"Are You Serious About Hope?"

By Dr. Mickey Anders

South Elkhorn Christian Church

Lexington, Kentucky

February 1, 2009 

Text: Romans 8:24-25, 31-38

Are you serious about hope? 

"I hope the weather warms up and the snow and ice all melt soon."

"I hope the Cardinals win the Super Bowl tonight."

"I hope the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan will come to an end soon." 

We have no control over the weather.  Does this mean that hope is nothing more than wishful thinking?  The Cardinals are serious underdogs.  Does this mean that hope is a hankering after what is extremely unlikely?  Wars and rumors of wars will be with us forever.  Does this mean that hope is a childlike naïveté about human nature?

What is the Christian view of hope?  And are you serious about hope? 

The dictionary defines hope as "wishing for something with expectation of its fulfillment."  Our usual understanding of hope is wishful thinking.  Hope doesn’t normally carry much weight.

But in Christianity, hope is a technical word with special meaning.  It is entirely different from the uses of hope I have mentioned so far.  In our faith, hope is "the theological virtue which desires and searches for a future good that may be difficult but not impossible to attain with God's help."  It is "the expectation of a favorable future under God's direction."

Hope is an essential and fundamental element of the Christian life.  Like faith and love, it can designate the essence of Christianity.  Christian hope does not arise from the individual's desires or wishes, but from God.  Genuine hope is not wishful thinking, but a firm assurance about things that are unseen and still in the future.  Hope is a confident expectation that what God has done in the past, God will do in the present and future.

Hope is a central feature of Paul's theology.  It is one of the defining marks of a Christian. Despite the suffering that comes from living in a fallen world, the Christian is certain that God will one day complete what God has started in the lives of believers and in the whole cosmos. 

In Philippians 1:6, Paul says, "I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ."

We like to fend off our critics humorously by saying, "Be patient.  God isn't finished with me yet."

In Romans 5, Paul says that hope is the positive result of trials and sufferings.  "We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…" 

The Bible is filled with messages of hope.  We hope in God,. We hope in Christ,.  We hope in God's promises, in the mercy of God.  Hope is obtained through faith, through grace, through the word, through patience and comfort of the scriptures.  Hope is described as good, lively, sure and steadfast, gladdening, and blessed.  Hope triumphs over difficulties.  We are called to hope.  We are to rejoice in hope.  We should abound in hope.  We should not be ashamed of hope.

In our text for today, Paul says, "For in hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." 

With all these verses about hope found in the Bible, we would think that hope has always been a profound idea in theology.  In fact, it was not until Jurgen Moltmann in the 1960s that hope came to the forefront in theology.  He published his monumental work Theology of Hope in English in 1967.

In 1944, Moltmann was drafted into the German army after the war was hopeless for them.  He was not at all sympathetic to Hitler's regime so he surrendered to the first British soldier he met.  Then he spent several years in prisoner-of-war camps in England before finally returning to Germany.  During those years, he became a Christian and began to seriously study theology. 

He was one of many survivors of prison camps who discovered that hope was the key ingredient in survivability.  Those prisoners who had no hope died quickly.  Those with some reason to hope seemed to survive in spite of all odds.  So Moltmann knew from first hand experience that hope was pivotal in life.

Later, he would develop his whole theology from the promise of hope.  He was among the first to base theology, not on God's actions in the past like creation, but on God's promise of the future and on the resurrection. 

The key verse in this theology is 1 Peter 1:3 which says, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

Moltmann rightly recognizes that people all through the Bible were motivated by hope.  Remember how important the promise of land was to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  They were wandering nomads, yearning for that Promised Land.  That future promise was repeated throughout the book of Genesis and kept the people moving forward.  Later, the promise of the coming Messiah pervaded the remaining books of the Hebrew literature.  Israel's entire identity is in light of the promises of God. 

In the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus casts a light on every page.  His resurrection is the first fruits of our resurrection and the promise of life after death.  Our God is the God of the future who holds out the promise of new life to all of us.  As Peter says, "We have a 'living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.'"

Moltmann proclaims that it is hope that changes us, hope that changes the world.  It is an expectation that the promises of God are already in the process of fulfillment. 

Why is hope important?  We can first answer that question by taking a hard look at what life would be like without hope. 

Paul commented on this in 1 Thessalonians, where he wrote, "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope."  Can you imagine grieving without hope? 

In Ephesians 2, Paul describes life before we knew Christ this way, "remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world."

How would you like to live in a world where evil ultimately prevails, where there is only dark at the end of the tunnel, where there is no yearning for the future?  We do not want to live in a world without hope. 

But hope changes everything.  It gives us the strength to stand up against the forces of darkness.

Bishop Desmond Tutu faced the regime of apartheid in South Africa with a faith in the future:  "I want the government to know now and always that I do not fear them.  The resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ declares for all to know that light will triumph over darkness, that goodness will triumph over injustice, and that freedom will triumph over tyranny.  I believe fervently what Paul meant when he said, 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'"  Hope gives us the courage to stand against the darkest evils of our day confident that good will out, that God's word will be the last word. 

Halford Luccock tells of a New England dinner party some years ago.  There was a man there who spent his summers in Maine, and he fascinated the other guests with the story of a little town called Flagstaff.  The state planned a dam, and Flagstaff was to be flooded by the large lake formed by the dam. As a consequence, all improvements and repairs to the town stopped.  Why paint a house if the deluge threatened it within six months? Why repair anything if it faced destruction?  So day by day, week by week, the town became increasingly bedraggled, dilapidated, woe-be-gone, and then the man made a telling observation:  "Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present."

Think about that line, "Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present."  It's true!  Without hope, the present is utterly meaningless.  Why work?  Why plan?  Why live if there is no hope? 

Today hope is enjoying a resurgence.  Politicians have claimed it. Who can ever forget Bill Clinton's famous speech which he ended so dramatically by saying, "I still believe in a place called hope."  I have often been to his hometown of Hope, Arkansas.  But there is also a Hope, Kansas, New Mexico, Idaho, Maine, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Alaska.

More recently our new President has claimed the mantel of hope. The title of his second book and his speech before the Democratic Convention in 2004 was, "The Audacity of Hope."  He got that phrase from a sermon by his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright.   

In the sermon, the pastor talked about a painting completed in 1885 by George Frederick Watts.  The painting depicts a hunched and blindfolded girl who sits atop a globe and cautiously plucks at a single string on her crude wooden harp. 

The world on which this woman sits is a bleak one.  And we know it is true.  Our world is "torn by war, destroyed by hate, decimated by despair, and devastated by distrust."  This week, the ice storm has ravaged our state.  The failing economy has an icy grip on the whole world.  It's not a lovely picture of this world. The world on which she sits seems on the brink of destruction.  

And a closer look reveals all the harp strings but one are broken or ripped out.  Even the instrument has been damaged by what she has been through, and she is the classic example of quiet despair.  Yet the artist dares to entitle the painting "Hope."

Jeremiah Wright proclaimed, "The harpist is sitting there in rags.  Her clothes are tattered as though she had been a victim of Hiroshima… Yet the woman had the audacity to hope."

Hope is sometimes the one string that keeps us going.  When all else fails, hope gives us life!

In March of this year, the Norwegian government opened a vast underground crypt on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.  This cave 425 feet deep inside a frozen mount has been prepared to receive shipments of seeds.  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a cold-storage facility designed to preserve 4.5 million distinct seed samples. 

This seed collection will be the ultimate backup in case a natural catastrophe like a asteroid strike occurs, or in case we humans do something stupid like have a worldwide nuclear war or we somehow cause massive climate change.  Doomed the "Doomsday Vault," this seed bank will eventually be the repository of the seeds for almost every variety of plant known to humankind.  The low temperatures can preserve the seeds for thousands of years.

In case of disaster, where would we be without seeds, seeds for the future?  We need a place to preserve something as essential to the world as seeds.  And, friends, we need a place to preserve something as essential to the world as hope!  We cannot do without faith, hope and love, and it is our job to be the vault preserving those great values. 

The church is the place where hope is nourished.  There are plenty of reasons to lose hope in this life.  In fact, it is fairly easy to preach about despair, to generate hate, to lose heart.  In this world of bad news, these often seem much more credible than hope.

But the church understands that hope is not rooted in what happens in the present.  Our hope comes from the promise of God.  It is rooted in God, not happenings.  Our theology is grounded in hope. Our lives receive meaning from hope.  Our faith nurtures hope. 

We are with Paul in proclaiming that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." 

We are called to share that audacity of hope.  Are you serious about hope?