OUR HOPE

ROMANS 8:18-39

I want to talk to you this morning about one of the most important qualities in our lives as Christians. It is hope. Our text one of the many great biblical passages about hope.

Some of my favorite lines about hope come from the wonderful American poet Emily Dickinson:

When I lookinto my heart, I can recognize the little bird of hope perched there. Actually, my little bird of hope sings a few words along with the tune, and in this sermon I want to tell you what some of those words are. But Emily Dickinson is right: the little bird of hope is down in our souls, and it never stops singing, never at all.

Hope is really important. The reason is that we human beings naturally lean into the future. I think God made us this way. We have a primal drive toward the future and a primal need to be able to look forward to something good in the future. When we lose hope, our spirits can become sick. We need hope in order to live, and to live well, and to be happy.

Understanding Hope

So what exactly are we doing when we are hoping?

Well, we aren't pretending that we don't have severe problems. That's not hope; that's denial. In our Scripture Paul wrote that the sufferings of this life cannot be compared to the glory to come. I find it helpful to change the word "sufferings" to "problems." Some of us feel we should reserve the word "suffering" for people like Paul who have been persecuted for their faith and for others who haven't been nearly as blessed as we have. But all of us have problems. So Paul wrote: "I consider that the problems of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." Clearly Paul was not denying the problems of the present. He was just reminding us that what is coming is going to be greater than all the problems we have now. Hope is not denying the problems.

Neither is hope a naive expectation that everything will naturally get better on its own. Progress is not automatic, and in fact things sometimes get worse rather than better. I may be mistaken about this, but I have the feeling that in my lifetime the tone of politics has gotten worse rather than better. I remember the Eisenhower versus Stevenson presidential race in 1956, and I assure you that it did not feel like the race of 2016. I think the air and the oceans are much more polluted today than they were in my childhood. I think drug abuse is much more widespread today than it was in my youth. Sometimes things get worse instead of better.

Hope is not denial of our problems or naive optimism. It is trust concerning the future. Our Christian hope is trust that in the future God will make things turn out right.

This means that hope is a special form of faith. Faith is trust in God. Hope is trust in God for the future.

Our Christian hope is comprehensive. God is the creator of all things visible and invisible, and our hope is that God will solve all the problems of our world and of our lives. God will make everything right.

In saying that we hope that God will make everything right, I am not saying that we know how God will do this. We don't. Paul mentioned this in our Scripture text: "Hope that is seen is not hope." If you see it, if you understand it, then it isn't hope; it's knowledge. We don't know how God will make everything right. But we are trusting God to do it.

So hope is trust that in the future God will make everything right. It's going to be OK.

When?

And that leads us to ask, When will God make everything right?

The answer, I think, is: "In the end." In the end, God's kingdom is going to come and in the end God's will is going to be done on earth as it is in heaven. In the end we will be resurrected and our hearts will be pure and we will see the face of God.

If we claim that before the end arrives we can bring in the kingdom of God, that is not hope. That is utopianism. In particular, if we think our candidate or our party or our public policy will usher in the kingdom of God, that is a pipe dream. Pipe dreams are the dreams you have when you put opium in a pipe and smoke it.

This does not mean we shouldn't try to make things better now -- more peaceable, more just, more compassionate, more joyous, more merciful. We should try. God isn't going to wait until the end to begin making everything right. God is working now to make things right, to move us closer to the peaceable kingdom. That is God's great project, and we are called to share in it.

There is a version of Christianity that says things are going to get worse and worse until God suddenly intervenes to turn everything around. I don't believe that. I don't think it's biblical. I believe God is working now.

In fact, I think we can see God at work in our world. We have to be cautious about this, but I think that if we are careful we can discern some of the things God is doing. I think God has been at work in the formation of democratic nations around the world, beginning with the United States. I think God has been at work in the progress the world has made in health care. I think God has been at work in the civil rights movement in our country, and in other similar movements for justice and peace around the world. I think God has been at work in the astonishing modern expansion of Christian missionary work throughout the world.

When we have Christian hope, we are trusting God to continue to work to make things better, and we are trusting that in the end God is going to complete that work. Our hope is that all will be well, everything will be all right.

Who?

You notice that I say everything will be all right. That is certainly the Christian hope, the complete victory of God over all evil. But this leads to another question: For whom do we hope?

Since God is at work throughout the world, everyone who is in the world stands to benefit from what God is doing. It is easy enough to think of Christians as benefiting from God's work, and we certainly do. But it also is the case that the entire world has benefited from democratic governments and better health care and the civil rights movement and other movements for peace and justice in our world, and from Christian missions.

God's work is not yet finished, and it is only in the end that God will complete the great project. It is only in the life to come. And so we ask, for whom do we have hope in the life to come?

I think the answer is that we hope for everyone whom God loves. It is easy to see why we have hope for Christians, but we should remind ourselves that God loves all people. Paul wrote to Timothy: "We have set our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe" (1 Tim. 4:10). Because God loves all people and is the savior of all people, we hope for all people. It would be small-minded of us to do otherwise.

You ask, Are you affirming universalism? Universalism is the claim that we know that in the end everyone will be saved, and I don't think we can know that. I do think we may hope for that, and I think we should hope for that. We don't know enough about the future to claim that all lives will be salvaged, but neither do we know enough about the future to claim that some lives are unsalvageable, even by God. So we hope for everyone. Because God loves generously and saves generously, we hope generously, but without claiming to know the final outcome of things.

What Effect Does Hope Have on Our Lives?

I want to turn now to the question, What effect does hope have on our lives?

A conventional assumption is that hope leads us to disengage from life. The reasoning is that, since we hope that in the end God will make everything right, we have no incentive to try in our own time to make things right.

I see the logic of this, and I suppose hope could have that effect on people. However, I've never seen it have that effect. What I've observed is the opposite.

It works like this. Life is hard. The problems are huge. We are always at risk of giving up. We can become cynical. As some young people say, Life sucks. Many people today speak sarcastically about everything. I'm not talking now about a gentle, bemused humor about human foibles. I'm talking about contempt for everything, full-blown despair about whether life is even worth living, unquestioned certainty that nothing at all is good or really matters.

That kind of cynicism is the attitude that really leads us to disengage from life -- not hope, but despair: * The problems are overwhelming -- why should we even try to solve them? * The poor are always with us -- why help them? * The students won't learn -- why teach them? * The addicts are their own worst enemies -- why intervene for them?

This is where hope can help us. In the face of problems that are overwhelming to us, our hope in God saves us from despair and therefore from disengaging from life. We do what we can, when we can, the best we can, and we hope that God will take our efforts, such as they are, and make use of them in the great project in which God is engaged, the project of making everything right. We work hard and we work smart because we have hope in God for the future.

So the effect hope has on our lives is that it encourages us to address the problems around us. I've seen this over and over. I expect you have, too.

Our Ultimate Hope

Until now I have been speaking mostly about our hope for our lives here on earth. That's very biblical. But now I want to say a word about hope in the face of our ultimate human problem, the one Paul called "the last enemy."

Even though in our minds we all know that death is a universal human experience, it can be difficult for us to internalize this fact. It's not my intention now to urge you to internalize it more than you already have. I'm not even sure that's a good idea. For all I know, it may be best just to accept our mortality little by little, as we are able.

What I do want to say about death is this -- this is the one problem where we all recognize that there is only one possible source of help. When we have died, no one but God can possibly help us. We Christians have been given the hope that God is going to do just that -- help us when we are dead. In our Scripture Paul list ten things that cannot separate us from God's love. The first one is death.

I am aware, of course, that many people feel unsure about heaven. There are reasons for this. One is that we do not have and cannot have an experiential knowledge of heaven. We can't go there. We can't experience it. What we can do is to hope for heaven. I want to turn again to Emily Dickinson: "I never saw a moor. I never saw the sea. Yet know I how the heather looks, and what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, or visited in heaven. Yet certain am I of the place as if the chart were given."

Not only can we not have an experiential knowledge of heaven; we can't even imagine what it might be like. I mean that literally. Human beings are incapable of imagining (creating an image in their minds) of what a perfect eternity would look like. We can imagine isolated ideas such as, for example, that there will not be any illness, but we can't image the big picture. And, of course, since we can't imagine it, it seems unreal to us.

A third barrier to ultimate hope is that many modern people are inclined to think heaven seems just too good to be true. I can understand why people think that. When something seems too good to be true, it often is. Often -- but not always. When I was in my early twenties I fell in love with Caroline Toler. I wanted more than anything else in this world to marry her. Marriage to her seemed too good to be true. Only it wasn't. This past June we celebrated our 55[th] wedding anniversary.

I am hoping for heaven, but I am not denying death. I try to take death seriously. But death is not the only thing I try to take seriously. I try to take Jesus seriously, and I try to take seriously what Jesus said about heaven. Every Sunday, in obedience to his command, we pray together the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father who art in heaven," we say, and "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus believed that there is a heaven where God abides and where God's will is always done. It is to that heaven that Jesus ascended. It is in that heaven that Jesus today stands beside the throne of God. And it is into that heaven that we shall welcomed when our journey through this world is ended. That is our ultimate hope, and we owe it entirely to Jesus.

Conclusion

As long as I live I want to have this Christian hope in my heart. I want it to be a virtue, a habit of my heart, a settled conviction that affects the way I live. In order for that to happen, I try to cultivate hope in my heart. I do that by being a member of the church. I do it by reading the Bible. I do it by singing hymns about heaven. I do it by intentionally rejecting the way of sarcasm and cynicism and despair that is so widespread in our society today. I want to remain steadfast in hope. To those who say that life sucks I offer another possibility: Jesus was right, the gospel is true, and death cannot separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.