A Sermon from First Church, Scarborough… 

A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, July 22, 2007.  The principal reading was Romans 5:1-11. 

“We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:2b).” 

“Hope on the Inside!” 

There have been bleak times in the course of human history and in our personal histories.  The great human sorrow of present time is hopelessness.  Hopelessness reigns wherever men and women, believers and seekers, do not know that God is present in their lives, for hopelessness says, the world cannot be helped and I cannot be helped.  Most often we hope for only an improvement in our situation that comes through some exercise of human energy and not for a solution.  There are many days when I am weary and worn beyond words.  I have a “hope problem.”  Today and for the next three Sunday services, I am going talk and I ask you to think about one four-letter word.  The word is “hope.”  We worship the God of things that are not yet, the God of things that are yet to be.  That is both true and easy to say, and I have just done so; but hope, real hope, Christian hope, is not quite so easy to come by. 

One of the great sins of our time is hopelessness.  I want to turn our attention to the “hope problem.”  Our society, as optimistic and can-do as it often appears to be, has a “hope problem.”   

When we say, “If life was only more in balance and proportion,” we have a “hope problem.”  When we see assorted, addictive behaviors in our society and in our lives, this is a “hope problem.”  When we know we have a problem at home, or school, or work, or church with a lack of motivation, it, too, is really a “hope problem.”  Problems that seem to have to do with everything from money management to personal relationships may at their center be hope problems. Sometimes our hope just fails us for lack of faith, lack of imagination, lack of courage, or we accept a cheap imitation, an inadequate hope that is little more than “whistling into the darkness.” 

Hope is not an act of human will so much as it is an act of faith, of imagination and of courage.  Hope is not mindless optimism.  Hope is not mere acceptance of things are they are.  Hope allows us to see beyond the moment and what is, to imagine, to visualize, what might yet be and what ought to be.  Fact and experience do tell us where we have been.  Christian hope guides us into the place where we have not yet been, and into becoming the persons we have not yet become.  Optimism simply cannot hold up to fact and experience and disappointment.  Optimism alone can drive people into fantasy, and sometimes into terrible rage and self-destructive disappointment.  We have a “hope problem.” 

We can say, in a too simplified way that many people have enough to live on but little or nothing to live for.  True, we do not live by “bread,” or wealth or welfare alone.  Most of us have the means but lack the meaning or the purpose.  “Why am I alive?” is a question that, without an answer, only cloaks our “hope problem.” 

I turn to the Paul’s letter to the Romans.  The Apostle had long been convinced that God meant for Jew and Gentile Christians to live together in a single community of faith and love and hope, Paul and his companions had been working mightily towards the goal for a generation.  It was not a golden age.  The mid-first century experience and evidence was suggesting that Jew and Gentile followers of Christ were finding it increasingly difficult to understand and accept each other. 

As Paul wrote his letter, the theme of hope emerges.  To put his ministry and life into perspective, he found that he needed to turn again and again to a new and a more profound understanding of hope. 

One of the conclusions he reached is that hope is internal and more about human character than it is about circumstance.  Hope is more about what is going on inside of us than what is going on in the world around us.  Hope is about what we trust is going on in the world because of what we experience inside of us despite the evidence of contrary circumstances. 

Hope is a spiritual thing.  Paul says, hope comes from character, and character comes from endurance and endurance comes from suffering.  And hope does not disappoint us because its origin is found in God’s love that has been poured into our hearts, and not in the world. 

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better.  It is about getting better on the inside about what is going on outside. 

Hope is a spiritual thing.  We do not hope because things look hopeful but because we have experienced God’s presence and love, and we trust that this same love poured into our world will make possible a world of justice, inclusion, fulfillment and peace. 

The fruit of hope in our lives says Paul, is that we endure, we stay the course, and we stay engaged even in the face of suffering, or defeat, or discouragement.  Paul and the young Christian church were experiencing it all.   

One of the ‘hope” theologians, Jurgen Moltmann, says that hopelessness manifests itself in two ways in our world.  One is what he calls “presumption.”  We presume, too much.  Presumption is “a premature, self-willed anticipation of the fulfillment of what we hope from God.”  It is the human generated “quick fix” for a problem.  It is a human unwillingness to wait for God.  We set the date, the time and the terms. 

Hopelessness also manifests itself, says Moltmann, in despair.  We despair, too much.  Despair is “a premature, self-willed anticipation of the non-fulfillment of what we hope from God.”  It is the human generated thought, “things will never change,” and that means, “God ain’t going to do it.” 

When we ignore God and the spiritual on behalf of frenzied, perhaps ill-advised, human activity or we descend into hedonistic pleasures, that say, “live fast, love hard, and leave a good looking corpse,” we drift into hopelessness – presumption and despair. 

Viktor Frankl, a famous Viennese psychiatrist, wrestled with hopelessness himself. In 1945, after his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl spent nine days and nights dictating the text of a little book.  When published in English (1946), it was given the title, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  It is a stark description of camp life.  It is also a celebration of the human capacity for hope and dignity in the worst situations in life.  Only one in 28 prisoners survived the camps.  In more immediate terms, given our average summer Sunday worship attendance, only two of us are going to get out of here alive.  Who will it be?  Camp life was almost unbearable.  Too many, who were not killed by their tormentors or died from disease or malnutrition, reached the point of saying, “I have nothing to expect from life anymore.”  They gave up living, they soon died.   

Frankl writes: “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life.  We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, teach the despairing, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly.  Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.” 

Paul writes something very similar.  The question is not whether the circumstances of life are hopeful enough for us to keep going, to keep trying, and to stay engaged in spite of the discouraging evidence to the contrary.  The question is not how we stay hopeful, the question is what hope requires of us. 

The theologian Moltmann was also a prisoner.  While Frankl was writing his little book in Vienna, Moltmann was in Allied prison camps in Scotland and England.  Of his time in captivity, almost four years, he writes, “We lost our names and became numbers.  We lost our home and our country; we lost our hope and our self consciousness; and we lost our community.”   

Looking back, Moltmann recalled that a prison chaplain’s gift to him of a New Testament and Psalter came to provide his means for articulating the sense of loss he experienced.  He went on to develop what came to be known as the “Theology of Hope.” 

In every crisis of life, individual and communal, we have to make a choice.  We can choose either destructive behavior or hedonistic abandon or we can ask what hope expects of us.  In short, hope expects of us, in a biblical form, to do what is right and good and truthful no matter the fact or the experience.  This is to choose hope. 

These words stand for today.  We will pick up our theme of “hope,” next Sunday morning.  For the moment, I leave you with the words of St. Paul (Romans 15:13):  “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  Amen.