Bishop Tom Stockton served the Virginia Annual Conference in the Southeast Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church starting in 1988. He had previously been appointed to a variety of fruitful congregations in North Carolina, served on numerous high-level conference and denominational boards and committees, and was a Trustee at several institutions of higher learning, including Duke University.
Bishop Stockton died last October and was recently remembered by our retiring TWKC Bishop, Bill McAlilly. Bishop McAlilly preached the sermon for the Service of Remembrance for Bishops and spouses who had died in the past year, at the recent SEJC at Lake Junaluska.
For all his accomplishments and accolades, Bishop McAlilly reflected that Bishop Stockton may have offered his most effective and widespread witness through the personalized license plate on his vehicle, which read LIVEALIVE.
Living alive isn’t just about checking your pulse or making sure a person is breathing. We can have good vital signs, but still feel dead inside. To me, that is living without hope. Hoping is not wishing. Wishing is for earthbound ideas and outcomes that are usually based on personal wants or impulsive desires. What we hope for is something God also wants, and likely requires our participation.

When Paul refers to hope in the opening verses of Romans 5, he places hope at the end of a process that starts with justification:
1Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5, NRSV)

These words tell me three things:

*Claiming our faith brings a peace through Christ because we stand on His grace.
*We may boast in our hope because whatever we are hoping for should also glorify God.
*Even If the results are not what we expected, that does not mean we should be disappointed.

Bishop Ken Carter, currently serving the Western North Carolina Conference, said in his State of the Church address that we cannot be people of the past, because we are people of hope. Because we are people of hope, we are people of the future. One cannot live in the past and live alive in the future.

Let us remember that the certainty of our hope is not in who we have been, or who we are…but in who we are becoming. We are called to share God’s love that has been poured into our hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Let us LIVEALIVE as Daniel Iverson wrote in his 1926 hymn, “Spirit of the Living God”:
“Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.”