March 4, 2007 Sermon

Don’t Be Happy, Worry
Romans 8:18-25

You may remember Bobby McFarrin’s catchy hit of twenty years ago: Don’t Worry, Be Happy. On the surface it seemed like the perfect pop song. That is, it seemed all surface. But its lyric proposed a surprisingly profound idea, that we can to a certain extent choose our attitudes—and that our attitudes largely determine our experiences of life.

Today we read a passage from the Apostle Paul that supports the Don’t Worry, Be Happy thesis. In his letter to the Roman Christians, Paul puts suffering in its place. Suffering happens, Paul admits, but we hope despite the pain. We hope for meaning. We hope for peace. We hope for salvation. Trouble is, we live in a Don’t Be Happy, Worry world. Paul references real suffering. Any honest look at the future reveals little hope. That goes for international relations, the Michigan economy, and—all too often—our private little lives. Instead of whistling through our days we feel burdened by tight finances, health problems, and personal conflicts. We know stress far better than peace. We must work to keep our faith in Jesus Christ alive in the face of all the unhappiness.
No matter what worries you may have remember this: Faith keeps hope alive.

Meet Jurgen Moltmann. Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1926, Moltmann was a mathematical prodigy. He idolized the slightly older Albert Einstein and took the university entrance examination to study physics. But it was 1944. We younger generations cannot appreciate how inevitable Germany’s victory in World War II appeared to be until quite close to its end. The Axis powers had overrun Europe from the Atlantic to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara. German bombers were flattening English cities. German tanks clattered without opposition across the lands of fully one-fifth of the world’s population.

But the tide turned. With a loss of lives beyond imagination in today’s comfortable western world, the Russians pushed the Germans back. American, British and other soldiers made brutal advances in Italy and France. Suddenly, Germany was surrounded—and defeated.

The seventeen year-old Jurgen Moltmann got drafted. Within months of his induction, the German army began drafting sixteen, then fifteen year-olds. Moltmann’s unit joined the front at Reichswald in Belgium. He waited until dark, snuck toward the enemy and surrendered to the first British soldier he met. He spent the next four years as a prisoner of war in camps in Belgium, Scotland and England. He met a group of Christians in camp. An American chaplain gave him a New Testament. He read it, and felt a gradual dawning of faith. He later said, “I did not find Christ, he found me.”

It was the perfect moment for Christ to find Moltmann. Like so many of his countrymen, he had lost all confidence in German culture. The Americans took pictures when they liberated the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They posted copies of these photographs of 70 pound skeletous men and piles of children’s bodies at every prisoner of war camp so the defeated Germans would be confronted with what their nation had done. Moltmann later wrote of his “torment by memories and gnawing thoughts of the bestiality of which my people were capable.” He claimed his remorse was so great he would rather have died than face what his own people had done.

But Moltmann’s new faith did not fail in the face of such grief and guilt. Upon his return to Germany in 1948 he studied and taught theology at leading universities. He started trying to reconcile what he had experienced with the New Testament’s insistence that we can know the peace of Christ when we believe in him as Lord and Savior. His work, A Theology of Hope, remains one of the most revered theological publications of the past century. In his later works he looked at the strong Christianity of the deeply impoverished in Latin America and at the place of ecological thinking in Christian theology.

We all have problems. But very few of us experience affliction like Moltmann, an affliction that struck him down mind, body and soul. Because he hopes despite the despair he has known, we can, too. Because he believes despite his suffering, we too can believe in the peace of Christ. Look at how Paul starts the passage we read from Romans. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” I could not get away with writing that sentence. I have not suffered enough to earn the right. But Paul had suffered. He had suffered and yet believed in the glory yet to come.

It was Paul’s suffering that opened his eyes to the truth that, “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” Creation, not just Christians, but creation, awaits God’s revelation of yet more of His plan coming true in this world. All creation—animate, inanimate, earthly, universal—longs for the revelation of God’s intimate working in the lives of ordinary people: people who suffer like everybody does, yet who believe in Jesus Christ.

Any honest person can see creation going to hell in a hand basket. Wars and rumors of war, environmental disasters, religious hatreds, the divorce and abortion rates: it goes on and on. Paul noted this “decay” of creation. But he did not get trapped into believing that it meant the defeat of God’s purposes. We should not fall into that trap, either. We may groan with creation, as Paul says, as together we endure the sufferings that come with life. Yet we groan while we wait for redemption. We complain for excellent reasons, yet we complain while still hoping for salvation.

Jurgen Moltmann’s most famous quote has been carved into a stone archway that leads into the library at my seminary. “Peace with God means conflict with the world,” he wrote. The world gives us many reasons to worry. God gives us one surpassing reason to be happy: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Through our faith in him, which is itself a gift from God’s Holy Spirit, we receive our hope for salvation. We receive, as Paul writes, adoption as children of God. Faith keeps hope alive.

Paul concludes our passage with a reminder that if we already had complete peace with God in Christ we would no longer have to hope for it. For now, hope is what we have—but it is enough. Praise God!