Scripture: Acts 2:42-47; Mark 12:41-44 Series: 2022
Closing sermon in a series on hope, preached on Acts 2:42-47 where the post-Pentecost church lives out its hope through shared teaching, meals, prayer, generosity, and community. Using The Inner Game of Music’s equation of performance as potential minus interference, the sermon argues that hope is not optimism but a practiced disposition rooted in who Jesus is. Like prayer, service, giving, and sharing, hope is a habit we grow into through the Holy Spirit, reducing the interference between ourselves and God. This growth is sanctification, moving toward completion (teleos), as God meets us where we are but does not leave us there.
Illustrations: inner-game-of-music, performance-equation, groggy-morning-pianist, aquinas-conditions-of-hope, riding-a-bicycle, falling-in-love-marriage, service-ministry-sites, widows-two-coins, kids-sharing-toys, back-to-school-620
August 14
Living Hope
“The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.” Acts of the Apostles 2:42-47
There’s a book that came out in the seventies called, the Inner Game of Tennis. It was a best seller. I never read it. I don’t play tennis, but it influenced a book I did read and, and do enjoy, is called the Inner Game of Music. It was written by Barry Green based very substantially on the Inner Game of Tennis. Barry Green is a Bassist like me, a classical Bassist. And he took the insights of the author and adapted it to music. There are some similarities between someone playing tennis and someone playing music, especially when you are a soloist. Tennis is an individual event. And music is often an individual event. Tennis also has this concept of unforced errors that relates especially well to music performance. Many of us, myself included, can practice and can study and can know the music well, and then comes the recital and it’s just not all there. We get in our own head. It happens in most aspects of life. You get in your own head. To help understand those moments we get in our head, The Inner Game of Tennis, they use this math equation: P=p-i. Which that means is performance equals potential minus interference. We have to work on our potential. We have to expand our potential. We have to increase our potential and make it be something that justifies the performance. As well, we have to limit the interference, the ways we get stuck in our own head with self doubt. In the Inner Game of Music, the author talks about this young pianist who likes to practice in the middle of the day, when she is wide awake, like the late morning, early afternoon, but she performs best in the early morning, just after waking up, when she’s too groggy to really think about what she’s doing. She is just reacting to it. She is just playing.
I think there’s a fine line to make between properly thinking and overthinking, especially with faith, the meaning of life, ultimate things, etc. We shouldn’t under think. For instance, if we come across something that challenges our faith, the goal is not to ignore the challenge or pretend like it’s not there. Paul calls us to give an account of faith. Sometimes, however, we do overthink our own faith. We provide interference. Faith has not a performance like a tennis match or a concert recital, but there are aspects of potential and interference. And this is where hope comes in.
My friends, we are finishing our series on hope, looking at how this theological virtue can guide us in this world. We started off by defining what hope is. Then we spoke of how are hope is in Jesus and our future with God that is becoming present now. Finally, today we are going to think about living hope. The best example of this is found in acts chapter two, right after Pentecost, the church is all together, sharing together, praying together, having meals together, they’re living out their hope. Remember hope is a hard word to define in specific and concrete ways. It’s not just wishing for something nor is it generic optimism. Two weeks ago, we talked about Thomas Aquinas, the medieval philosopher, and his four conditions of hope: it must be something good, it must be in the future, it must be difficult to attain, but it also must be possible. These are helpful but insufficient, because our hope does’t rest on expert analysis but on the living God made flesh in Jesus Christ. And hope is not just an idea, but a way of life.
It’s not just about being always being consciously aware of grace and God’s presence. The life of faith is not a battle inside your mind to protect your mind-space from anything that would deviate from the norm. The life of faith, the life of hope, is what we do after receiving grace and understanding grace, what we do after we acknowledge Christ mercy towards us. There is interference we give to hope, like the musician or the tennis player, but with the Holy Spirit we can lesson that interference and grow in hope. As we habituate hope, we turn hope into a habit. Something we don’t have to consciously think about. A few Sundays ago, I mentioned how in the gospels hope is always a verb. We hope for something. In the letters of Paul and in the Book of Acts, they later concretize this verb, normalize it, so it’s something that we can understand, but it is still something that we do. It is living in light of our hope in Christ. This is what Jesus means by the kingdom of heaven is here. It’s not far away and in the future. We can live this day in Christ’s kingdom by how we respond and habituate ourselves towards our neighbor, towards love, towards prayer.
In acts chapter two, when the church is all together, praying together, they don’t do these things just because everyone is already good at prayer. God doesn’t call people who are already qualified. God qualifies the called. God offers space to grow in prayer. Prayer is a habit. It is something you practice. You get good at prayer, like riding a bicycle. You can be bad at it, inexperienced at it. It can make you very uncomfortable, like sitting on a bike seat. The first time you ride a bike is very uncomfortable. You can’t just read a book about riding a bike. You have to get on there. And really you have to fall down a few times to really learn. Prayer is also a relationship. When you are going on a date with someone. you don’t know everything about them. Your relationship is different than it would be after 50 years of marriage. During that first real encounter, you can’t do the things you will later do. You don’t have the same inside jokes. You don’t have the same mannerisms, the same understanding of each other. Prayer is like falling in love. It is a habit. It is a practice. If you don’t take time with your spouse to show love, to practice love, there’s going to be harm in your relationship. Service is a habit of giving up your time for another. It is a habit. It is a practice. It is something you can be bad at and that you can get better at. It is something that can be infused with God’s grace. If you’ve never been down to church under the bridge or gone out on the mobile loaves and fishes feeding run, or been to the rescue mission in marble falls or been on a partners in hope work site, or gone to San Antonio to Blueprint Ministries, the first time might be shocking. It’s hard. What you do would be unfamiliar, but then when you come back again and again, it becomes familiar. You realize what you were doing and the importance of it. You get better of giving your time. It is easier to stop and help another person. Generosity is a habit. Giving money to church is a habit. It is something you get used to. It is not something that comes naturally like, when Jesus talks about the woman who gives her two coins at the temple and how she does that out of joy and gives all that she has. How she gives more than the rich man who gives out of his abundance. Because to give out of abundance is not a habit. It’s just thinking, “Oh, I can do this. This doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t affect me to do this.” To give like the woman though she has affected. She no longer has those funds. They are not replaceable for her, but that is habit. The practice of giving opens up this possibility of generosity for her. Sharing is a habit. When you’re a kid sharing your toys is something you have to practice humans. Don’t naturally share. There are a lot of ways the children are kindhearted and loving sharing. The favorite toy is usually not one of them. You have to practice sharing. You have to practice letting go of total control over the objects in our life. Realizing that when we share something, another person may break it or hurt it. And that the loss of that object as far less of a concern than the loss of relationship between the people in our lives, but with all of these, all of these practices that we see in acts two, what I hope we can understand and see this day in this series on hope is that hope itself is a practice. Hope is a disposition. We are not naturally hopeful. There are not some people who are better at hope than others. There’s a difference between hope and optimism. The optimist thinks things are going to turn out just because they think that way it is centered on themselves. The hopeful person hopes because of God, because of who Jesus is. Now this is not to say that non-Christians can’t have hope, but that the hope they have is a mark of God in their life, whether they realize it or not. God doesn’t only work through the church. God is the Lord of all creation, all creation. All the world, not just the United States, all the universe, not just Texas. School is about to start for our children, for our college students, for our teachers. The start of school is a transition in all of our lives, traffic patterns change. You do not want to be on 620 when the High School lets out. A lot of things change. For those of us out of school, it is easy to pretend that learning has stopped and that growth has stopped. When Christ calls us, when we encounter the risen, Lord, God, doesn’t call us to stay in the same place. God meets us where we are, but God does not let us stay there. We are called to grow in holiness. In churchy terms, that’s called sanctification: becoming more holy again, not holy as like really boring and into casseroles. Holy as set apart for love in this world. Growing in holiness, moving on to completion, to being completely who God created us to be.
That’s what the Greek word for perfection means, teleos. It’s like completion, it’s finished. It’s not flawlessness. God calls us to seek and move towards completion in him. We do this through the activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The same spirit that was present on the day of Pentecost is present here with us and we can act, and we can receive that spirit. We can act, we can grow. We can grow in our prayer life. We can grow in our study of scripture. We can grow in fasting. We can grow in service. We can grow in giving. We can grow in worship. We can grow in holiness together. We can let go of the interference between ourselves and God. We can let go of the interference between ourselves and love. Letting Christ become greater. And our hearts can grow. Hope is a practice believing more in who Jesus is than in the brokenness, around us. Believing more in Jesus than in our desire for control. My brothers and sisters, this year, whether you go back to school or not, may you commit to growing, may you commit to furthering yourself. May you commit to practicing hope, practicing faith, practicing love, because of who Jesus is for you for us all.
Let us pray, Heavenly Father, giver of hope. May we rest in your hope this day, and may we act in your hope this day. Help us to not be stagnant in faith but active in love. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.