Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Original Manuscript:
There's a story in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman where the main character, the personification of Dream, becomes friends with a man named Hob, who is immortal. Dream makes a deal with Hob to meet at the same spot once every hundred years to catch up with each other.
Dream originally meets Hob in a tavern in Chaucer's England. All around are people saying that the morals of society are falling apart, politics are degrading, and the signs show the world will soon come to an end.
The story ends with Dream and Hob meeting in the same spot in the 1990s, although it's no longer a tavern but what looks like a coffee bar. The conversations around them are about how the morals of society are falling apart, politics are degrading, and the signs show the world will soon come to an end.
The problem for everyone around Dream and Hob is that they don't realize the truth that both Dream and Hob have come to realize: the story isn't at it's end. It has gone on long before and the plot will continue to long after.
For many of us, the bad times in our lives seem particularly bad because it is hard for us to see that we are never at the end of our story, but we are instead somewhere in the middle. Bad times will never out last us, and good times will always come again. There is always hope.
That is message of our faith: there is always hope. We have that hope because Jesus is always walking with us in our story. Through Him, we know full well that our story is no where near the end.
We see this crux of our faith, that our story is not at the end, in all our readings this morning, particularly the Gospel. It must have been hard for Bartimaeus to believe that there was an end to his misery. He was a blind man, turning to begging as his only means to live. It must have felt like life would never change or get better and that he would just keep on living his life merely sustaining himself and nothing more.
Then he hears that Jesus, the healer is there. This was his one chance for change, so he cried out to Jesus and Jesus made him whole.
His story begins afresh because Jesus is there to help him move forward. Jesus isn't just there for one person or another. He is there to be with us all.
God was with the Israelites in their story too. Even in being exiled from their land, their story didn't end. That is what Jeremiah speaks to this morning. Even though there are times of weeping, God is there, and God will lead them back. As the Psalm tells us, God is there to restore us. He is there to be with us no matter what we go through, and to make us whole again.
Jesus is there with us in all our trials because He suffered too, as Hebrews tells us. He gave Himself to be a sacrifice for us. Even though He was perfect, He still was willing to die for us. He was willing to put Himself on the line so that we would be made whole. He was willing to die so that we would never have to be at the end of our story.
Jesus walks with us still. No matter how dark it might get, Jesus is there with us, even if we don't always realize it. When everything seems hopeless, Jesus is there to provide us with hope. He's there to help us see again.
Even when it seems that we are at the end of our story, we are not. We're just there in the middle, and Jesus is there to help see us through it all, the good times and the bad.