Talking about New Hope

“God is good.” “Maybe the word is getting out.” “We are not a typical Baptist Church.” I heard these three statements from three different members of New Hope this past week.

Lois Cox, our Church Clerk and head money counter, emailed the news to me about our $4480 offering last Sunday. She wrote, “God is good.” Last Sunday was a special day in the life of New Hope Church. One hundred thirty four people attended our two worship services and gave that great offering.

I told our John Burlingame about the high attendance and the offering when I visited him at Sandlewood rehab facility on Wednesday, and John said, “Maybe the word is getting out!” That stayed with me. I thought, John is proud of his church, and he wants people to know about New Hope and join us as we try to do good work for God.

I overheard Judy Hutchinson say to another member of our Tuesday Grief Support Group, “We are not a typical Baptist church.” She is so right.

Let’s get the word out. If you are a member of New Hope, how about telling anyone who needs God and a good church that we are alive and serving. What could you tell people about us? How about these things for starters?

· We are learning to live by what Jesus said is the most important thing in the world. "'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them" (Matthew 22:37-40 The Message).

· In our small groups we walk beside each other and care for each other.

· We are a thinking church as opposed to one in which members are supposed to hew to a strict list of “official” doctrines.

· We are aware of the wideness of God’s mercy and try to show that mercy in the ways we relate to each other and to people who are not like us.

· God’s Spirit is working in our lives as we learn how to love each other as Christ loves us.

Healing the World

Our Minister of Music Dennis has inspired me to think about my favorite hymn on love: “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” number 7 in The Baptist Hymnal. It begins, “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory Lord of love,” and ends, “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine. Teach us how to love each other. Lift us to the joy divine.” The words are by Henry van Dyke, a popular Presbyterian preacher, poet, and writer in the last half of the nineteenth century. His meditation on First Corinthians 13 is a powerful little book titled, The Greatest Thing in the World. Learning to love each other is the greatest thing in the world.

One of van Dyke’s most popular stories, The Story of the Other Wise Man (1896), is a parable about loving people. He adds Artaban, to the story of the three Wise Men in the Bible. Artaban sells all he owns to bring three precious jewels to the newly born Christ child. All along his way to meet the baby Jesus, however, people who need his aid delay him, and as a result, he finally uses up all his precious jewels to help people and never gets to see the baby Jesus. In the end, Arbatan has a vision of Jesus Christ telling him that in helping others, he has seen and helped Christ himself.

The scenes of violence in Cairo, Egypt are hard to watch. Our hearts go out to the people who are caught up in the chaos. We pray for the people of Egypt and hope that the violence will stop before more people are killed and injured. How can we make a difference?

As people who follow Christ, we want to be part of healing the world. Jesus’ words apply to us: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God,” and “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” As we learn to respond in compassion to people in their needs and fears, we become peacemakers, salt and light in the world. Since we can’t change the whole world, we concentrate on learning to love. Henri Nouwen wrote, “All people, whatever their color, religion, or sex, belong to humankind and are called to be kind to one another, treating one another as brothers and sisters. There is hardly a day in our lives in which we are not called to this.”

The Joy of Preaching

As we begin the New Year, what are you most thankful for and most excited about? As you might expect, my heart gets beats faster and my gratitude flows for the opportunities I have to preach. Each week, I get to study and listen to a passage of the Bible and then tell you what I think I have heard. It is my privilege and responsibility to try to bring a word from God to a congregation of people who listen and try to be shaped by truth from the Bible.

Preparing to preach is a daily, continuing job. Most days, if anybody asks me, “What are you doing today?” I can honestly answer, “Getting ready for Sunday.” But, to be open with you about how I get ready, I have helpers. I remember, when I first started learning what preaching was all about, I realized that I need lots of help. My help comes in the form of commentaries, books, and other preachers’ sermons. My challenge is to keep you, the people of New Hope in mind as I prepare. The message is not a general message for everybody. It is for a specific audience: you, the people of New Hope.

What I hope will happen when I preach is that someone will hear and learn something about how to live knowing God’s love and wanting to do God’s will. So when you pray, ask God to use the sermons that are preached here at New Hope to change lives. Ask God to speak through me. When you come into our sanctuary on a Sunday morning, take a moment to ask God to use the whole worship service as well as the sermon to get truth and assurance of God’s care into all of our hearts and especially into those who have been far away from God.

Following "In His Steps"

When Jesus said, “Bless those who curse you and pray for this who mistreat you” (Luke 6:29), he gave us a challenge we will not be able to meet if we think that other people are in control of our emotions. What do I mean? Have you ever said, “He makes me mad?” When you said that, without intending to, you gave control of your emotions over to another person. You can’t bless anybody if you believe they are making you angry or sad.

The good news is that anger is a choice. Joy is a choice. Corrie Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spent years in Nazi concentration camps. She survived Ravensbruck. He was hanged at Flossenburg just before World War II came to an end. They both chose not to give in to hate and curse their captors. They showed us that we are free to choose love in the midst of an atmosphere of hatred.

Henri Nouwen described our freedom to choose our perspective and our emotions. “Strange as it may sound,” he wrote, “we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.”

Jesus is our clearest image of what God is like. Jesus is also our clearest image of what a human is meant to be. Because he knew that we have freedom of choice, he could teach us to bless those who curse us. Peter, who saw firsthand how Jesus responded to cursing said, “He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. . . . He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered” (1 Peter 2:21-23).

We can choose love over hate, joy over despair, and blessing over cursing.