Hope Filled Assurance

Reverend Dr. Dawn C. Berry

Here are excerpts and selected readings from Pastor Dawn’s sermon on Sunday, July 24 with a preface from the Epistle read by the liturgist.

Romans 8:38

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Our hope is grounded in believing that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Hope is different from wishing. Wishing is about having and holding, abdicating our responsibility for our lives. Hope is about living towards the future. Hope has a sense of continuity with the past and acceptance of the present. Hope does not look to the past with regret, but toward the future with expectation. We are hoping not for something but hoping in God.

From Mattie Stepanek, a young boy who suffered and died from muscular dystrophy, written at a time when he had already lost three of his siblings to the same disease:

Heartsong

I have a song, deep in my heart,

And only I can hear it.

If I close my eyes and sit very still

It is so easy to listen to my song.

When my eyes are open and

I am so busy and moving and busy,

If I take time and listen very hard,

I can still hear my Heartsong.

It makes me feel happy.

Happier than ever.

Happier than everywhere

And everything and everyone

In the whole wide world.

Happy like thinking about

Going to Heaven when I die.

My Heartsong sounds like this—

I love you! I love you!

How happy you can be!

How happy you can make

This whole world be!

And sometimes it’s other

Tunes and words, too,

But it always sings the

Same special feeling to me.

It makes me think of

Jamie, and Katie and Stevie,

And other wonderful things.

This is my special song.

But do you know what?

All people have a special song

Inside their hearts!

Everyone in the whole wide world

Has a special Heartsong.

If you believe in magical, musical hearts,

And if you believe that you can be happy,

Then you, too, will hear your song.

From the novel, Godric, by Frederick Buechner:

(Godric was a 12^th Century English holy man from Finchale)

The secret that we share I cannot tell in full. But this much I will tell- What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

And from T. S Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

We shall not cease from explorations

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of the earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning.