Romans 5:1-5
“Growing Hope”
June 14, 2020 – Second Sunday after Pentecost
As he strapped on his weapons, he said to himself, “Hope is not a strategy.” I was listening to one of those thrillers with a solitary protagonist who has incredible military fighting skills. He goes up alone against all odds in opposition to forces of evil, in this case an international ring of sex traffickers. Most of the book is the first person narrative of the hero, and he constantly repeats to himself that refrain he learned during his training, “Hope is not a strategy.”
“Hope is not a strategy,” is evidently a fairly common adage in the armed forces. The point seems to be that merely hoping a mission or battle will turn out well is no substitute for a carefully-thought-out plan and clear goals. Writers in other walks of life have adopted the slogan. There’s a book about making sales, a weight loss plan from Rachel Hollis, and a fairly often repeated quote from James Cameron, all beginning with, “Hope is not a strategy.” Don’t hope, they tell us. Instead, make a plan.
Yet hope is one of the three key Christian virtues. In our text for this Sunday from Romans 5, verses 1 and 2 celebrate the fact that hope grows out of our faith. As I repeated from Peter Kreeft three weeks ago and implied in our children’s message for this week, hope is the stem which grows out of faith. Paul begins with ,“Therefore, since we are justified by faith,” and goes on to talk about faith’s results: peace with God through Christ and access to grace “in which we stand.” Then that sentence concludes at the end of verse 2 with “and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God.”
For Christians, hope is far from second best to good strategic planning. For us, hope is not merely forlorn wishful thinking. Instead, hope is something we boast about, something in which we rejoice. And we believe hope is one of the great gifts we as followers of Jesus have to offer those around us in a divided, broken, and hurting world.
Yet how exactly does that work? When things are divided, broken, and hurtful to the extent that there seems no immediate reconciliation, mending or healing, in what does a Christian offer of hope consist? At this point, we must both admit and proclaim that real hope is not at all the same as good feelings or optimism.
We can see this distinction between hope and the emotion of optimism by considering our situation in worship right now. Many of us, including myself, were in the habit of relying on weekly worship as a way of periodically “tanking up” spiritually before heading back out into the pressures and difficulties of life. I once illustrated this in a sermon by how whales periodically rise to the surface of the ocean to breath out and breathe in, before plunging into the depths again. Worship is a way to surface and take a deep breath of the Spirit before diving back into the darkness around us.
Yet my philosopher friend Robert Roberts argues that as good and wonderful as are all those aspects of worship which refresh us—uplifting music, thoughtful prayers, beautiful banners and colors and space which lifts our eyes and hearts up—they may often just simply be creating moods, feelings which we mistake for genuine spiritual life.[1] Instead, he argues that genuine Christian hope is not something we just feel in a worship service, but that authentic Christian experience is “Being able to carry one’s hope into situations which… appear most contrary to hope; to experience the hope of life in the midst of death and the hope of righteousness amidst the moral degradation of the present world.”[2]
So Roberts goes on to say that Christian hope is not optimism.[3] Optimism is merely a natural human tendency to believe things are going to turn out well. It’s the student who has a good feeling about an exam, even though she hasn’t studied. It’s the person with a string of dismal romantic relationships entering into yet another, trusting that it will be better this time. It’s a stockholder holding tight instead of selling, confident that the market will turn back up before too long. Such optimism is a natural human feeling, built into us by God or evolution or both. But it’s not really hope. And such optimism is easily sidetracked or devastated when it bumps into the hard reality that our optimistic expectations frequently do not pan out at all.
Instead of a fleeting mood, or even more lasting feelings of optimism, Roberts argues that hope is an emotion and a virtue which, as Paul says in verses 3 and 4, is embedded in our hearts and minds as a matter of enduring and persistent character. It is a shaping of our souls which constantly looks beyond the specific “hopes” and expectations we feel about what happens to us today or tomorrow, but toward that “hope of sharing the glory of God,” about which we may rightly boast.
Christian hope, then, is built upon the foundation of faith, trust in God, with the conviction that God is absolutely trustworthy. Just as He raised Jesus from the dead, He will raise us up. Just as He did not leave Israel in Egypt, He will free His people from bondage and oppression. Just as Jesus healed those around Him and drove out demons, He will heal our bodies and drive evil from our hearts and minds. That is our faith, what we believe. Out of that faith grows our hope.
The huge problem for our Christian hope is that all those expectations I just named as true hope are not for today, tomorrow, or even next week. For most of us they feel far in the future. It’s much easier to picture and aim toward some nearer goal, toward a better job, or reconciliation in a relationship, or even just a bathroom remodel. We can come up with strategies to achieve those things. But hope is not a strategy. So it does not feel very practical or relevant to our present situation, to current events.
That distant and future nature of true hope is why, after boasting about hope, verse 3 begins at a place we might think is somewhat strange, “And we also boast in our sufferings…” Paul is not talking about some sort of masochistic or attention-seeking pathology of wallowing in suffering for its own sake. As he goes on to explain, suffering has a role in generating genuine and lasting hope in what really matters, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Let’s try to unpack that a little.
The steps are there, but it is difficult to see how we are supposed to get from suffering to hope. Suffering often, maybe even most of the time, does the opposite. I remember sitting in the living room of a dear old Christian philosopher friend. He taught and argued for the truth of the Christian faith all his life. He wrote books proving the existence of God, demonstrating the truth of Bible, and expounding the foundations of Christian ethics. He had been faithful to his church, generous in giving, and kind and encouraging to generations of younger Christian students like me. Yet now in old age he was experiencing debilitating physical and mental illness that started years before with crippling insomnia.
My friend sat there in all his suffering and told me how hopeless it made him feel. He said, “I’ve devoted my life to God and He let this happen to me. It makes me wonder if what I’ve believed all that time is even true.” I don’t think my friend’s experience is that uncommon. I can imagine myself with feelings like that cropping up someday. It is what suffering frequently does to us. It takes away hope. It does not produce it.
Yet as Paul’s progression of suffering, endurance, character, then hope, suggests it is not suffering as such which produces hope, but what we do with suffering. The first step is to endure. I don’t think I can say enough that I am firmly convinced that Christian character is grounded in what we might generally disparage as “habit.” Endurance is nothing other than the habit of continuing to do what is right and good and holy, even when it is hard. I’m talking about things like saying my prayers when pain is wracking my body, or getting up for worship when grief is grinding down my heart.
Habits, good or bad, are what character is. Good spiritual habits which endure, even through circumstances and experience which make us want to abandon them, help create holy and godly character. And, says Paul, such character produces hope.
My friend Robert Roberts points to one spiritual habit in particular which is particularly highlighted and even enhanced by suffering. That’s the habit of doing those things which focus on our true hope, on that hope of the glory of God, on the hope of standing one day before the face of our Lord and Savior and being filled with overwhelming joy while, as the old hymn says, “the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”
Suffering is the time when all those closer goals and dreams and hopes grow dim. Optimism does not pan out. Expectations are disappointed. Health and wealth diminish. Relationships fall apart. It’s just in those times that we are able to focus more clearly, to grasp more firmly that which is our real hope, the glory of a God who is always there and who always loves us.
A couple of you recently shared in one of our Zoom gatherings about the need to brace up the foundations of your homes as they rest upon the wet clay that is so prevalent around this area. Your walls were cracking, your floors were tilting and your yards were sliding down the hill. Your contractors had to drive pylons down 25 feet or more through that shifting mud to reach solid rock on which your houses and land could rest. Suffering is cracks in the walls of our lives and the tilt of floors on which we thought we could stand. Suffering is the wakeup call which rings out for us to drive our hearts down through all that ugliness and pain to find the solid rock of God and His glory.
I frequently criticize popular clichés, often spoken by TV or movie characters. Advice like “Believe in yourself,” or “Follow your heart,” richly deserves such critique. But what we are reading from God’s Word about hope today suggests there is something to it when people going through trials say to each other “Just have hope.” It is not as pointless and impractical as that “Hope is not a strategy” slogan might suggest.
A recent article for the on-line journal of the U.S. Army War College is entitled, “Hope is Not a Strategy: It’s the Only Strategy.” The author argues that hope in larger human dreams and goals has strengthened and sustained just war efforts and good leadership in the past, whether we’re talking about Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King Jr. Giving up on hope in their times and in what they were seeking would have been a poor strategy indeed. Encouraging hope led to victories of all sorts.
Those who tell us “hope is not a strategy” probably believe that relying on hope will produce disappointment. Without good planning, hoped for outcomes will not appear. The war will be lost, the sale will fall through, and the weight will come back. But, as that War College article shows, that is not always the case. It may even be that the bigger and more important the hope, the more likely it is to produce something good. So verse 5 today begins, “and hope does not disappoint us.”
Christian faith is the seed for growing hope that does not disappoint us. In the midst of sickness and suffering Julian of Norwich had visions which caused her to write, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” More recently, the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke a moving, challenging and beautiful eulogy at George Floyd’s memorial last week, saying:
I turned to the end of the book. And I know how this story is going to end. The first will be last. The last will be first. The lion and the lamb is going to lay down together and God will take care of his children. We got some difficult days ahead, but I know how the story is going to end. There’s going to be justice for George Floyd. There’s going to be justice for Eric Garner. This story won’t end like this. God will never leave us, nor forsake us. I been to the end of the book. Let’s fight on. Let’s stand together. Let us not leave this family now that this ceremony is over.
That last bit of what Rev. Sharpton said is important. You could have heard all I’ve said so far and imagined that our eternal hope in Christ is some sort of consolation prize for all the hopes which will never materialize in this world. You might think hope in God means to just give up on plans and goals and dreams for this life. You may suppose that all the protestors for racial justice, and at other times against abortion, are aiming at things which will never happen until Jesus comes back. Our Christian hope is all about the future. All we can do right now is shake our heads and resign ourselves to the evils around us. But that’s not what Rev. Sharpton said, and it’s not what Christian hope teaches us.
That last verse goes on. We need to read the end of the story. The end of this particular bit of the story reads in full like this, “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.” That’s not in the future tense. That’s in the past tense with a present effect. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Hope does not disappoint us not just because all will be well someday. Hope does not disappoint us because we have already received the beginning of what we hope for. We have received the love of God.
Our Christian hope for a coming glory is pointed toward a holy love which does not give up on the present world and the people around us. We have glory already, a glorious love which can change this world and make it better. As we read in the Gospel from Matthew 10 this morning, Jesus did not come just to aim His followers at a glorious future. In love and compassion for the crowds Jesus saw, He sent His disciples out to teach and heal and deliver people from oppressive evils right then. He said they would have hardship. They would be persecuted. But the one who endures (there’s that word again) would be saved.
Jesus gave His people, gave us hope for the future at the very same time He sends us out to do good in the present, to show others the love of God which had been poured into our hearts. Like Rev. Sharpton said, our Lord calls us to stay with those who are lost and hurt and oppressed, just like He himself will never leave us or forsake us. That’s hope for the future and hope for now. It’s hope which keeps pressing forward to fulfilled by love.
That loner hero in the thriller I read? He saved the girl and brought down the trafficking ring. Then at the end of the book he was off on another mission, without any real strategy for success. Again he says to himself, “Hope is not a strategy,” but then he adds, “but sometimes hope is all you’ve got.” I would add, “and hope is enough.” Hope is enough when the love of God is in our hearts and we are living out His love in real and practical ways. Let us hopefully stand with the oppressed, heal the sick, and comfort the broken-hearted. Let our hope make a real and present difference in this world right now.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2007), 155-158.
[2] Ibid., p. 157.
[3] Ibid., pp. 158, 159.