This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
Keep Your Fork
DATE: April 11, 1999
SERVICE: Easter II
TEXT: 1 Peter 1:3-9
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

"Last year I hoped that the Indians would make it to the World Series. They didn't.
"I also hoped that my investments would do well enough to sustain dreams of early retirement. They didn't.
"I occasionally hope that creative types will use their talents to produce the kind of art and music and television and movies that uplift our spirits and inspire us to try to be better than we are. Last I checked there is still a Warner Brothers Television Network."
"I had hoped that after a really fun Easter Service, Faith would be in the black financially finally, but the financial secretary informed me, we aren't."
"When my father-in-law found out he had pancreatic cancer, I hoped that he would be able to beat it following surgery. He didn't.
"I had hoped the holocaust in Kosovo would be settled at the Peace Table. It wasn't."
When you feel like the patron saint of lost causes, it is easy to ask whether God has abandoned us, or whether God is there at all.
This is precisely what was beginning to happen among the Christians Peter addresses in today's passage. They were new Christians who were in danger of giving up their faith because of the hostility and persecution they faced. What could they do? What can we do?
We have three choices. There are simply no other choices, only variations and combinations of these three:
Choice #1: We can abandon all hope.
Choice #2: We can pretend things aren't that bad.
Choice #3: We can believe that it's all part of the Big Plan.
Let's take a closer look at each one. But before we do, let us pray: Dear God, it's a long way to victory. We are a people of the quick fix and the short run. Long hauls are not our forte. Thank God you are in it for the long haul. Thank you for hanging in there with us when we want to give up. Thank you for keeping the faith. AMEN
The first choice--abandoning all hope--leads to bitterness or insanity. If we really took the enormous suffering of the world to heart, and saw no way out, no final justice or redemption, we'd either become embittered in our despair, or we'd crack under the strain, which suggests this is not a good choice.
The second option-- pretend things aren't that bad--is a much more common choice than the first. Pretending things aren't that bad shows itself in either naīve optimism or willful attempts to remain blind to other people's suffering. Some naīvely optimistic pretenders are optimistic for themselves, as they believe the bad stuff only happens to other people who somehow deserve it - the "you-smoked-for-30-years-so-you-deserve-your-cancer" school of thought. These are very unpleasant people to be around when you're suffering, and they don't tend to do too well when suffering finally catches up to them, either. They get stuck on the question: "What did I do to deserve this?"
Other naīvely optimistic pretenders are optimistic for the sum total of humanity, believing that we can create our own paradise on earth if we just work at it together. But even if this were possible - and every bit of evidence in the history of humanity says it isn't - this future paradise wouldn't undo all of the pain and suffering and crushed hope of the past.
On the other hand, blind pretenders simply try to ignore pain as much as possible, usually by running away - making a break for it, an escape attempt - from suffering. White flight from the inner city to the suburbs; lying in the sun in Cancun; getting hammered on booze; sniffing cocaine.
The third choice--believing that it's all part of the Big Plan--is Peter's choice. In this letter written to despairing Christians 2,000 years ago, he reminds them that their real hope lies in resurrection, that no matter what happens in this life, Christ has won for them an inheritance in heaven that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading. I think most do-good Christians fall within this explanation.
Yet Peter's choice is equipped with its own problems. These days, when Christians answer crushed hope with talk of heaven, they're often accused of rationalizing inaction, of being pie-in-the-sky idealists or escapists who can't deal with reality. Christians with hope hear things like, "That's all well and good, but it doesn't really put food on the table, or pay the rent, or cure my cancer, does it?" Modern Christians are supposed to be activists, not escapists.
Did Peter's own resurrection hope lead him to be an activist or an escapist? The snapshot we have of Peter prior to Christ's resurrection is of a coward, a fearful man who essentially ran away - the consummate escapist. Remember that Peter was the brash apostle who swore he would never betray Christ, and then denied him three times before the cock crowed.
After the Resurrection, however, we see one of the early Church's great leaders, one might even say an activist, a man who faced his own martyrdom with the guts to ask to be crucified upside down because he wasn't worthy to die the same way Christ died.
The fact that Peter probably wrote today's passage shortly before his martyrdom suggests that it is not only his response to despairing Christians but a confession of his own ultimate hope at a time the Roman state was crushing his worldly hopes. Resurrection hope turned this escapist into a martyr-activist, a man who sought no escape. In fact, much of the rest of 1 Peter contains his instructions on how to act as believers. Peter doesn't seem to find any inconsistency between resurrection hope and Christian action in this world.
But that's not all. We can embrace suffering as Christ did on the cross because we know that the cross is not the end of the matter. There's something better coming.
There was a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer, and had been given three months to live. Her doctor told her to start making preparations to die, so she contacted her pastor and had him come to her house to discuss certain aspects of her funeral arrangements and her final wishes.
She told him which songs she wanted sung at the service, what Scriptures she would like read and what she wanted to be wearing. The woman also told her pastor that she wanted to be buried with her favorite Bible. Everything was in order, and the pastor was preparing to leave when the woman suddenly remembered something very important to her. "There's one more thing," she said excitedly.
"What's that?" came the pastor's reply.
"This is very important," the woman continued. "I want to be buried with a fork in my right hand." The pastor stood looking at the woman, not knowing quite what to say.
"That shocks you, doesn't it?" the woman asked.
"Well, to be honest, I'm puzzled by the request," said the pastor.
The woman explained. "In all my years of attending church socials and functions where food was involved, my favorite part was when whoever was clearing away the dishes of the main course would lean over and say, 'Keep your fork.' It was my favorite part because I knew that something better was coming. When they told me to keep my fork, I knew that something great was about to be given to me. It wasn't Jell-O or pudding. It was cake or pie. Something with substance. So I just want people to see me there in that casket with a fork in my hand, and I want them to wonder, 'What's with the fork?' Then I want you to tell them: 'Something better is coming, so keep your fork, too.'"
The pastor's eyes were filled with tears as he hugged the woman goodbye. He knew this would be one of the last times he would see her before her death. But he also knew that that woman had a better grasp of heaven than he did. She knew that something better was coming.
At the funeral, people were walking by the woman's casket, and they saw the pretty dress she was wearing and her favorite Bible and the fork placed in her right hand. Over and over, the pastor heard the question, "What's with the fork?" And over and over, he smiled. During his message, the pastor told the people of the conversation he had with the woman shortly before she died. He also told them about the fork and about what it symbolized to her. The pastor told the people how he could not stop thinking about the fork, and told them that they probably would not be able to stop thinking about it, either. He was right.
So the next time you reach down for your fork, let it remind you that there is something better coming. This season of Easter is a special time for Christians to celebrate the ultimate reason for our hope: Christ is risen, and invites us to rise with him to new life. That's no invitation to leave the table; it's a suggestion to keep our forks. It's a suggestion that says, hope is great for breakfast but terrible for supper. In other words, hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is enables us to act.
[NOTE: Invite the congregation to repeat the words, "Keep your forks" in the following litany.]
- Easter is an invitation to try again with God's help to break that addiction we had given up all hope of ever breaking. There's something better coming; "Keep your forks." - Easter is a chance to work at renewing the marriage we had given up all hope of ever saving. There's something better coming; "Keep your forks." - Easter is an opportunity to reach out to our neighbors who, in our busyness, we neglect. There's something better coming; "Keep your forks." - Easter is an invitation to look at our lack of love and seek God for compassion. There's something better coming; "Keep your forks." - Easter is a chance for all no-hopers to regain their vision of what can be! There's something better coming; "Keep your forks." - Easter is an opportunity to renew our faith. There's something better coming; "Keep your forks."
- Easter is a chance to "renew our strength and mount up with wings as eagles; to run and not faint." There's something better coming; "Keep your forks."
Maybe the Indians will win it all this year.
AMEN