Reading: Mark 4:35-41 l clearly remember my first afternoon in Tiberias on Lake Galilee. Bernadette and I had booked into the Guest House on the lake side when I heard a noise like a train rushing past. My actual words were, `What on earth is that?` We walked out on to a balcony and were astounded to see strong winds had whipped the previously calm waters into white caps, and this had all happened in a matter of minutes. The strong winds lasted for about twenty minutes and then went as fast as they had come. Evidently the hills surrounding the lake act as wind tunnels and according to the desk clerk these sudden storms were a common occurrence.

Galilee is a small lake about 21km long and 7km wide. The Western side around Tiberius was Jewish, the other side was gentile (non Jewish) territory. The story here is of Jesus and the disciples in a boat going to the other side of the lake. A storm springs up, the disciples panic and Jesus says, `Calm down. Why are you frightened?` At that moment the storm ceases. Not for a moment do I believe that Jesus stopped the storm. That would take it into the realm of fairy land rather than the land of isobars and fronts and troughs which express the vagaries of the weather then as now.

The passage has been treated in many ways. Bill Loader sees it as a story about Jesus confronting destructive forces. Chris Budden sees it as a failed attempt to stop Jesus achieving social reconciliation with the other side. Lamar Williamson sees it as addressing the storms within us. All of them miss the bleeding obvious: the last sentence: `Who is this man whom the winds and waves obey?` - not that they did but that is how they saw it! The context and our understanding of the weather have changed but the question remains, `Who is this man?` It is the fundamental question of faith.

In those days they answered the question it terms of the `Christ`, the `Messiah` or the `Son of God`. Our answer today would be, and should be, radically different for, as with the weather, we need to take into account insights and understandings not available to those who lived in the first century. We need as always to `double read` the scriptures - to ask how the passage addressed its first readers, and to ask how it addresses us today. To the readers of those days who believed that the ability to control the weather was a divine prerogative, it was undoubtedly a miracle. To the readers of today who think in terms of highs and lows it is a case of the topography of the surrounding area causing sudden storms that go as fast as they come. Either way, the question remains. `What manner of man is this?` The context has changed but the question remains.

Who then is this man? He is the man from God`s tomorrow. He is, in Paul Tillich`s words, `the new humanity`, the one who points to and constitutes fullness of life. He is the light of life. The story of Jesus is the story of life incarnate. He manifests what it means to be a human being. He is, to use Dennis Edwards` words, `The universe come to consciousness`. And we have Pilate to thank for the ultimate answer, `Behold: The Man`.

Who is this man? I do not see him as one who controls the weather. I see him as `the man from God`s tomorrow`. He is for me a sign of hope in a hopeless world.

CHRISTIAN HOPE TODAY
Let me first clear the building site and get rid of some of the garbage - remembering of course that one man`s garbage is another man`s treasure. You may not agree with what I say today and that`s OK. Within this congregation there are many differing views and all that I seek to do this morning is to share with you my understanding of Christian Hope. Anyone married to Margaret quickly learns that they do not have an exclusive grasp of the truth.

How do I see Christian Hope today?

(1) I reject the idea of `Que sera, sera`, that `whatever will be, will be`. I have no time for what is known as `determinism`– be it philosophical, genetic or religious. The idea of predestination as expounded by Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin or Barth is based on the idea of heavenly life after death, which some of us now see as of little or no importance. They confidently assert that the future is in God`s hands. I beg to differ. God is not a despotic ruler arbitrarily determining our lives. God is the creative energy of life in our midst, the energy of newness, the catalyst of the new. God did not create the world. God is creating the world and we are called to love it into being. The future is not determined! It is wide open. The universe is a work in process. It is not fixed or final. Forget about God as the great ruler in the sky determining the future. God is the energy of creative love inviting humanity to fullness of life.

Last week I opened a new folder on my computer named `The God File` into which I scan anything that I come across that may be useful in understanding the word `God`. I did this because I am becoming increasingly convinced that millions of people reject the Christian faith because they find it incredible. I find that quite strange because I see consumerism and our modern life style `incredible`. Be that as it may, I suspect that the basis of much of the rejection of the Christian faith has to do with what people understand by the word God. For many the word God means an all powerful being who controls the life of the world and to whom we should pray for rain. If that was my idea of God I too would reject the Christian faith! What we mean by the word G-O-D is crucial. Hence my opening of `The God File`.

Why do I mention this? Because the first entry in that file is relevant to what we are thinking about today. It is a statement by Charles Birch. He sees God not as the external maker of the world but as the Spirit of life within the world and he goes on to say, `It is God`s presence in the occasion that enables it to be something more than the determined outcome of the past`. God is the energy of newness, the creative energy of life. God is a verb not a noun. We live in a world in process. We live within an evolving and incomplete universe and God is the creative impulse that moves us forward.

(2) The second bit of site clearing that needs to be done is to recognise that the scriptures are not of much use to us as far as the future is concerned. There are two reasons for this.

One is that the word `hope` in the New Testament refers primarily to the hope of life after death, a subject which obsessed the minds of the people of those days. Their hope was in heaven. As Paul puts it, `If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we of all men are most to be pitied.` (1 Corinthians 15:9)

The second reason is that they saw the end of the world as imminent. As Paul again put it to the Corinthians, `The time we live in will not last long.` (1 Corinthians 7:29) Jesus of Nazareth, however, spoke of a new world order which he called `The Kingdom of God`. It was the dominant theme of everything he said and did.

The scriptures, of course, remain of huge importance and there are many great statements within them, one of my favourites being that `the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God`. The scriptures are our link with the past and without them we would know little of the one whom I now refer to as `The man from God`s tomorrow`. The problem was that the people of those days saw the world ending in the very near future. They saw it in graphic terms of Jesus ascending to heaven and then descending to bring the world to an end. Great artistry but lousy theology!

Far closer to it were the Hebrew prophets who denounced injustice and looked forward to the day when justice would flow like a mighty river, peace would replace war, barriers between people would be broken down, and where food and wealth would be shared among all. They pictured this in terms of a great feast enjoyed by all - a good picture and good theology, a picture picked up by Jesus in the Upper Room on the night before he was murdered.

The point I am making? Apart from Jesus and the Prophets, don`t expect too many insights about the future from the Scriptures. The time frame of the biblical writers was very different from ours.

(3) I am also tempted to say `Don`t expect too much from the theologians`. Barth and Bultmann and Bonhoeffer and others did a great job of bringing revelation into the present and the calling for religious decision in the present. The downside of their contribution was however twofold –
(a) An interpretation of human history that is too individualistic. We are individuals but we are not isolated individuals. Social life is not something added on to life. It is basic to it. To be fair to Bultmann, in his later life he recognised this. `I have thought in one sided fashion about the individual person . . . and not about the community.`(The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann C.W. Kegley p 277)

(b) They denigrated the relevance of the future. They failed to see that to be human is to evolve and that hope is part and parcel of human existence. It was left to the Marxist philosophers like Ernst Bloch to make the point that humankind does not as yet enjoy its true identity, is involved in dynamic evolution and that the meaning of the present is anchored in the future. I find it fascinating that it was left to a Marxist philosopher to say that `Where there is hope there is religion`. (Geist der Utopie p1404) Fine tune `religion` to Jesus of Nazareth and you have the basis of my contention that hope is essentially about evolution which is continually transcending the present. Forty years ago a theological friend said of me, `Your problem is that you see transcendence in the future.` He said it as a criticism. I saw it, and see it today, as a compliment! The process theologians following the lead of Alfred North Whitehead are now filling the gap left by the theologians of the last century.

4) The last piece of garbage to be removed from the site is what I call the disaster of dualism - the way we are encouraged to think in terms of alternatives: subject and object, science and religion, public and private, faith and reason, past and present and so on. The duality that really bugs me is that of `rational and irrational`– a polarity which completely leaves out the `non rational`. I look forward to the day when we think in terms of `both/and` rather than `either/or.`

I read the other day a striking statement from an agricultural scientist, Fred Provenza, who speaks of the world being full of passion but devoid of compassion, how he has come to see life as the stage upon which we learn to love one another, and how creativity is the uniting of what appears to be opposites. `The courage to transcend boundaries is the source of creativity.` He then goes on to say something that almost sounds like scripture: `Faith, hope and love collectively are energies of transformation of the world, but love is the source of creativity. When people lose the capacity to love one another, they lose hope. When they lose hope they lose the ability to imagine the future, and in the process they lose faith in their capacity to participate in creating it. Compassion dissolves boundaries by transcending pairs of opposites.`

Let`s not today think in terms of opposites as far as the future is concerned. Such dualism misses the point completely. For example if someone asked me, `Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the world?` my answer would be, `I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I am hopeful!` It isn`t a case of optimism or pessimism. It is a matter of hope. The process for people of faith is from optimism through pessimism into hope. It is the ability to see through the naïve optimism of our day, to see the potential for destruction, and to see hope in Jesus of Nazareth. As Jim Wallis says, `The future belongs to those who can see it and begin to live it. Our society today is crumbling for want of a vision.` (Call to Conversion p 136) It is the claim of our community here at Wembley Downs that Jesus of Nazareth gives us such a vision. It is a vision that goes way beyond the current discussion in political circles and financial circles of whether the glass is half full or half empty - a discussion that highlights the disaster of dualism, and the simplistic nature of politics today.

Having cleared the decks, let me now try and clarify what we mean by optimism, pessimism and hope.

OPTIMISM is the expectation that things will get better. It is in the ascendancy today and is evidenced and argued in such books as The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. His thesis is that over the last 100,000 years the human species has developed by sharing tools and ideas. With the advent of farming about 10,000 years ago this sharing of ideas and practices took a great leap forward as it did again about 200 years ago with the utilising of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. He maintains that this collective intelligence has taken another huge step forward with the world wide web. This will enable the human species to evolve and develop at a faster rate. Life is much better than it was in the past and will continue to get better. He claims to be a rational optimist and says the evidence is all around us. His argument, of course, has a huge hole in it: the development of which he speaks doesn`t apply universally. Obesity is a problem in the West. People are starving in Africa. Notwithstanding this, one cannot but be impressed by his argument and the evidence. I certainly was when I read the book. But in the back of my mind there was a niggling question: `Where had I heard this guy`s name before?` And then suddenly I remembered - as is often the case with the elderly. He was the Chairman of the Northern Rock Bank that went broke in the Global Financial Crisis and had to be bailed out by the British Government. So much for rational optimism!

As far as optimism is concerned there are also some real doubts being raised by the experts as far as technology is concerned. When in New Zealand I picked up a fascinating book with a title totally inadequate to describe its contents. The title was You are not a Gadget. The writer Jaron Lanier is a computer nerd of the highest order in great demand for virtual reality medical applications and the problem of hacking. In his book he described how in the 1980s Dave Smith designed a way to represent musical notes in digital patterns, that is, in an on/off, key down/key up manner. It was called MIDI. It has become the standard scheme to represent music in software and is now the basis of the music you have on your mobile phone. Lanier`s concern is that MIDI is now looked on as the system to represent digital music, and the notes it produces bear little resemblance to the notes sung by an Ella Fitzgerald or a Whitney Houston. His book is an exploration into whether people are becoming like MIDI notes - overly defined and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer.

Notwithstanding my limited understanding of computing and that I understand about a quarter of what he is saying, I believe the point he is making is the same that concerns me - the dumbing down of human potential. This is evidenced not only in the digitilisation of music but also in the diminishing of real world relationships through such things as the narcissism of Facebook. The point I find myself coming back to again and again is that the Christian faith is about fullness of life.

As far as PESSIMISM is concerned, let me refer to another book - a book that is achieving cult status amongst young people. It is called The Hunger Games and is set in post apocalyptic America, that is, after the great disaster. The setting is an Olympic style Games where the contestants kill each other until only one is left standing - a 21st century version of the gladiatorial fighting in the Colosseum. It`s an easy read and I will not spoil it for you except to refer to one scene where a girl named Rue is killed. I read it on my Kindle electronic reader where you can not only highlight passages but you can see what other readers have highlighted. The normal highlighting of any passage would be one or two, perhaps five at the most. But these words were highlighted by 206 people: `this awful piece of time we call today`. `This awful piece of time that we call today.` When you link these words to the youth suicide rate today it gives some idea of the pessimism that abounds today.

Granted everything that Matt Ridley and the optimists say about collective intelligence, there is ample reason for pessimism today. We live, for example, in a society where violence is endemic and there seems to be little or no awareness that violence is dysfunctional as a political or social instrument.

As far as `collective intelligence` is concerned we need, for example, to keep continually in mind that atomic physicists in their brilliance created a nuclear bomb, and it was used to kill and destroy at an unprecedented level by one of the world`s most `developed` countries. It should never be forgotten that the United States is the only country that has used a nuclear bomb - establishing forever the right of failed states like Pakistan to use nuclear weapons. So much for technology as the saviour of the world! The fact that nuclear warfare hasn`t happened yet doesn`t mean that it cannot or will not happen. Neville Shute`s novel On the Beach was the novel that spelled out the pessimism of violence when I was a youth, just as The Hunger Games does today. The plague proportions of violence must be recognised. The `recreational violence` which is emerging within our society is but a symptom of the larger problem.

Add to violence the phenomenon of global warming (where emissions are increasing at the rate of 4% per annum), the dimming of the Arab dawn, and a thousand other features of our life today, and one could be excused for being pessimistic about the future. There are many dead branches on the evolutionary tree. It is well within the bounds of possibility that homo sapiens may well become one such branch.

And so we come to HOPE, something that is very different from Optimism or Pessimism. Optimism and Pessimism are reactions to the data before us. Hope goes beyond the evidence. Hope is about changing the evidence. Hope, as Vaclav Havel says is `an ability to sense a deeper reality than what is visible` and committing oneself to it. Optimism and pessimism are based on the evidence. Hope is a conviction that seeks to change the evidence. Margaret said something interesting the other day. She said to me, `You`ve spent your whole life trying to change things - and it hasn`t worked.` So true, but I live in hope of so doing - and to do so regardless of whether it is successful or not. I live within the hope that `life rather than death, sharing rather than selfishness, peace rather than violence, relationship rather than enmity shall become our reality. `*

This is of course what the Church is about. As we say in our third Sunday liturgy, `Jesus gives us real eyes to realise where the real lies.` Hope is the ability to sense a deeper reality than what is visible and to commit oneself to that reality - despite the data, despite the evidence and regardless of the cost. This is the story of Jesus. On that first Palm Sunday when Jesus entered Jerusalem, and Pilate entered on a prancing war horse, the gauntlet was thrown down and the outcome a foregone conclusion. And at the end of the day, the powers that be thought they had done away with the man from God`s tomorrow. No way! He lives today in the hearts and minds of his followers as he did then. In Jesus of Nazareth lies our hope! The story of Jesus is the story of life incarnate, life in all its fullness. It is about life in the presence of death, life in the absence of life. It is about hope being enacted in the presence of optimism and pessimism. I`m not sure that the lion will lie down with the lamb but I certainly get the message that Jesus is the man from God`s tomorrow and we live today within the hope that someday peace rather than violence, sharing rather than selfishness, unity rather than division shall some day become the reality in which the world shall live. We see in Jesus of Nazareth the light of life.

Hope then consists of standing outside the system and sensing the deeper reality which it could become. God is the ongoing thrust of life towards fullness of life. It is what hope is all about. Hope really is the ability to sense a deeper reality than what is visible and to commit oneself to that reality - despite the data, despite the evidence and regardless of the cost.

Hope is about lifting one`s eyes to the horizon. Hopeless people don`t do this - they simply conform. And in so doing they set themselves against the nature of an evolving universe. Change is the name of the game, and change is not going to come from the wealthy and the successful - nor is it likely to come from the oppressed who are without a voice. Change will only come, hope will only be realised, when someone enters the silent grief and suffering and oppression and brings it to speech. And if you can`t see the relevance of this to Jesus of Nazareth you haven`t read the New Testament. The story of Jesus is the story of hope and every Communion Service we bear witness to this as the celebrant calls out, `Where lies our hope?` and the answer rings out, `Our hope is in Jesus of Nazareth`. So be it. Let us commit ourselves in hope - regardless of the consequences - commit ourselves to that deeper reality of life until the evidence changes and fullness of life becomes a reality.

Faith enables us to see it, love puts us on the road and hope keeps us there.

* A statement by Keith Rowe to whom I continue to be indebted, so much so, that I find it difficult to remember where I read it, so I acknowledge the source. He is not, of course, responsible for the heretical passages for which I remain exclusively responsible!