Hope*

Have you ever tried to create something?

I love/hate the process.

I always thought writing would be so glamorous. There was something so attractive to it, like blankets, hot coffee and foggy mornings.

Instead, it’s incredibly frustrating.

I feel like God must be constantly disappointed by me. As if He is shaking His head in heaven muttering about how He could really do a lot of good in the world if Joel would just get his head on straight for once.

The ideas come out slow. I get tired. I get moody.

I always look at the work and proclaim in a fit that it is not good enough! I can’t even explain why, it’s simply that it’s missing…something.

I don’t know if I have ever reread a blog or talk that I have created, and not kicked myself multiple times later on.

      You should have said it differently!

      Why did you use that verb! Are you 4?

     That last part is not even a real sentence!

We are always our own worst critics.

Probably a result of our fears.

Because once you put the things in your heart out there, you no longer have a hold on them. You lose control of the creation.

People can take what you made and respond however they want.

It has to be what God feels like in some small way...

For whatever reason, this idea makes me think about a story that one of the authors of the bible recounts in the book of Genesis. It is about some questionable marriage ideas and an unfortunate slave named Hagar. and no, her name was not the unfortunate part…

Born to Egyptian parents, Hagar found herself the slave of a man named Abram (soon to named Abraham), the father of the Jewish religion. God had spoken to Abram many years earlier and told him that even though he had no son at the time, God would make Abram’s descendants as numerous as the dust. Basically, Abram was going to have a lot of kids and grandbabies.

But several years later, Abram had none.

So what do you do when what you thought would happen, doesn’t?

Instead of hoping and waiting, Abram and his wife, Sarai, came up with a plan. They decided that in order to fulfill God’s promise of an impossibly large family tree, Abram should marry Hagar, their Egyptian slave, and get her pregnant.

The plan works.

Hagar grows pregnant.

Sarai grows jealous.

We can pick up the story in Genesis 16:4-8.

⁴ He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. ⁵ Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”

⁶ “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

Ever had a situation you felt stuck in that wasn’t really your fault?

If you are like me at all, my default mode is Hagar’s plan.

When I feel helpless or out of control, my plan is to run.  I am reaching Olympic status at it. I am that good.

How do you talk about something you are trying so hard to find yourself?

My wife, Sheri, and I talk a lot about how we have a love/hate relationship with me preaching. It’s a calling on my life, but so often I have to live out the message personally before I proclaim it corporately. I had to live out this message myself first.

So to talk about hope this morning is so hard, because I felt almost everyday this week that I could not make it to tomorrow. I was done.

And if I can be honest, I blamed God for most of it. After all, I didn’t ask for any of this. What did you do with my Grace and Peace I am supposed to have in abundance? Did you misplace it? Have you checked under the bed?

It’s not hard for me to put myself in the story.

I am right there. Afraid. Alone. In the desert.

Genesis 16:7-8

⁷ The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. ⁸ And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”

“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.

The angel of the Lord?  It is a bit confusing.

Most theologians call this event a Christophany – basically an appearance of Jesus, before Joseph and Mary and silent night.

A Jesus-sneaking-in-the-world’s-back-door moment.

It makes the scene even more compelling, because it speaks to the reality that when no one else was looking:

Jesus

Finds

Her.

Think of the weight of that.

He finds Hagar. And is so gentle – no commands – just two questions:

        Where have you come from?

        Where are you going?

The questions are essentially two sides of the same coin, and are never asked because He did not already know the answers.

Jesus asks the questions of Hagar, coming right into where she is – out in the desert – and making her do one thing:

   Hagar, name it.

                              Out loud.

          Tell me the story…

Jesus did not frequently get called the Wonderful Counselor by accident.

So often, especially when talking to people in my generation, it is so popular to hear them talk about how the church has hurt them. How they don’t believe in what the “church” believes anymore.

Millennials don’t have exclusive rights to this or anything (every generation seems to get in on church bashing at some level) but with 20-30 somethings, we almost make it a sport.

But the problem, the reason it never seems to go beyond talking, might be because we are so general.

It’s hard to be honest.

It is very hard to be hurt by an entity like a church.  It’s the same as asking someone, “Who hurt you?” and they respond, “North America.”

No one will buy that reasoning except us church people. I will fall in that hole all day long.

It’s easier than reality.

The reality is, one of the thing that needs to change in church culture is so often the thing we have the hardest time with – actually saying the person’s name out loud. It’s not a church. It is a person or people in the church.

It makes me think about how a group of friends and I got together recently, and as we talked, it came to a point where we had to have a difficult conversation.

We had to actually begin to name our brokenness.

I had to sit and listen to a friend tear up about how I had hurt them so deeply. We each began to name the hurts out loud. It was incredibly messy, quite a lot teary, and in the end we came away a bit better, but not completely healed.

Forgiveness is not a once and done.

Each day, you have the chance to fall back into where you came from, but it becomes a little bit easier to not fall back when you actually name the hurt.

Jesus’ genius was that by making Hagar name the situation, it brought it from the general idea of “my life is a wreck,” or my personal favorite, “THEY did this to me,” and made it specific. It derailed the runaway train of thought in her heart.

But Jesus did not stop there.

It is not enough to say it. You have to admit what it – this hurt – does to you. This is the “…and where are you going?”

She hurt you, so what are you going to do now?   He makes her admit the reason she is out in the desert.

She is running away.

We all want to.

I heard a line the other day that if parenting were any easier, they would just call it bio mechanical engineering.  I love that.

Maybe you are that dad that is trying with your teen, trying to do it right. And you walk out of rooms in your house, fuming, because no one is respecting you and that anger is building in you. “I shouldn’t have to take this.  Who cares about me working on saving up a college fund for you, you ain’t gonna live long enough to apply there you little…blessing from the Lord.”

Or you are playing the mom / social director / food coordinator / maid /morality police / budgeting supervisor role in your home. Sometimes you get on Pinterest or Facebook and feel so guilty the second you see the highlight reels from all the other moms that are doing this whole ‘mom thing’ better than you. You try so hard, but it honestly feels like you are plugging holes in a sinking ship.

Or you are in junior high – there is a reason every adult shakes their head when they think about themselves in junior high.  It’s not because it was so easy. It’s awkward and tough.

Or you are in high school, and the hallways feel more like passing packs of wolves out to get you between classes. You never let any weakness show – ever. Because there are things worse than actually dying. But it is so tiring…

Maybe you are running, not because of someone in your life, but because you don’t have that someone in your life. You would love to be mad at someone! Love to have a lover’s quarrel with that significant other you don’t have. So you go out to places just to be around other people. You can’t keep going home to that empty house.

Maybe it’s that people treat you like you have an illness because you get the senior discount now.  Like you have no use because of the number of birthdays you have had. Everyone wants you to just go somewhere, or asks why you are not in Florida by now. You have all this wisdom to give, and no one is listening.

We all want to run away sometimes.

Yours may look different than mine, but then again, it may not. Maybe you, too, find yourself:

Screaming four letter words when someone takes your parking space in Raley’s.

Putting emotional armor on when a friend walks in.

Drinking that extra beer.

Netflixing the night away.

Staring at ceiling fans.

Accidentally eating a whole bag of chips.

Losing hours to Facebook and Instabrag.

Sighing heavily in my driveway.

Lifting too many weights at the gym to feel strong – because I don’t sometimes.

Getting stuck on tasks that don’t really matter because I am too scared to do the things that actually do.

 

I run.

 

I hide.

 

I punch objects of various sizes.

 

I resonate with David in Psalm 55:

I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.
⁷ I would flee far away
and stay in the desert;
⁸ I would hurry to my place of shelter,
far from the tempest and storm.”

I don’t know where the desert is for you. I know where it is for me.

But now we come to that part of the message.  This is the part where, as a Pastor, you are supposed to list the three steps to find hope. Where I am supposed to teach about how to get out of the desert.

I honestly would love to.

I would love to make up 3,5,7,9 steps to help you have hope to carry you through the holiday season. I could actually make up a few for us. I have read a few self-help books…in the end, though; none of us would remember them.

Instead, I want to finish the story…

Genesis 16:

9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”

13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”

I love that.

Jesus tells her, “You can’t keep running. Honey, it is not going to work out like how you thought, BUT…let me show you a glimpse of your future.”

And in that vision of the future, of how God will not give up on her, Hagar responds in a way that is so full of emotion. It pulls my heart straight out of my chest every time I read it.

You Are the God Who Sees Me.

In that moment, she stops running. Not because God promises her it is going to be all better.

Nothing actually changes. In fact, she is a slave that runs away. It is guaranteed to get worse.

Nothing changes.

Except her.

Because in the desert, there is only one reason Jesus is out there.

It is to find her.

It is one of His most endearing qualities to me. That He finds us, usually when we think no one is even looking.

And it is not a one-time deal with Jesus.

Hundreds of years later He came back, spent three decades here and was executed. But death could not hold him.

Why?

Because he found you and me…

…And would not let us go without a fight.

I am learning, through failures and running away and Jesus and his tenacious pursuit, that it does not matter what I think about me.

Creations do not get to tell the creator their own meaning.

There is no desert too far away for Him to find us.

He is the God that traveled across the stars to get to us.  The One that left perfection to live in the dust.  He left everything because of His belief that anything and everything can be redeemed.

But He leaves it all up to us in the end.

His love is so strong, that for it to be real, there has to be an opportunity to reject it.

To say no.

To keep running.

In the end the question will be the same…

In spite of everything you have gone through – every heartache and every wrong – after you have named all the hurt, will you still go back?

You can’t stay in the desert forever. There is nothing for you there.

Will we place our hope in Jesus? Again, or maybe for the first time?

Will we name the pain?

Admit we have been running away?

And then, open our hearts again?

Knowing that if we put ourselves out there, if we open back up, it will mean we will lose control of our hearts in big and small ways.  And in that loss, we will find out where our hope is truly found.

We really trust our God.