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, August 5, 2007. The principal reading was Romans 8:31-39.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).”
“An Old White Rag”
There have been bleak times in the course of human history and in our personal histories. The great human sorrow of the 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 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. (This sermon is number 3 in a 4 sermon series.)
One of the many criticisms uttered against Christian talk of “Hope” is that it cultivates a lot of futuristic happy talk that ignores present realities and past experience and postpones every problem and every solution, to an escapist time in the future. In the 21st century, hope does have a wimpy reputation, and as we have less and less confidence in the future, much less trust the One who holds the future, we have watched the declining value of the power of hope. Any theology of hope that is only about tomorrow and not about today is increasingly suspect.
Hope is meant to be a word of strength and not of weakness in the present, and of anticipation and not of hesitation about the future. Hope invariably involves a sense of promise. One has confidence in the promise because one trusts the one who makes the promise; and one desires the fulfillment of the promise, and thus our desire is an enabling expression of our hope.
Hope remains in our time an elusive virtue because we, as a people and as a nation, are uncertain into who and what we should put our hope. A Christian does not simply hope for the best. We hope that we may obtain the promises of God. Christian hope is not simply personal satisfaction, but the work of an entire congregation or community of faith. We need one another and the strength of our ongoing Congregational tradition, and we need the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Hope is a cooperative, communal venture. It does, however, begin with the individual.
God is present in Jesus as the spirit of self-giving love, and wherever that spirit is now being expressed in this world, there God is. Let me offer, in support of this thought, a true story.
Jürgen Moltmann, the author of “The Theology of Hope,” grew up in Nazi Germany and was conscripted into the German Army in World War II as a teenager. Captured by the Allies in Belgium, he spent his late teen years as a P.O.W. in camps in Scotland and England where he was forced to perform manual labor. The cold damp weather was bad for his health.
One winter he had a terrible cold, a runny nose, and no handkerchief. He was forced to use his coat sleeve. The coarse material felt like sandpaper on his nose. One day he looked up from his work to see a group of local Scots women and children, watching him and the other prisoners. One old woman looked directly at him for some time. She then spoke to one of the guards and handed him something. The guard approached Moltmann and presented him with an old white rag. At first, he stared at the nondescript piece of cloth, failing to understand what had happened. Then, suddenly, he later wrote, it dawned on him what she had done.
The old white rag helped to change his life. The woman’s act did not cure his cold, nor did it shorten his imprisonment. But her act of love came from one who knew what it meant to be without the essentials of life. The old woman had just the right thing for his need: not a new starched handkerchief but a soft, worn rag. She became the Christ for him and helped heal his loneliness, despair and suffering. Open to the gesture, Moltmann, after his release, went on to study, teach and write of Christ’s spirit of hope and love and trust.
A person, who would be hope filled, must learn, and must decide to trust. To trust or not to trust is a spiritual decision.
The question is: do we choose to believe that the universe, other people and our own selves are basically trustworthy or not. And one of the results of choosing and expressing a basic attitude of trust is that it makes the “trustee” hopeful.
Paul puts it in a lengthy sentence: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, no angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Just how much am I willing to trust the universe and all that is in it? The question is a personal one. Do I believe the source of the universe is basically benevolent and caring, or is it cold and callous? How much am I willing to trust other people? Are people basically good and decent, or are they selfish and brutish? How much am I willing to trust myself? Am I basically capable, reasonable, and humane with good impulses or am I selfish, greedy and mean with only sinful impulses?
I am not suggesting that you and I be naïve and innocent as though we do not live in a world of natural disasters and human violence, disease and war. We can be overly trusting of others and thereby become their victims. We can be overly trusting of our own selves and lose our capacity for self-examination, self-criticism and self-regulation. We can never be so glib or evasive as to say, “The Devil made me do it!”
But the much greater threat and danger is that we can become basically distrusting of life and other people and our own selves. We can become paranoid and thoroughly hopeless.
Hope is trusting without reservation. Although it can be influenced by the intellect, trusting happens at a deeper level than the intellectual; which is perhaps why Jesus called us to become like little children to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10;15).
“For I am convinced that (nothing) will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Paul was correct.
This conviction that the universe and all that is in it, including other people and our own selves, are basically trustworthy – that God is for us and not against us – happens deep within our inner child. It is the site of our hope.
It has been suggested that there is a linguistic or language connection between the two words “hope” and “hop.” It was the pensive Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard who coined the phrase “the leap of faith.” In his view life is not a series of inevitable transitions but of discrete leaps of decision. We stand at the abyss of the unknown, we decide to leap, and we leap. Hope allows us to take the leap.
Dean Snyder, a United Methodist Pastor in Washington, D.C., has said that we in the church are like children playing in a park without a parent or guardian. We start out playing near the parent and then wander a little bit away, until we realize we have strayed perhaps too far and run back to make sure the parent is still there, where we left the adult. Then we begin to play again and maybe this time we fall, and we run back to our parent, who wipes our tears, brushes the dirt off, and tells us we are really okay. After some cuddling and reassurance we are turned loose, and we begin to play again and to wander off again.
This is what our spiritual life is often like. We take hope and leap into the world, but come back again and again to be reminded that the universe is trustworthy, despite all the bruises and wounds inflicted upon us. We can have hope. We can be a hope-filled people.
So we gather this morning for a taste of Christ’s body, the bread and the wine. To remember that the universe is basically trustworthy, others are basically trustworthy, and we ourselves are basically trustworthy, too. We remember all of this truth not so much with our adult intellect as with the child within us. We choose trust so that we might have hope.
“For I am convinced,” said St. Paul. I am convinced, too, say I. Are you?
