths and burials in our lives, and we've seen that God keeps bringing good out of those things. And maybe that's why this older person was telling me why some of the older people in our parking lot right now are relatively not anxious because they've been through a lot, and they've seen how God does do this. This is the storyline.

And so if you're younger, please don't give up so much of surviving times like this. He's just getting out of bed with faith that God's gonna move today, putting two feet on the floor and moving forward, living through another day, another day, another day, and eventually it's the third day and there's a resurrection. Don't you think God can do this now? I mean, first of all, He can make our church more united than ever. You know, I've been so concerned about our church being divided by political controversies and other differences, but with this happening, He can unite us all as we work together to bring help to those who need.

And He can make us all individually more like Jesus as we sacrifice to help our Santa Cruz neighbors. And here's the thing I'm really excited about. I think He can actually make Santa Cruz into a different place spiritually. I mean, imagine what if Santa Cruz became a community where the people who lived through all of this could not deny that the churches behaved like Jesus? What if people were drawn to place their trust in Jesus instead of being repelled by Christian division and Christians standing for more of what they're against than what they're for? What if they said, "Man, when all chips were down, the Christians in this community were there. They didn't even think of themselves. They didn't protect their own stuff. They were there for us. Through this death, couldn't there be a resurrection?" Yes.

I mean, we're already seeing this. We saw this Friday. I got to go with a Cal Fire firefighter who was about to return to his line, and he just said, "Pastor, I want to be baptized to take the next step in my faith journey." And so we went right down here to Seacliff Beach in the midst of all the smoke, and we celebrated his new life in Christ. And really, what we were celebrating was his answer to this next question. Watch this. Jesus then asks Martha, "Do you believe this? Do you believe that I'm the resurrection and the life?" It's an important question because really, unless you believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, you actually don't have access to this specific hope because you only have sort of vague, impersonal hope.

You know, there's plenty of people today praying to a general God, right? I believe that God is out there somewhere. What Jesus is inviting Martha to do, and you and me to do, is to believe in a God who personally loves you and seeks out you and is willing to come to die for you and pay the penalty of sins for you so that he can resurrect you. He is the resurrection and the life for you. That is the gospel storyline. Martha says, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world." That's her response. But how do you respond when Jesus says, "Do you believe this? Do you believe?"

I hope you do because it really does make all the difference, not just eventually, but in daily life. That's why the big question here is, "Do you believe this? Do you believe the gospel story? Do you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who came down from heaven, died on the cross so that we could be forgiven, and then rose again so that God could someday destroy death and evil and suffering without destroying us?" Man, that is a beautiful storyline. Do you believe that? And I ask this of two groups of people. First, there are people who would say, "Absolutely, I tune into these live streams all the time." I would say, "I do believe that gospel story," but maybe you haven't kind of reached down deep and activated it this week and chosen your meta-narrative and said, "No, you know what? The storyline that I'm viewing this all through is we go through crucifixions, but resurrections follow. I'm encouraging, I'm hoping today to help you activate that storyline in your life.

But there's a second group of people, maybe you're listening to this going, "Man, I would love to believe that it sounds so good." Well, I would invite you to say with Martha, "Yes, Lord, I believe." You're not saying, "Yes, Lord, I understand every word of this." You're saying, "I choose to believe that." Try it as an experiment and watch what happens. Watch what happens to your hope level. Watch what happens to your optimism. Watch what happens to your strength level. Watch what happens to your ability to help other people when that's your storyline.

Let me close with a story. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached a sermon right after he got back from a tour of the Holy Land and he talked all about his trip to Israel and he said, he said, "The place that made the biggest impression on him was the very ancient church of the Holy Sepulchre." And that's the old, old centuries old church in Jerusalem that is the traditional site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion and burial. Now look at this. He says, "When he stood on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified," he says, "I will never forget the experience that came to me." There was something that overwhelmed me. I fell to my knees praying and before I knew it I was weeping. This was a transfiguring experience for me.

I started thinking in a way that I'd never thought before of the meaning of the cross. What is the cross? But God's way of saying to a wayward child, "I still love you and I'm willing to go to any length including sacrificing the life of my only begotten son in order to be the one who is the one who is the one who is the one son in order to redeem you." And then it was as we stood at that cross there was a little walk maybe 60 or 75 feet and they said to us that this now is the tomb where Jesus was buried but our guide began to talk and he became eloquent and he said, "But I want you to know that this tomb is empty. He is not here now." And that's right. The tomb is empty. Jesus lives. This is our hope. This is what keeps us going and this is why you he says can go out with new hope, new life, new hope for the future no matter how dark it gets.

Realize that God ultimately transforms Good Friday into Easter. And so he says let us not be disillusioned. Let us not lose faith. So often we've been crucified. We've been buried in numerous graves but I'm here to tell you the resurrection reminds us that it won't be like that all the way. God will bring all of the light a day out of the darkness of midnight. Do you believe that today? Is that your storyline? Then you can face anything. Let's pray together. Would you bow your head with me?

Heavenly Father, we ask that you give us the faith in the possibility of resurrection as families, as individuals, as a congregation, as a city, as a county, even through the destruction that we're seeing because we have seen that Jesus is the resurrection and the life and he died and rose again to prove it and with that hope we can face the future. God I pray that many right now would pray with Martha. Yes Lord I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God who is to come into the world, the resurrection, the life now come into my new life with strength and hope I pray. And God as Mark prayed we pray for the firefighters right now. Give them strength. Give them safety. God we ask for favorable weather conditions. God we pray for comfort, for the evacuees. God may we as a church be what Santa Cruz needs us to be. May we shine with your light into this smoky darkness. This is why we are here. Work through us we pray in Jesus name. Amen.