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I want to say, I welcome to all of you Here at this opening Eucharist for the academic year 2011, Welcome especially to you who are entering students here, working on a master of divinity or a

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master of Arts or a dual degree with the school of Social work. You've been here maybe for just a few weeks, most of you and maybe you will agree by now that everything is different. Everything

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has changed. I mean, look at you, you're sitting in church on a Tuesday evening. Who was the last time that happened? Everything has changed . The housing is more cramped or depending on where

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you came from, more commodious, The weather has been more unbearable than you've ever imagined, at least up until yesterday. And all the native Texans here smelled the signs of fall in the 92 degree temperature

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we had yesterday. The things people here are apt to care about and talk about our different for better or for worse from the language of the marketplace that we're familiar with. The neckties that Professor Bodman will

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wear this year will often stretch credulity and well not necessarily pass muster in many other settings. You can tell him. I said that by the way, everything has changed. If you don't believe me,

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now wait until you start learning hebrew, Wait until cysts one. Wait until Professors Lord and Saltine and told me began introducing you to what liturgy really means . If you stay here, it's not like we'll

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be taking your treasure chest and turning it upside down until everything has fallen out and we've replaced it all with new stuff. It's more that what you learn and experience here will shed new light on what you

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brought with you and what you brought with you will alumina in new ways, what you learn and experience here in that sense, things will change and it won't always hurt except when it does. I have

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a dear friend, recovering alcoholic, almost 40 years in recovery who has been through the furnace of life , and his experiences have made him not just smart , but also wise. He testifies to me that

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there are only two ways to grow closer to God . The first one is through the long process of disciplined prayer, And the 2nd 1 is through your own pain. The pain that life often serves up

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to us. Sometimes when we least expect it, there is wholly purposefulness to it. My friend says ST paul agrees with him, he's writing to the church in Rome. I don't know what's going on

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with those people in that church, but some of them are suffering. Something is changing for them. And apparently it is painful. Maybe they're wishing for health if they lost it. Or maybe they're worried

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about keeping it if they have it. Maybe they tremble for their Children as they figure out that they can't protect their Children from everything. Maybe they're getting ready for their ordination exams or maybe they've got their

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endeavors and they're waiting for a job. I don't know what their problem is, but Paul apparently does and he addresses it. It sounds to me quite frankly like something having to do with growth. But

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Paul calls it groaning and in the rhetorical strategy that he uses to address this problem, he acknowledges their pain and moves them toward hope. And he says some interesting things about hope. Now hope that is

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seen is not hope for who hopes what for what is seeing, he says. But if we hope for what we do not see, he says, we wait for it with patience. Hope that is

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seen is not Hope, you're here. Your new everything has changed and maybe you're groaning a little. Where is the evidence? Right this minute you're thinking that I belong here. Maybe I was wrong about

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taking this step. Everything is different. Nothing feels familiar. Where is the evidence that I belong here ? And if that's what you're thinking, paul wants you to know that there are certain kinds of hope

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which, from a christian point of view, simply do not cut it. There is a kind of hope which is tied too closely to the externals of life, tied too closely to the evidence. If

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things are looking good today, if I'm feeling well , if there's plenty of money in the bank and people are friendly to me and the news of the world is not too bad and I've got my game

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on, then I have hope. That's hope based on evidence. This is my problem. That might be political bit for the presbyterians in the room with the analysis coming from some of the quarters in our

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church today, that suggests that the presbyterian church is quote deathly ill. Now, part of me wants to respond to that by saying at what point in the last 2000 years of church history, has a

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church not been deathly ill? And by the way , isn't that kind of the point of the church ? Is the church not always dying? Because finally , we are inescapably of the world and the end

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of the world is dying. And it's not some new overlap, presbyterian or some system of dual committees on ministry or non geographic presbyteries or moral purity that is finally going to save the church. It is

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only the coming again of jesus christ that is going to save us. And therefore it is our job to bear witness to the strength of God made manifest in God's weakness. We wait with hope for that

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, which has not yet been seen. But leaving all of that theology aside for the moment, right ? The analysis that is offered to support that our church is deathly ill is based upon superficial evidence,

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and that's always a dangerous way to assess the faithfulness of the church. The evidence, according to the deathly ill people, some of them friends of mine , is that we're not growing, we're not sending

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out as many missionaries as we used to. We're not as theologically articulate as we were 100 years ago . We've given over the interpretation of scripture to the historical, critical approach, and therefore, they say

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, the church owns the Bible. Now we're too inclusive. We're not organized according to the like minded the best days we ever had were back in the 1950s. Remember how good those days were. Therefore

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based on the evidence. We are deathly ill. Your student body president and I were discussing this just a few days ago and Bart smith said yes, but aren't we empty tomb people? He's got a

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point. Is it ever a faithful thing for people of the resurrection to look at the church they serve and so confidently declare that based on the evidence, it is deathly ill. If things go well,

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there is hope. If there's a problem though, then things don't go so well and there is not hope. And I have kind of a thing with that kind of hope. The hope that we have

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when all the measurements are suggesting that things are going well. The problem is but that is when I am least persuaded that I need hope. So that the point at which I need it the most is

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precisely when hope is in its shortest supply. Hope that is seen says ST paul is not hope. And on the other, the other hand, there's a kind of hope that has no ties whatsoever to

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any evidence. There is a a way of hoping that is absolutely disconnected from the daily affairs of human history that simply dismisses the particulars of our time by focusing upon the sweet by and by of another world

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. It's a kind of hope, for example, that here in Austin looks at the drought, were suffering through or looks at global warming, or looks at the effects of pollution or overdevelopment or depletion of

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the aquifers and says, well all these things are real, but there's not much we can do about it except hope, but that's not hope either. That's escapism. I'm talking tonight about a different kind

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of hope altogether. I'm thinking about biblical hope, kind of hope that has always been given its most eloquent expression against the bleakest backdrop, the kind of hope that the prophets, second Isaiah and Jeremiah and

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all the rest throughout as a kind of lifeline for the chase and Israelites to cling to in the midst of exile. The kind of hope that Saint john wrote about when he envisioned that same comfort taking on

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human form and coming into the world as light, which would shine in the darkness in which the darkness would not overcome. Not hope based on evidence and not escapist hope but hope that places itself squarely in

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the midst of pain. 10 years ago, this coming Sunday, I was in Atlanta pastor in a center city church who happened to be giving An address in Tyler Texas for the annual breakfast of a charitable

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foundation. I'd flown from Atlanta to Dallas and then to Tyler on September 10 and about the same time that breakfast was over, a plane was flying into one of the World Trade Center towers. I was

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shaking hands and someone came running in from the parking lot and she said, a plane has just hit the World Trade center Towers, You know what happened next? And in the wake of every plane in

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the country being grounded in short order, I rented the last car somebody could rent in Tyler on that day and I got back to Atlanta in the wee hours of the next morning. Suddenly the bulletin that

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we on the worship staff had put together before I had left for Tyler just didn't feel right anymore. And so we changed some of the hems, most notably we added a mighty fortress is our God as

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the first him in that service. That sunday someone on the staff said, we've got to sing that hymn because of this verse. I've never noticed it before. But now I will never forget it.

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And though this world with devils filled has threatened to undo us. We will not fear for God hath willed God's truth to triumph through us. We made some other changes in the service. And the big

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change that I thought about making was the gospel text that I had planned to preach from. It was in the election erI and it was the parable of that woman who found a lost coin and then threw

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a party called her neighbors and said hello. I just found a quarter under my sofa. And so I'm having a big hamburger cookouts for the neighborhood. How did that have a thing to do with the

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tragedy of 9 11. I called one of my parishioners tom long professor of politics at candler School of Theology and I said can you help me think of the text I ought to use. He said don't

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give up yet on that text about the lost coin . He said think of those firemen up there right now in new york scouring through the rubble, searching for any sign of life. And every time they

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see a finger wiggle they dig until they get that person out there, they are up there surrounded by the tragedy of that impossible scene. And when they find somebody alive, somebody whom they have never met

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, somebody whom they do not know, They dig that person out and they cheer and they celebrate he said don't give up on that text yet because it is an entryway into the mind of God on this

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particular sunday. And so I didn't. And finally I understood that that text is the very picture of biblical hope. It's hoped that weaves itself throughout the amazing saga of the people of God in every age

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. Hope that acquaints itself as well with our saga , yours and mine, and nowhere in my judgment is that hope put more eloquently than in ST paul's words, when he pondered the suffering of the church

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in Rome. For paul, heard not just the groaning of those people in their specific pain, whatever it was, but in his theological imagination, he heard all of the other groaning in the whole wide

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world. He heard the way in which all of that pain was taking part in the cosmic pain of the universe, as through jesus, christ all of creation was passing away so that something new and redemptive

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could be born. So, in a letter to that struggling church living, as we do within that ? S scatological tension between the already and the not yet having had a foretaste of that hope, but

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still waiting for the experience of it in its fullness , paul used the image of childbirth to describe biblical hope. We know he wrote that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and

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not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption the redemption of our bodies. Foreign hope, we were saved. Now hope that

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is seen, he continued, is not hope for who hopes for what is seen. But if we hope for what we do not seek, we wait for it with patients. Carl Bart was the preeminent

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reformed theologian of the 20th century. And if you've never heard of him, you will learn a lot about him while you were here. I'm told that he once said over every butcher shop should be printed

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. Those words. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now over every butcher shop. His point was that part of the way in which we preserve ourselves is that we butcher part

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of the creation. So maybe at least we ought to think about that when we are busy seeing about our own preservation. Our hope, he said, is inextricably connected with the pain of the whole world

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. I think he's onto something. This is what hope looks like when it is placed squarely in the midst of pain. It links us to everything. Hope that it's not easy right now to see or

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to measure or to walk around taking pictures is nonetheless promised, and therefore real. Which means that there is not death but hope for the church placed squarely in the midst of a time in which things might

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be falling apart right now in order to be reassembled in a more faithful way in God's future. There is hope for those persons you know, and love who may be lost in some sort of fog right

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now and yet who in God's own purposeful deliberate time are most surely and certainly moving toward that moment when they come to themselves and to God, there is hope for nations, whether they like Libya, be

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in the midst of revolution or like this nation, be in the midst of learning often painfully that ours isn't the only power in the world and yet all the while God has not given up on us,

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even if we've given up on God, there is hope even for the cosmos suffering from global warming stricken by drought here, in flooding there, by the loss of species everywhere as powerful people all over the

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world are just beginning to get that we are stewards and not owners of it all. And here tonight , my friends, there is hope for you when everything has changed or is changing simply because you have

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chosen to be here and maybe you are tempted right now to lose hope because you can't see much of the evidence of it. Not right yet. And so maybe I'm catching you tonight in a hard place

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. Well listen, the promise of God is that if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience, we wait for it with patients because God's biggest project, the project

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that has occupied God's attention since before. The beginning of time is not just that you're going to go to seminary and then serve some corner of the world , although that might be part of God's project,

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believe it or not, but God's biggest project is the redemption finally, of this whole groaning creation, rock live hovel, Well known Czech playwright, poet and then President of the Czech Republic once drew an

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interesting distinction between hope and optimism. Hope, he says, is far different from the conviction that things will turn out all right, or that conditions are auspicious for a positive outcome. In fact, he

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suggests the less auspicious one's current condition, The deeper and more genuine hope becomes precisely because it is not dependent upon the ebbs and flows of life of suffering or joy of loss or gain. He's not even

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a believer. And yet he says the most remarkable thing, we cannot manufacture hope ourselves. Genuine hope always comes as he puts it from elsewhere. Will you hold that thought in these days ahead? When

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it seems that everything is changing? I look at you and I am filled with hope, not because of who you are tonight. Rather because of who you will be, who we will all be in

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God's good time and how we will play our own parts and the redemption of the world. That redemption is signaled for us tonight, By the way, by the broken body and the shed blood offered for

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us. Once again at this table. And when you come forward in a few minutes, remember that hope that is seen is not hope. But if we hope for what we do not see, we

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wait for it and maybe even work for it with patients in the name of God creator, christ and