The editorial cartoonist for USA TODAY had it right in just two frames.   The first, dated 1968, has two young people coming out of movie theater with the marquee reading 2001: A Space Odyssey.  One says to the other, Won’t it be great if we can fly to other planets in the year 2001?  Second frame, year 2001.  Same couple, all grown up, at the desk of an airline agent who says to them, There are no flights to Des Moines until Tuesday and your bags went to Miami.  [Jan. 4, 2001: 12A.]

That’s about the way it is, isn’t it?  When Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey that Stanley Kubrick put to film, he had an imagination brimming with hope for a future fueled by science and technology.  Some things turned out as predicted; most didn’t.   Pan Am was supposed to carry us all to distant planets as easily as Southwest to Lubbock.  It hasn’t even gotten a plane off the ground for more than a decade since going bust.  So the optimism of that day has bumped up against the realism of today about like high-flying technology stocks that fell with a thud last year.  Counting on things to improve by our own ingenuity is about as risky as counting on science fiction to become science reality or dot.coms to become blue chip stocks. 

But thinking about the future and journeying toward it is good and right this first Sunday of the new millennium.  The question is, Is there a way to hold hope in the future that has any surer foundation to it than our failed attempts in the past?  Some of you are good and tired of making good faith efforts of your own that end with broken resolutions and more disappointment than you care to name. Where do we look for hope?

We go back to the promises of God found in the history of the people of God and recorded in Scripture.  We go back to a people who knew something about odysseys, about journeys into the unknown.  The Hebrews are the original experts on odysseys to the future.  Coming out of a world that thought of life as endless cycles of life and death, of seasons changing one into the other with nothing new under the sun, their vision was unique and world making.

Caught in slavery and working for the man in Egypt, they found themselves drawn out of bondage and traveling toward freedom.  Their experience with God taught them that nothing had to remain the way it was.  Things could change for the better.  And if that were to come to pass it would be because behind or beyond the powers-to-be that seemed in control was a more powerful God that was in control and that could be trusted.

Some of you here this morning need to begin at just this point.  You need to believe as you begin thinking about your future that there’s something to hope for, something to strike out for spiritually, and most of all, you need to believe there is someone – the God of heaven and earth – who will go with you and see you safely through.

When we think of odysseys we some of us think back beyond Arthur C. Clarke to Homer.  We think of the Greek stories of the hero Odysseus who journeyed through one dangerous trap and perilous temptation after another in search of home.  That life is a journey, an odyssey, it is not so obvious to everyone though.  It’s a conviction that needs to be taken up in order to be lived well.

And that is just what I challenge you to this morning.  Take up the journey of faith, your own faith odyssey and strike out for your spiritual home today.  Understand that you are not really in search of yourself, though that is something you will discover more fully along the way.  Who you are is not an achievement to be gained at the end of the journey but rather an insight to be realized fully only at the end.  As T. S. Eliot puts it, We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive at where we started/ And to know the place for the first time.  [“Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot, the Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (Harcourt Brace, 1980), p.145.]

I take Eliot to mean that the new people we become are really only the people we were destined by God to be at the start.  We begin our journey of faith with an original love bestowed upon us lavishly by a God who has created us and formed us.  God has made us and named us and claimed us for his own before we could do anything great to deserve the notice of heaven.

Israel started out as God’s people with nothing to commend themselves.  They were a slave people, unable to do anything to effect their own freedom or future.  But God’s love was their beginning.  Before they could make God proud, God conceived and birthed them as his own.  I have called you by name, God says, and I have claimed you for my own.  And even when in the midst of their journey they failed the Lord and fell into captivity again, God redeemed them and reclaimed them.

Nothing you are today or are not tomorrow can stop God from holding onto you in love.  As much as Israel was God’s children, and even in likeness to Jesus being God’s beloved Son in whom he was well pleased, so you are who you are as a good gift from God.  If you need to lay hold of this before embarking on your faith odyssey, begin here and now.  Accept God’s love for you.  Accept God’s claim upon you.  Determine that you don’t need to go make a name for yourself; all you have to do is accept the name you’ve been given and live to glorify God’s name instead.

Keep in mind though that the journey of faith is no easy way.  It is filled, as the hymn says, with many a danger, toil and snare, with flood and fire.  But God’s command is Do not fear.

The Mason family made an odyssey through the southwest this past week.  We began our journey down I-20 going 30 miles per hour on a sheet of ice to Midland, the day after Christmas.  After stops in Phoenix and Orange County, California, we visited the Grand Canyon for the first time. An awesome spectacle, don’t you know?!  But the view from the rim does not account for the danger in the canyon below.  The Colorado River runs over 270 miles through that big hole in the ground.

In 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named Major John Wesley Powell determined to be the first to explore the full length of the vast canyon.  He headed out with three boats and nine other men, against the advice of Indians who predicted his certain death.  At one point the rapids had been so strong and perilous, three men left the party and began a walk to civilization.  O. G. Howland, his brother Seneca, and Bill Dunn, tried to convince Major Powell to quit the river.  We surely will all die if we continue this journey, they said.  What happened instead is that the three men died and Powell and his group survived.  The three men that left at what came to be known as Separation Canyon were reported killed by Indians who took them for miners who had killed an Indian woman.  As it turned out, the remaining adventurers had to go through only two more sets of rapids before having calm water the rest of the way.  Fear conquered the Howlands and Dunn.  Powell and his group conquered their fear.

Faith faces down fear with the confidence that God will see us through flood and fire both.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, God says.  When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned….

It's not that the floods and fires of life will not be fearsome to us; it’s only that we are commanded not to let fear control us.  And what is the root of a fear that makes us wilt in the face of it?  Is it not that we will have to go through it alone and will find that we are not up to the challenge?  Well, God not only has made us, named us and claimed us.  And God has not only assured us that we will not be lost in the floods and fires of life.  All of this is so because God has promised to be with us through it all. 

Whatever life brings you; God is with you in it.  Whatever you bring upon yourself, God will stay with you to bring you out of it.  Israel learned this both ways.  They were captives in Egypt through no fault of their own and God saw them to freedom.  And then they were captives in Babylon because of their own faithlessness, and God saw them to freedom again.  In the same way, some of you have found yourself in fixes you had no control over.  And some of you have put yourself in fixes you can hardly quit blaming yourself for.  Here’s the good news: You can face them with faith, you can set off straight into them to your future, because you belong to God, not to your problems.  And God is with you all the way.

Tom Hanks has done it again with his role in Cast Away.  You know the basic story: plane downed at sea; man marooned on deserted island; meager resources to stay alive, let alone get to civilization.  It’s not an odyssey exactly, but it’s equally a story of human survival, of facing fear, of finding what you are worth in dire circumstances.  He makes it through the ordeal, because he refused to let himself believe he was alone.  His best friend on the island was Wilson – I’ll leave it to you to find out who he is.  But at the end of the movie he says that he made it through because of the picture of his girlfriend Kelly, that he clung to in hope.  Actor Chris Noth had a bit part but he commented on that notion: I think it’s beautiful, that the idea of someone can help you, that people are with you whether they’re really there or not.  [USA Today (Jan 4, 2001):2D.

If that’s true about the idea of someone who’s not really there, think of what it means for the God of the universe to really be there.  So set out in faith, Odysseus.  The perils are great but the presence of God is greater.  Do not fear.  God is with you.