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"The Hope that Come from Faith"
In the Book of Hebrews we read these words, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

I've been going across the country talking to college and university students and asking them what they hope for in the twenty-first century. We're coming to an end of a millennium. What do they hope will happen in the next century? I get a variety of answers, but among the answers that I get, these perhaps are the most important:

First of all, they say they really hope that people become more caring. They are sensitive to the fact that something is getting lost in the world. They go to banks and deal with machines instead of tellers. They go to universities and computers register them instead of people. They feel a sense of detachment. They sense that personal connections are evaporating, that we are becoming a mechanized people in a mechanized world and they want the human touch.

They want to become caring people. They want to care for people who are going through trouble. They want to care for people who are hungry. They sense that caring is at the core of the Christian faith. A phrase that I can always get from them is this: "We want out hearts to be broken by the things that break the heart of Jesus." What a good statement to care that way. We have to care for people--people who experience prejudice, privation, discrimination.

During World War II there was an incredible man who cared. His name was Metropolitan Cyrill. He was from Bulgaria. I don't know whether you know much about Bulgaria, but it was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II. In spite of that fact, Hitler was not able to round up a single Jew in Bulgaria, primarily because of the leaders of the church there. They stood against Hitler. They cared for their Jewish brothers and sisters and they hung tough when the time came.

This is the story. They rounded up the Jews and had them down at the train station. They were ready to load them on the trains to ship them off to Auschwitz. It was the midnight hour. Suddenly at the end of the boulevard leading to the train station, there appeared this great church leader dressed in black with a beard that came down to his waist. He stood 6"5' to start with but those Orthodox priests have miters on top of their heads so he must have looked like a giant. They said when he walked, men had to run to keep up with him because his stride was so great. Suddenly this man appeared at the end of the boulevard with about a thousand church people behind him. He strode down the boulevard, the church people marching behind him in silence in the dead of the night.

They surrounded the enclave of Jews. The SS Troopers tried to keep them out. Metropolitan Cyrill just laughed at them, pushed their guns aside, and marched among the Jews. As the Jews gathered around them, he let them know that he cared for them. He raised his hands and with one verse of scripture changed the destiny of a nation. He quoted from the Book of Ruth. He said this to the Jews as they gathered around him hysterically, ready to be shipped off to Auschwitz: "Whithersoever thou goest, I will go. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God." This was a man of courage. This was a man who cared. Young people say they want that kind of caring. They want that kind of intensive caring in the world today.

The second thing that they want, the second thing that they look for, is an attitude of forgiveness. We're living in a world where people don't know how to forgive. I mean stop to think about it. What's going on in Northern Ireland? Catholics and Protestants can't forgive each other for what's in the past. And what's going on in Croatia and in Yugoslavia. One group of people, the Serbs, not able to forgive another group of people, the Albanians, and back and forth it goes.

The ability to learn to forgive is crucial for the destiny of this planet. A man that has shown us the capacity to forgive is Nelson Mandela. A friend of mine who knows him well said, "Mr. Mandela, when you were released from prison, when you were let out of that cellblock, you marched across the yard to the gates of the prison. I got my daughter up in the middle of the night to see the scene. As you were marching across the courtyard, the camera zeroed in on your face and I'll never forget your face. It was full of anger and hatred, animosity. I have never seen so much anger and so much hatred written on a man's face. That's not the Nelson Mandela I know today."

Mandela said, "It's interesting you should say that because as I left the prison block and marched across the courtyard, I thought to myself, 'They're letting me go, but everything that was important is taken from me. My cause is dead.'" He did not know that it was not dead. He had been kept in solitary confinement. He did not know he had become a folk hero. "My cause is dead," he said. "My wife, they have taken her from me. My friends have been put to death. Everything and everybody that means anything to me, they've taken away. It's all gone and I hated them for it. Then I remembered what Jesus said about forgiveness and God spoke to me and said, "Nelson, for twenty-seven years you were their prisoner but you were always a free man. Don't let them turn you into a free man only to make you into their prisoner.' And I realized the importance of forgiveness."

Not only on the international scene but in our personal lives, forgiveness is at the core of our humanity. If we don't know how to forgive, we can't survive. We must not only be a caring people, we must be a forgiving people. Without forgiveness, there is no hope; there is no future. Our destinies are, in fact, lost in meanness and cruelty and anger. Aren't there people that you know that you need to forgive? Don't the roots of bitterness that are eating away at your soul need to be pulled out? Only by asking Jesus to empower you to forgive will you ever grow into the kind of forgiving person you ought to be.

And so it is that young people were saying to me over and over again, "We want people in the twenty-first century to be caring. We want them to be forgiving. Just this."

In the play, A Raisin in the Sun, the young man comes home to see his family after he has lost all the money that would give them a future, destroyed all their hopes. His sister, Beneatha, calls him every despicable name imaginable. After she curses out her brother, the mother speaks and says, "I thought I told you to forgive him."

"Forgive him? There's nothing left to forgive."

"There is always something left to love," says the mother. "And if you haven't learned that, you haven't learned anything. When do you think it's time to love and forgive somebody? When they've done good? When they've made you proud? Well, that's not the time at all. The time to love somebody is when he's at his lowest because the world's done whipped him so."

We must become a caring people. We must become a forgiving people. This is at the core of what people hope for in the twenty-first century.

I want to say another thing. Everywhere I went young people talked about this. They said, "We hope that in the twenty-first century, people learn how to be still." They recognize that the momentum of life has picked up. We're moving at a faster and faster rate. It's hard to catch your breath in this helter-skelter world and they recognize the need to stop and be still.

The scripture says, "Be still and know that I am God." Let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up I make sure to get up at least a half hour before I have to because I realize how important it is to be still, to be quiet. I lie in bed in the morning and in the stillness and in the quiet of the morning, I say nothing to God. I ask God for not a thing, save this: In the stillness of the morning, I just say the name Jesus over and over again, and I invite Jesus to invade me.

It is one thing to believe in Jesus. It's another thing to find a still place, a quiet place. The Celtic Christians call it a "thin place," a place where the wall between God and you is so thin that he can break right through. In the stillness of the morning in quiet, I yield and let Jesus invade me, let Jesus possess me. It is one thing to believe in Jesus. It's another thing to invite Jesus into your life to cleanse you of the dirt and the darkness and to fill you with the ecstacy of his presence. Without Jesus how can you be forgiving? You forgive because he forgave you. He teaches you how to forgive in the depths of your being, He teaches you how to become a forgiving person. It is in the depths of your being that his presence makes you into a caring person, and last of all this, a joyful person.

When I was a boy, I hated Sunday evening services because whenever the pastor would ask for a favorite hymn, Mrs. Kirkpatrick on the fifth row of the church would always say, number 111 in the Tabernacle Hymn Book. I hated that song as a kid. The song was In the Garden. You have to understand, I was a tough kid at fifteen on the streets of Philadelphia. I walked tough and I survived by being tough and I didn't like that song because it wasn't tough. You know the song. Imagine a fifteen-year-old boy singing:

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.

I didn't like it. The second verse to me was even worse:

He speaks and the sound of his voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing.

I hated that song, but that's because I was fifteen. The older I get the more I love that hymn. The more I love to find a quiet place to go off alone and let Jesus invade me, and to sing the chorus of that precious song:

And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

It is in stillness to surrender to the presence that gives us joy, that teaches us how to forgive and that empowers us to be a caring people.

The young people said, "We have hopes and dreams for the future." Indeed they do. Faith in Christ and surrendering to God and yielding to an invasion of the Holy Spirit, ah, these are the good things that create this future. So I quote again the verse, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." May this be your faith. May this be your blessing.

Interview with Tony Campolo
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Tony, you talk about standing in solidarity in suffering. Where did you learn that kind of faith.

Tony Campolo: I grew up in West Philadelphia. I was just a boy when the war was taking place, World War II, and all around me were Jewish people weeping and crying over the death and the loss of loved ones under Nazi totalitarianism. Their sorrow became my sorrow because they were my friends. They were good neighbors. They were good to me and to see them going through pain was more than I could handle. It sensitized me and I realized that they were, in fact, a chosen people by God and I wanted to be with them.

Talbot: And so the caring, the compassion for the Christian to be loyal to the resurrected Christ through action, meaningful action, faith with action, that's what you're about in your ministry.

Campolo: I think that when Jesus comes in, the real evidence that one is possessed by Jesus is caring. I mean, I believe in all the gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues and healing and prophesies, but, you know, Paul writes so eloquently, "If you speak with the tongues of men and of angels and you don't have this caring sense; if you have prophesies, if you understand all mysteries and you don't have love, you're nothing," and that's where I am.

Talbot: Kingdom Works is one of your wonderful programs and your son, Bart, is working hard to continue that legacy of caring. Say a word about that.

Campolo: He's gathered together young men and women and has them working in Chicago, in Oakland, California, in Philadelphia. He has them connected with churches in urban neighborhoods and these young people not only do social service in the neighborhood, but they go door to door. When people answer the door they sayto them, "Look, we're not here to lay a trip on you. We just want to pray God's blessing on you and to pray that the needs of this family will be met." And they pray with them and say, "Do you have any special needs?" People always do. "Yes, my husband has lost a job, or my daughter is pregnant, or my son's on drugs." And this is what they do: they take note of that and make sure that some social service agency connects with that family.

Talbot: And you are a gift, Tony Campolo, for bringing that message of racial and urban justice, not only to the neighborhood where you grew up, but all around the country and into the White House as well. Thanks so much, Tony.

Campolo: It's good to be with you.

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