Way back in March of 2005, I began a seminary
internship at Morningside Presbyterian Church in
midtown Atlanta. My first assignment was to create a
new Sunday morning Bible study. The topic was left
entirely up to me, with two important requirements.
The first was that this class had to be appealing
to the scores of new members who had recently
joined the congregation—many of them young
professionals choosing a church for the first time as
adults. The second requirement was that the class
needed to start as soon as humanly possible. Now,
that semester, I was enrolled in an enthralling course
on Paul’s letter to the Romans. We were reading the
letter in English and in Greek. We were studying the
ancient context in which it was written. We were
considering its unrivaled impact on all of Christian
theology from Saint Augustine to John Calvin to Karl
Barth.
In short, the course was something close to seminary
geek heaven. I could not have been more at home.
And so, I thought, what better topic for my new
Sunday morning class than the letter to the Romans?
I could start immediately. The syllabus was already
in hand, and surely it would attract crowds of these
new, young parishioners, if not drawn by the intern
instructor than surely by this catchy title: “Studying
Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” I thought of that myself.
I prepared my notes. I gathered two stacks of
Bibles. I arrived early to be sure that the room was
comfortable, that three dozen chairs were set just
right, and the flip-chart markers were fresh. And
then, I waited. And I waited. And twenty minutes later,
with three faithful souls in class, I decided it was time
to start. Lesson learned. Experience gained. What’s
an internship for, anyway? The opposite of isolation is
connection. The cure to an epidemic of loneliness is
the creation of communities of belonging. And here’s
the good news in the Church: that is precisely what
we are called to do and be together. Earlier in John’s
Gospel, Jesus declares his God-given purpose this
way: “I have come that they may have life, and have it
abundantly.”
The Letter to the Romans is a weighty theological
document. It is not the most accessible of our
Biblical texts. If you want to introduce the Bible to
someone new to the Christian faith, you’re better to
start with the Gospel of John or perhaps the Letter
to the Philippians. Romans, on the other hand, is
an advanced course in the essentials of our faith.
And yet all these years later, I remain convinced
that the situation into which this letter was written
bears a striking resemblance to our own. Consider
this. Paul is writing to a community of sophisticated,
thoughtful, educated, intelligent, well-meaning
people for whom Christian faith was simply not an
assumed way of life.
If you were to walk into the office on Monday
morning in First Century Rome and announce with
passionate zeal, “I have been buried with Christ and
raised to new life,” you would have been met with
the same blank stares and raised eyebrows that
would greet you tomorrow morning in Indianapolis
(and I suggest you try it). For then, as now, people of
class, people of culture, did not wear their faith on
their sleeves, and Christian faith itself was a foreign
concept. The small band of Jesus followers in that
big city struggled to cling to faith in a complicated
and sometimes hostile environment. They were
looking for a word of hope in a time of despair. And
this, behind all the theological concepts and the
abstract language, this is what Paul aims to offer.
Hope. Hope grounded in faith.
So far, our Lenten sermon series has introduced three
tangible, practical virtues. Kindness. Truthfulness.
Friendship. Now, they may not be easy to practice,
but we know them when we see them. This Sunday,
we turn to a virtue that is harder to nail down and
more difficult to describe. One of our early worship
attendees described it as “squishy,” a virtue that
can be dismissed as a wispy feeling or a vacuous
emotion. A friend of mine put it concisely this week
when I told him the topic for the sermon. He asked,
“How do you practice hope?” Perhaps that’s the
question at the heart of today’s sermon. How do you
practice hope?
We might begin by naming what hope—at least in
the theological sense—is not. Christian hope is not
a synonym for optimism. This idealistic confidence
that everything will work out in the end may be
a byproduct of hope, but it does not name the
substance of the virtue. In my experience, optimism
tends to skate on the surface of experience,
bypassing the reality of pain and the certainty of
suffering. Hope goes deep—in the words of our
Declaration of Faith, plunging us into the struggle,
asking for something from us. Hope is not naïve.
Neither, however, is Christian hope compatible
with the kind of cynicism that has overtaken so
much of our discourse. We are all encouraged
to distrust everything and everyone, from oncevenerated institutions to colleagues and classmates
to neighbors and even members of our own family.
There is a brooding, general lack of faith in the
human species, an assumption of the worst in
others. Maybe you’ve heard this modern take on the
beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the cynical, for they
shall not be disappointed.” We have lifted cynicism to
the realm of virtue.
The wreckage of this idolatry surrounds us. We
see it in diminished expectations for the future
among emerging generations. We see it in broken
relationships. We see it in the lack of concern for
those who will follow us, who will inherit what we
pass along. We see it in a general sense of foreboding
and pessimism. A few weeks ago, columnist David
French wrote an essay reclaiming the original intent
of President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise
speech.” The 1979 address was widely panned and
even blamed for Carter’s political demise. But French
(from the other side of the political aisle) sees in
the speech a prophetic word that went unheeded,
writing, “The trends [Carter] saw two generations
ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body
politic.”
One of those fruits is surely the cynicism that
simultaneously produces both selfishness and
despair. As Carter said, “We have learned that piling
up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives
which have no confidence or purpose.” Have we
learned that lesson?
I believe this is the quality that distinguishes the
virtue of hope from airy optimism or tempting
cynicism: purpose. Purpose.
Ultimately, hope that is not anchored to something
more sturdy than human ability or enterprise will
succumb to the battering reality of life in a broken
world. True hope must rest on a deeper sense of
meaning, a firmer foundation of faith, a greater sense
of purpose
And this was the Apostle Paul’s message to the
Romans. Hope does not disappoint us when hope
is tethered to God’s presence, to God’s power. It
was Václav Havel—the poet and statesman whose
own life was characterized by suffering and periods
of deep despair—who could still write these words:
“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of
the spirit…It transcends the world that is immediately
experienced. It is anchored beyond our horizons.”
Without a sense of transcendence, true hope will
always elude us. Yes, we can do much good. We can
celebrate many successes. We can effect change
and accomplish genuine improvement simply by
relying on our goodness and ingenuity, but these
efforts will never be enough on their own. We cannot
create the kingdom of God. We are creatures and
not the creator. And if our vision is limited to human
endeavor, the result will always be disappointment.
When our hope is rooted in this transcendent faith,
we can pursue with passion the work that is ours to
do, trusting that it will always be incomplete because
only God is sufficient. We can practice selfless
service. We can give with generous hearts. We can
listen with an open mind. We can speak the truth in
love. We will be filled with an irrepressible energy
that is not contingent on the immediate success of
our efforts. We can be a people fully immersed in
a faith that we did not create and a grace that we
cannot achieve. True hope will come as gift. As gift
from God.
How do we practice hope? What does hope look like
in our lives and in our church? Remember that virtues
are cultivated over time and deepened by repetition.
Let me then suggest that hope is a discipline. It
involves a kind of dogged determination to trust even
when we can see God’s grace least clearly.
When I think of hope, particularly hope as
irrepressible energy that comes as a gift of God, I
think of our son Benjamin who turned six last Friday.
Ben exists in my life as a constant reminder of the
spiritual gift of hope and the irrepressible energy of a
child. A few weeks ago, on a very dark and very cold
morning, I woke Ben up as I do on many mornings,
trying to gently rouse him from sleep and move him
through the morning routine as efficiently as possible.
There are eighteen minutes between his wake up and
when the bus arrives in front of our house, and we
need to make the most of every single one of those
eighteen minutes. When he finally opened his eyes,
his first words were, “Dad, is it Friday?” In the interest
of efficiency, I briefly considered lying to my son to
get him out of bed, but I decided to tell him the hard
truth. “No, buddy. I’m sorry. Today is Wednesday.” Ben
sat straight up in bed and declared, “Oh. Well, that’s
okay. Wednesday is another one of my favorite days.”
Friends, the circumstances of our lives do not have to
dictate the character of our hope. We can anchor our
confidence in the reality of God’s presence. We can
practice hope by looking everywhere for signs of it.
While a resident chaplain at a children’s hospital
during seminary, I met a woman, a mother whose
five-month-old twins had still not left the hospital.
Every morning, no matter how early I arrived, she
was there. And every evening, no matter how late I
stayed, she was there. Holding her babies. Praying.
Crying. Waiting. Pleading. Rituals of compassion.
“What gives you strength?” a novice chaplain asked.
With a confident smile and eyes that showed wisdom
beyond her nineteen years, the mother simply
responded, “I see a new day coming.”
This is our hope. Amen.