“A NEW HOPE: WHY OUR FUTURE COULDN’T BE BRIGHTER”
Christmas: The Force Awakens
December 27, 2015
Cornerstone Community Church
When “Star Wars” first came out in 1977, that was the full title – “Star Wars.”
But when “Star Wars” ended up becoming a series of films and not just a stand-alone
movie it was decided that the first movie needed a new title to distinguish it from the
series. And if you are familiar with the series you know what they renamed it – “A New
Hope.”
We’re just a few days away from the beginning of a new year, and with a new year
comes new hope. In some ways our hopes stay very much the same from year to year,
don’t they? We hope to get in shape this year. We hope to get out of the hole financially.
We hope to start a family. We hope to find a new job or to get a new car or to start a new
project in our home. We had many of the same hopes last year – some of those hopes
were fulfilled, and some got put off.
But in other respects our hopes are very different now from what they once were.
Think back, if you’re a little older, to when you were 15. What were your hopes back
then? If you were anything like I was, you hoped to do something significant with your
life. You weren’t quite sure what you wanted to do, but you just knew that you hoped to
make a difference, a big difference. Maybe you hoped to start a company or to invent a
product that would make the world a better place. Maybe you hoped to become a teacher
and to influence hundreds and hundreds of kids to love to learn. Maybe you hoped to be
an athlete or an entertainer. Or maybe you hoped to become a soldier or a policeman or a
firefighter, someone who helped keep our world safe. Do you remember now what your
hopes once were, what you dreamed of, what kept you awake late into the night?
But we’re a little older now. I’m 60. I no longer hope that someday I’ll be able to
dunk a basketball or star in my own TV show. And it got me thinking – is it time to
downsize my hopes? Or is it time to quit hoping entirely?
And the answer is, “Of course not.” As followers of Jesus, we are of all people a
people of hope. And the source of our hope, of course, is Jesus himself. Listen to how
Matthew talks about Jesus in his Gospel:
A large crowd followed Jesus, and he healed all who were ill. He
warned them not to tell others about him. This was to fulfill what was
spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “Here is my servant whom I have
chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he
will proclaim justice to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out; no one
will hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a
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smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he has brought justice through to
victory. In his name the nations will put their hope.” (Matthew 12:15-21)
Jesus is the one in whom the nations put their hope. And so do we. When no one
or nothing else could possibly give us hope, Jesus does.
When you’re sick, when you’ve had surgery and are in a lot of pain, when you’ve
got an illness, you cling tenaciously to hope, to the hope that you’re going to get better.
When I was sick a couple years back the darkest times for me were when I would lose
hope. There was a time or two when it felt very much to me like I was never going to get
better. But my family and friends wouldn’t let me stay there; they kept reminding me
that I had reason to hope. And they were right, and in time I did get better.
But let’s be honest – aren’t there times when there is no hope of getting better?
My Mom is 95. She has dementia that is making life very confusing for her, and her
dementia is not going to get better. She is losing her sight, and her vision is not going to
get better. She can’t walk, and she isn’t going to get better.
But because of Jesus, the one born on Christmas Day, the one who rose from the
dead on Easter Sunday, my Mom has every reason to hope! Someday soon, my Mom
will get much, much better. She will walk and run and jump and dance. She will think
more clearly and understand more fully than ever before. And she will see the face of the
one who loves her most, the Jesus she has loved with all her heart her entire life.
So no matter how sick we might get, no matter how hard life might become, no
matter how desperate our situation might feel, we who follow Jesus always have hope.
And as we are about to begin a new year as individuals and as a church, I want to spend a
few minutes talking about our hopes. Specifically, I’d like to share with you some of my
hopes for our church family. In three weeks we’re going to vote as a church family on an
opportunity to link arms with a terrific group of people and to become – together – a new
church. I very much appreciate that most of us don’t like change. We like sitting in our
same seat every Sunday and using the same toilet stall after pancake breakfast. We’re a
little leery about having a bunch of strangers in what we’ve come to think of as “our
house.”
But let’s address that issue right up front – this isn’t “our house.” This is Jesus’
house. His name is on the building. You and I aren’t “the cornerstone.” Jesus is the
Cornerstone. He is the hope of the nations. And it is our mission as a church to bring as
many people as we can into this house so they can hear about Jesus and get to know Jesus
and worship Jesus along with us. And if that means we have to give up sitting in our
favorite row, we are more than glad to do it.
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Hope To Enlarge Our Family
So let me share with you some of my hopes for us as a church family as we head
into 2016. And let me start by saying this – I believe with all my heart that our future has
never been brighter. We’ve been here in this theater for 23 years. I can’t tell you how
many times I’ve sat in this auditorium and prayed for our church … how I’ve prayed for
so many of you. And I’ve sat in here and dreamed and imagined and wondered and
hoped about what our church could become.
And this has been my main hope – the hope of enlarging our family. As a
church, we are a family. We love each other through good times and bad. We laugh at
each other and we cry with each other. And we are committed to each other; that’s what
it means to be family. And no matter what happens in the next few months, that’s not
going to change. We’re still going to be family.
But the hope is that we can enlarge our family. Think about it this way. You’re
single. There are advantages to being single. You don’t have to cook for anyone but
yourself. You don’t have to pick up after anyone else. You aren’t responsible for anyone
else. Your money – it’s all yours. But have you noticed that despite the advantages of
being single, most of us don’t want to stay single. We want to find a partner; we want to
get married.
So you get married; it’s now the two of you. And there are advantages to just
being the two of you. If you want to snuggle and play kissy-face, you don’t have to
worry about some munchkin walking in on you at an inopportune time. You can go out
to lunch and judge the people at the next table whose kids are loud and messy. You don’t
have to think about mortgaging your house or draining your retirement to pay for college
for a kid who has no idea what he wants to do with his life and isn’t always that fond of
going to his classes. You can clean your house and know that when you come home
from work that night, it will still be clean.
But have you noticed that despite the advantages of it being just the two of you,
most of us don’t want to stay that way. We want to have kids; we want to enlarge our
family. Of course, it doesn’t always happen as quickly or as easily as we would like. We
tried for five years before we had our first child, and at times it felt like five decades.
Many of you here know how that feels, to want to have a family and for one reason or
another to be denied that experience. But what do you do? You keep at it. You adopt.
You take in a foster child. You are willing to do whatever it takes, no matter how much
money it takes, and why? Because you ache to enlarge your family.
Then your kids grow up. And what do you want for them, and frankly for you?
You want them to meet someone. You want them to find someone as special as your
partner is to you. And when they do, your family grows. There’s another pair of feet
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under the table for Christmas dinner. And do you whine about it? Do you complain
because your family has gotten bigger? Well, a little. No, of course not. You’re thrilled.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
And then what is your hope? You want the family to keep growing. You want
your kids to give you grandkids. In fact, that’s the whole reason you had kids in the first
place, so that someday they would give you grandkids you could spoil and then send back
home so they can complain that their parents are mean and they want to live with Gogo
and Papa.
It is natural for us to want our families to grow. And that is my hope for our
church family. It has been my hope from Day 1. Some of us have worried that by
joining with another church, we’re going to lose our family. We aren’t. We’re doing
what families are supposed to do – we’re enlarging our family. We’re opening up our
arms to people very much like us and inviting them to join us in God’s house. We’re
inviting them to laugh with us and to cry with us and to eat pancakes with us and to work
very hard with us to share the good news about Jesus with our neighbors and friends.
Now there’s two ways to enlarge your family. You can do it the slow way – one
at a time. But there’s another way. Did you ever see the show “The Brady Bunch”? Let
me tell you about it. It’s a story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely
girls. All of them had hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one in curls. It’s the
story of a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four
men living together, yet they were all alone. Till the one day when the lady met this
fellow. And they knew that it was much more than a hunch. That this group must
somehow form a family; that’s the way they all became the Brady bunch!
I had one idea of how to grow this family we call Cornerstone. And God had
another idea. Instead of growing us one by one, God’s idea was to grow us by a bunch.
Now if you ever watched “The Brady Bunch,” you remember that those two families had
a lot of fun together. And they had their share of bumps and bruises as they lived out
what it meant for two families to become one family. We will most certainly experience
some bumps and bruises and hurt feelings in this process. But we will also have an
incredible amount of fun together.
Think about it this way – what services have we had in here that have been the
most fun and the most inspiring? Is it when the church is two-thirds empty, when there’s
no one in your row to pass the popcorn bucket to during the offering? Or is it at
Christmas and Easter when the church is filled with people, when there are people sitting
all around you who are singing praise songs at the top of their lungs? You have to agree
– that’s a much more fun and far more inspiring worship experience. So imagine how
fun that would be if instead of it happening once or twice a year, it happened every week!
And you also know that one of the most fun things we do here on a Sunday morning is to
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baptize new believers into the faith. Everyone’s wondering the same thing – will Pastor
Craig’s wrists be strong enough to lift the person back up out of the water? Just imagine
how fun it will be instead of having one baptism a year, we have to schedule a whole
bunch of baptisms because so many people are coming to faith in Jesus week after week.
It makes me want to start strengthening my wrists.
Did any of you read the best-selling book from a few years ago called “The Prayer
of Jabez?” The entire book is based on one verse from the book of Chronicles, a oneverse prayer by a man named Jabez. Here’s the verse; this is the prayer of Jabez: “Jabez
cried out to the God of Israel, ‘Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my
territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free
from pain.’ And God granted his request.” (1 Chronicles 4:10) That’s what many of
us have been praying for many years – Lord, enlarge our territory; enlarge our family.
And I am persuaded that God is answering our prayers by bringing to us this new family
of folks who love Jesus and who love the Bible and who want to join with us in changing
the world.
Hope To Expand Our Impact
So that’s my first hope for 2016 – that we enlarge our family, that we add a whole
host of brothers and sisters and kids and grandkids. Here’s my second hope – that we
expand our impact. The big question we’ve asked ourselves during this process is this –
would we be better together? Would we do a better job of impacting this community and
reaching our unchurched friends and neighbors if we joined together? The question is not
– will life be easier together? Now in some respects the truth is that life will be easier
together. We will have more people loving our kids in the nursery and teaching our
children’s classes. There will be more volunteers working with our youth. There will be
more small group leaders and more small groups. There will be more people who give
their tithes and offerings so we can support more missionaries and more ministry
projects. In some ways life will be easier because, as the saying goes, “many hands make
light work.”
Here’s how the Bible puts it in Ecclesiastes: “Two are better than one, because
they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him
up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down
together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one
may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not
quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) And notice the focus of those verses. While it’s
true that life can be easier together, the real focus is on the fact that we are better
together. And that is our hope for this next year, that our two churches will be better
together, that we will be able to expand our impact to a much greater extent by partnering
together than we could by going it alone.
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Now you might be wondering something. “Why not partner with the Methodist
church in front of us? Why not partner with some other church down the road if churches
are better together?” Fair question. And the answer is that not all churches fit. Carol
Brady wasn’t a good fit for any man; she was the right fit for Mike Brady. And we think
our church and Menlo Church are a very good fit. Our values are a fit, our beliefs are a
fit and our passion is a fit. And because we’re a good fit, we think we will be able to
accomplish a great deal more together than we could separately.
Let me give you just one example. As a church we’ve collected shoeboxes for
Operation Christmas Child for a number of years; this year we contributed 240
shoeboxes, which has the potential of changing the lives of many kids and many families
around the world. So think about next year – how many shoe boxes do you think we’ll
be able to contribute by partnering together? The number that comes to mind for me is
1000. It could be more. It’s my expectation that together we will be able to quadruple
the impact we make in the world through Operation Christmas Child.
And that’s just one example. I hope you start dreaming about the possibilities. I
want you to, as they say, get your hopes up. Get your hopes up about the impact we
might be able to make on the high schools in our area when we have a fulltime youth
pastor to give leadership to our team of volunteer leaders. Get your hopes up about the
impact we might be able to make on struggling marriages. Get your hopes up about the
new ministries we might be able to start, like a grief recovery ministry or a divorce
recovery ministry to complement the recovery ministry Kurt and Teri already lead for us.
That’s my hope and I’m sure it’s your hope, that together we will be able to expand our
impact and make a bigger difference in our world for the cause of Christ.
Hope To Lengthen Our Legacy
And here’s a third hope of mine for me and for our church family – I hope we
lengthen our legacy. I don’t know if you’ve seen this website called “legacy.com.” It’s
an online obituary where users can pay their respects and celebrate someone’s life. I love
the website’s tagline – “where life stories live on.”
Like a whole host of you, I’ve put my heart and soul into this church for many
years. Many of us have raised our kids here. We’ve seen them come up through
Kingdom Kids, go to Vacation Bible Camp, watch them get baptized, sent them off to
Hume Lake, seen them go off to college and get jobs and get married. We have
experienced a million life stories together. And we want those life stories to live on. We
want the time and money and blood we’ve invested in Cornerstone to live on.
So here’s my dream. Twenty years from now this church is going to not only be
alive, it’s going to be thriving. Instead of 100-150 people meeting here, there will be
1000-1500 people here, or wherever we might go next some day. And a large percentage
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of those people will be people who would not be in any church if this church didn’t exist.
Many of those people will be folks who heard about Jesus here, who gave their lives to
Jesus here, who got baptized here, who raised their kids to know Jesus here.
And while the church won’t be called Cornerstone, the fact is that without
Cornerstone, that church would never exist. Because you have served and given and
prayed and worshipped here so faithfully, there is going to be a church in San Jose for
many years to come that will be used by God to change the world. We may only have
been called Cornerstone for 23 years, but our legacy will be a very long one.
That is my new hope for our church. The last 23 years have not been easy. This
next year, as good as it’s going to be, will not be easy. But as a church, our future has
never been brighter than it is. And while I won’t be up here every Sunday to drop hints
that I’d love for you to take me out to Arby’s for lunch, I will most definitely be here,
because I can’t wait to see what God is going to do through you and me who make up his
church in this place.
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