Praise the Lord for this new day. There will be musical presentation and celebration at Wesley United Methodist Church, 1000 Day Hollow Road, Endicott this evening at 7 PM. Our Church will be participating at the Annual Apple Festival of Endicott on Saturday September 20, 2014. This famous event will take place on the Historic Washington Avenue. Our church will have a booth with various Apple baked goods, featuring homemade apple strudel - they are the best. Join us.
I have been reflecting on
the death of our moms. Thank you all so much for your love and kindness
expressed through cards, e.mails, and personal expressions. We have also
heard from around the corner and from around the globe. My mom died on the
August 31 at 11:30 PM. She was buried within less than 24 hours. This is the
cultural custom of where I was born and raised. The final event of gathering
and sharing was held on Thursday the September 11 (Indian time). During the
days of mourning the people are seized from their regular schedules. The family
where the death has visited will not cook any meals. The relatives, neighbors,
bring the meals.. Often these are meatless meals. Durin the time mourning many
and friends come to stay with the family. This is the fellowship of mourning
and suffering. After the final day of mourning and celebration people get back
to their daily work and daily routine.
I havee been reflecting in
these days on life, death, and resurrection. I am reflectiong on the gift of hope we have in Jesus and because of
Jesus. It is written, "Christ in you the Hope of Glory". Life, it
seems, has a way of killing dreams. You set out with high hopes—for your
schooling, your career, your family, and your golden years. You have plans,
aspirations, and expectations, but things don't always turn out the way you
expect. Plans fall through. People let you down. You let yourself down.
Suddenly the life you're living isn't the life you dreamed of at all, or you
find yourself in a place you never expected to be.
Fantine, a young woman from
Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, sings a
powerful song (in the musical version) as she finds herself in a hopeless
place. A summer lover has left her alone with a child. She finds work in a
factory, but has to place her daughter, Cosette, in the keeping of some cruel
and crooked innkeepers. When it is discovered that she has had a child out of
wedlock, she's thrown out of the factory and into the streets. She's forced to
sell her hair, then her teeth, then her body, in order to pay for Cosette's
care. She's falsely accused of a crime, and placed under arrest, and, on top of
all this, she's desperately ill. Out of that dark place, she sings, "I dreamed
a dream in days gone by … now life has killed the dream I
dreamed."
Though things may go awry
and our plans suddenly change, we still have hope. Hope is more than a word.
Hope is to the spirit what oxygen is to the body. Without it, we die. When a
team loses hope, the game is over. When investors lose hope, the stock market
tumbles. When a patient loses hope, death is found crouching at the
door.
Viktor Frankl survived
years in the Nazi concentration camps. While there he noticed that many
prisoners died just after Christmas. T hey were hoping they'd be free by then.
When they weren't, they gave up. He learned that as long as prisoners had
something to live for, a reason to press on, they could endure just
about anything, but once they lost hope, they quickly died. Dostoevsky said
that "to live without hope is to cease to live."
Jesus Christ is our hope.
He is our peace. He is our salvation. In Him we have all that we need for
this life and for the life to come. Hope is the confidence that our Risen Lord can and will do something
good—in this life, and the life to come. Our story isn't over yet. Our Lord
can and will meet us in life's experinces and situations. He is strong enough
and wise enough to do something good, something meaningful, and something
eternally significant.
In this life, we can find
joy, beauty, forgiveness, healing, purpose, restoration, and the reality of
Jesus's presence in our lives every day. In the life to come, we can look
forward to reunion with those we have lost, the restoration of all creation, and
to eternal life with God and one another in worlds beyond our
imagining.
Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables to expose what he called three great
evils of his time—poverty, the exploitation of women and children, and spiritual
darkness. He pulled no punches in his tale. Fantine ends up dying of her
illness, but somebody is there. Jean Valjean takes Cosette into his protection;
he raises her, and years later delivers her into the arms of a fine young man.
As Valjean dies at the end of a long and good life, Fantine's spirit returns to
usher him into heaven. The musical ends in a great re-union of all the
characters, singing about a new and better day. "Will you join in our crusade,
will you be strong and stand with me. There's a future about to start when
tomorrow comes." It's a song of hope.
Victor Hugo believed in the
Lord, and that gave him reason to believe that good would triumph over evil,
that justice would be done, and that there was life and love beyond the grave.
For 200 years, his story has given the world hope, hope that is grounded in the
existence of a good and gracious God.
Life has a way of killing
dreams, but Jesus has a way of bringing them, and us, back to
life!
In Christ,
Brown
