"Hearts in Waiting" 
Looking to the future in hope and assurance
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 7, 2003
Text: Isaiah 25:6-12
It was Friday, August the 15th of this year - a day in this city's life that will go down in infamy. The hottest day that I think I can ever remember in this city. The day of the blackout. Bemoaning the fact that we couldn't get cool and not knowing what else to do, Marial and I decided to go for a walk and get some fresh air. We were tired of staying under the pall of darkness and were looking forward to the morning.
We embarked on our walk very early in the morning. As we turned the corner, to my great surprise, I saw an entrepreneurial delight: Three children had set up a lemonade stand. Not only was it a lemonade stand but, according to the advertising, it was: “The best lemonade in the world.”
Now, my natural inclination was to ask them, “On what basis of objectivity did you come to that conclusion?” Have they tasted all other lemonade in the world? But I thought, “No.” I was thirsty and they were doing their best. And so I handed over 50 cents and drank what must have been the weakest lemonade in the world. One of the children said: “Well, we only have the one packet, and we have to make it last all day.”
I looked into the eyes of these children and couldn't help but think that they were doing what is known as “the best of things in the worst of times.” They were seizing the day - they were apprehending the moment - they knew the needs of the world around them. I also saw in their eyes the future. I thought, here we are, having lived in darkness for nearly 24 hours, here we are in the midst of a crisis, but they want to do something positive,
I think it's fair enough to say that all human beings, deep down in their hearts and minds, really do want the future to be better than the present. Deep down, I don't think that any one of us doesn't want tomorrow to be better than yesterday, for there is within the human heart this desire to wait, hope and work for something good, something better. That doesn't mean that there are not exceptions: those who are clinically depressed, for example, who, through no fault of their own, have little or no hope for the future and wonder what tomorrow will bring and are the sadder for it. We must understand that.
There are also some who, by virtue of their own desire, have what a friend of mine once called, “a rear-view mirror to life.” In other words, they are always looking back to try to find their reason for being. They are always looking back to some halcyon day, doing a retrospective in order to live in the present and move into the future. But in doing this, they become fixated not on the windshield but on the rear view mirror.
Because many people have a romantic view of the past and a desire to go back to former days, they do not embrace the future with vigour and vitality. I believe that those people are in a minority. I do believe that in most of our hearts there is a desire for the next day to be better than this day. I say this because I believe that the future is important. This isn't just my belief - God believes that the future is important. One of the signs of that is that if you look at literature - really good literature - most have a sense in which tomorrow will be better than today. I often think that Dickens is still so popular and powerful because by pointing out the problems around him and making his readers aware of what was wrong with the times, he wanted something better to emerge as a result.
Recently I read a fascinating book by Andrew Roberts titled, “Hitler and Churchill.” It's a study of the leadership of these two charismatic leaders. What made them both amazing was that they wanted to move to the future. The only problem was, Hitler wanted to move to the future with almost total disregard for the welfare of the world. Churchill, on the other hand, understood the problems around him and had the leadership ability to get people to see that there could be a brighter future, even in the midst of the current darkness. In other words, Churchill spoke about doing the best of things in the worst of times.
Now, there are nuances to Andrew Roberts' argument. These aren't absolute statements about either man - they both had flaws, they both had difficulties - but what made Churchill wonderful was that he was able to get people to look beyond the plight of the present to the future.
Our text this morning is one that looks to the future. It might sound a little harsh at times - crushing the heads of the Moabites and so on - but the people for whom Isaiah was writing were living in a divided kingdom, a kingdom that seemed to have little or no future at all. In fact, they were living in dark and desperate days and, as a divided nation, had been overrun by first one group and then another. In the midst of this Isaiah speaks a word of hope: He calls on Israel to do the best of things in the worst of times, and he says to them: “God will wipe away tears from all faces.”
In other words, even though there are difficulties and challenges now, God will, if we are prepared to wait on Him, wipe away the tears and give hope to the nation of Israel. So powerful is this text that New Testament writers borrowed from it. In the Book of Revelation, Chapter 21, John sees in Jesus the wiping away of tears from people's eyes. Paul, in the first Book of Corinthians, Chapter 15, talks about Christ giving that same hope. The New Testament saw Christ fulfilling what Isaiah had hoped for: that death would be removed and tears would be wiped away by the virtue of Christ's love. But the Gospel message and even the message of Isaiah go beyond Christ, to the fulfilment of what Christ will do for us, yet.
As we begin a new church year, I want us to look at the future. I want us to be passionate about the future. We might look in the odd rear view mirror but it is the windshield that we will be looking through and down the road, in the faith of Isaiah, the faith that God is moving ahead of us into that future.
As I've sat and thought about the future recently, and a few things and characteristics of it I think are very telling. The first is: It's unavoidable! Bill Gates once said: “There is one thing that we cannot do and that is turn our back on the future.” Unless you believe in the annihilation of the world and its imminent demise, then the future is important. It must be dealt with.
Granted, we take things with us into the future. In a sermon The Reverend John Harries preached back in June, he talked about going though a difficult transition in his life and all the things that he took with him on the ark on which he voyaged through it. In the same way, we as Christians take all manner of things with us as we move into the future. We take the history of Israel with us. We take, of course, the presence and the power of Jesus Christ with us.
And we go into that future because we know that there is no option. There is no looking back to a halcyon day. It doesn't exist for you or I or for the Church of Jesus Christ. It's now and it's the future. That's what we have to wrestle with. That's where we have to live.
As the hurricane approached Bermuda last week (many of you know I lived there for many years), my mind turned to one of plays of William Shakespeare set in the island of Bermuda, The Tempest. I thought of a line in The Tempest, then thought I should pick up the play and read it again, because I hadn't done so in years. Antonio, who was the aspiring, usurping, Duke of Milan, says to Sebastian in one very telling moment: “Whereof what is past is prologue, what's to come is at your and my discharge.” The past is prologue. It's important, all right, but it sets the stage for what is to come.
We have in this church, for example, a glorious past. What we have to ask ourselves is: “What kind of future are we going to have?” For the future is unavoidable. It is also, secondly, unpredictable. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, we don't know what's going to happen in the next second - it is unpredictable. We can plan, we can strategize, but we don't know.
Surely at this time of the year the unpredictability of life becomes all the more poignant as we think of September 11, 2001. Who in their darkest nightmares would ever have imagined such an atrocity on this continent? Who would have thought of what has taken place since? It showed just how quickly the future can change by what breaks into the present. Indeed, none of us know what the future is going to bring.
I'm reminded of a wonderful story I heard about a man named André François Raffray who lived in Ârles, France. He knew a 90-year-old woman named Jeanne Clament and for many years coveted her apartment. He met with actuaries, accountants and lawyers and decided that it would be a good idea to buy a $500-per-month annuity so that when she died he would get the apartment. The only problem was that 90-year-old Jeanne Clament lived another 30 years! She became the oldest person in the world. His $500 per month turned into $180,000 by the time she died. And on her 120th birthday she sent him a lovely little card: “Sorry, I'm still alive.”
In other words, even if you try to predict the future on the basis of everything that is logical - insurance policies and actuarial tables - the reality is that you can't know the future any more than I can. It is unpredictable.
Israel, of all the nations on earth, realized that. The people of the Bible realized that. The prophets realized that. Whenever they seemed to be comfortable and everything was working fine, someone else would invade and they'd be thrown back onto their heels. It was unpredictable. They didn't know what tomorrow would bring. You don't know in your life what tomorrow will bring.
There's something else about the future, and that is what makes it sustainable: faith. For the prophets it was the one, clear thing. Faith that what links the present to the future, what links the past to the present, is the eternal God. The constant is the love and the grace and the righteousness of the Almighty. That is why Isaiah could say, even when everything was at its darkest, “God will (notice the future tense) wipe away tears from all faces.” Why? Because Isaiah believed. He knew and understood that it was precisely his faith in God that gave him the ability to look into the future.
My friends, I think there are many people of this generation who are almost consumed with the present at the expense of their thought for the future. I think that one of the grave dangers is that if we live the self-centred life that only concentrates on what gives us our immediate pleasure, if we do not think of a faith that somehow transcends even now and moves us into the future, we will be all the poorer.
Now, I know some of you will be saying: “But Jesus said 'therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.'” (Matt. 6:34). Absolutely, take care of the day. But not at the expense of the future, and often we do that. As generations emerge we do not look ahead to see the ramifications of our actions on future generations. That what we do to the earth and the world affects the next generation. How we govern and structure ourselves, the laws that we enact, the vision that we have of society, have an effect down the road. For the prophet, faith sees the one thing in common between the past and the future and the present, and it is God.
There is one last thing: Not only is it faith that makes our moving into the future sustainable, the future is also in many ways interminable. In other words, we do not know when things end. God has never given us that information. There are signs and wonders, there are images in the Bible that tell us when, possibly, we might destroy ourselves or our ultimate end may come. But, in fact, the actual, key time is not given to us. We are to live between now and then in faith. We live in the faith of an eternal being and an eternal God.
Some years ago, at the request of her family, I visited an elderly lady who was very much in the last hours of her life. A very sweet soul. It was very moving and as I tell everyone, it is one of the great privileges (not difficulties) in ministry to be with someone in their last hours. I asked this woman if there was any advice she could give me, any thoughts that she might have to inspire me. She just looked at me and with a wry smile she said: “But God isn't finished with me yet.” She died about three hours later.
There was a sense in this woman's heart that there was something more. Oh, she knew that her earthly life was at its end, but she still didn't believe that her relationship with God was going to end. On the contrary. That is exactly the thing about the future. That is what enables us to grasp it, to say: “Oh, sovereign Lord, you will wipe away every tear from our faces” for the future is not just for the young, the future is for us all. Because the future belongs in the hands of none other than the sovereign God.
That is why I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ should always be a lemonade stand. And what the sign on the lemonade stand should say is: “This is the best thing that you could ever have in the world.” And you would, like those children, do the best of things in the worse of times, for we believe in the future because we believe in the living God. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.