I preached this sermon this morning, and I thought it was pretty okay. Maybe it can speak to you.
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Romans 5:1-8
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 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.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. (NRSV)
When was the last time that you let yourself hope for
something? Not just a little hope – like
for a good parking spot, or for a friend to get over being mad at you. I mean a big hope. One that really changes some things about
what you want and how you act. A hope on
which some big stuff hinges. I have
hoped for a couple of things recently, and been disappointed in the outcome. I will tell you about one of them.
I have shared with many of you, over time, that I feel that
God may be calling me into the field of teaching, in a seminary or college
setting. Nothing brings me more joy than
being able to dig into a text of some sort, and bring out the ideas that I
think are meaningful and useful to a body of people. I have been able to do a lot of this sort of
work here at City Road – in creating curriculum for Vacation Bible School; in
teaching the Thursday morning Bible study; in studying scripture and drawing
out themes for preaching. But I have
felt for several years now that perhaps this is the work that God wants me to do
with my whole heart and life: writing
and research and teaching and helping prepare other leaders in the church. One of my goals in my upcoming year of leave
is to discern more fully where God might be calling me in this way, and to
apply to many programs for doctoral work, which would be necessary for this
kind of teaching.
As I began to dig deeper into the scholarship that I’m
interested in (which is very boring – church history and British Wesleyan
studies!), I found a woman at Stanford University who is doing the very thing
that I want to be doing. I read her
books. I read her articles. I contacted her. I visited with her in Palo Alto. I felt sure that my future was opening up in
her direction. I began to think about
what it might look like to move my family to California. I had hard and heartfelt discussions with
Jeff and other family members about how we might maintain our family structure
in this scenario. And, last December, I
made my application for doctoral work there.
Then, the waiting. I
waited for what felt like six millennia, but it was really just a couple of
months. I got the email on a Friday, and
I opened it immediately. And it began:
“we regret to inform you . . .” I was
completely deflated. I had allowed
myself to experience this hope so deeply, so totally, that when it wasn’t
fulfilled in the way that I preferred, it was a really hard blow to me. I spent at least a month in a mode of
self-pity, wondering why I had ever let myself think I could get into such a
challenging program. I allowed the
outcome of this situation I had hoped for to determine my self-worth, and so my
self-worth suffered badly.
It’s my instinctual response to decide, in these down moments,
that I will just stop hoping for anything.
Easier that way, right? If you
don’t dare to hope for what you desire, then you will never be disappointed by
not having it. Or at least that’s the
logic of this world. But in our
Scripture today, Paul tells us something radically different: hope will not disappoint us. More fully: “we also rejoice in our
sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance;
character; and character, hope. And hope
does not disappoint us.”
Paul exposes for us the idea that suffering is inherent in
our current world. We know this to be
true – just look around. Do you see and
sense that things aren’t right? Do you
wonder why there is so much hurt and injustice around us? We know that suffering is part of life. God never desires us to seek additional
suffering, no; what life gives to each of us will be plenty. But the suffering that we will inevitably
encounter produces perseverance. There
is only one way through suffering – you have to hold on. As Vicki Jo tells me when we play, “I’m Going
on a Bear Hunt,” and we come to the river: “Can’t go under it, can’t go around
it, can’t go above it. Have to go
through it.” And then that perseverance
produces character.
I want to stop for a moment to discuss character. It’s all the rage these days to talk about
“character education” in schools. That
means helping kids learn to be good people, basically, in addition to all the
academic skills that they need. But when
I think of what have been the “character building” experiences in my life, they
have all involved failure and suffering.
Breakups, mistakes, bad gambles, wrong calculations, death and
separation. These have built
character. Suffering (and, to be honest,
sometimes self-inflicted suffering) has produced this character. So, if we want our children to have strong
character, we have to allow them to fail in ways that sometimes seem terrifying
to us – ways that have high stakes and real consequences. As a parent, I understand exactly how
difficult it is to allow kids to fail and suffer, especially when we know we
can swoop in and save the day. But how,
then, will they ever develop the character that Paul describes?
Indeed, Paul is acting like this kind of parent in the letter
that he’s writing to the Romans. He is
reminding them that the hope we hold as Christians is patently absurd. We hope for the day when Christ will return,
and we continue to hope that God is in the process of healing the brokenness of
this world. This is the hope that does
not disappoint us. But Paul was also
working with a group of early believers who had very specific expectations
about how that hope was going to be fulfilled.
They were quite certain that Christ would return within their lifetimes,
and so the organization of a church and a set of guidelines around that church
was really not high on their agenda. But
this kind of attachment to outcome is what leads to disappointment. Paul is outlining for his listeners the
process that will lead to hope (suffering, then perseverance, then character,
then hope). But he is careful to specify
that this is the hope that does not disappoint.
This was my problem in my situation with Stanford, I’m
afraid. I had become far too attached to
one very specific outcome of my hope.
That attachment produced expectations, and when those expectations were
not fulfilled, it was crushing for me.
But I think what Paul is getting at in our scripture is that it’s not
the outcome of our hope that is particularly important. It is the kind
of people we become when we continuously hope for something, without
disappointment. It is the actual process
of hoping, rather than the goal orientation of seeing a specific end result to
that hope. Hope is such a crucial
ingredient to the human spirit. We have
all known someone who has simply given up hope, and has died. Even in the absence of all other disease or
affliction, the loss of hope is fatal to life.
It’s not too much, I think, to say that hope is necessary for life.
Emily Dickinson wrote a beautiful poem about this.
Hope is the thing with feathers /
That perches in the soul, /
And sings the tune without the words, /
And never stops at all, /
And sweetest in the gale is heard; /
And sore must be the storm /
That could abash the little bird /
That kept so many warm. /
I’ve heard it in the chillest land, /
And on the strangest sea; /
Yet, never, in extremity, /
It asked a crumb of me.
I love how she describes hope as “singing the tune without
the words.” This is the kind of
nonattachment to the outcome of hope that I believe Paul is encouraging for
us. We know the tune – we feel it inside
of us. But we aren’t quite sure of the
words. God will provide the words that
we need in the time that is right. Meanwhile,
our task is to become refined by suffering into people of perseverance and
character who hold this kind of hope, for ourselves and for our world.
Hope also involves waiting, at which I am absolutely the
worst. In researching this text, I read a
sermon that my favorite theologian Paul Tillich wrote, entitled “Waiting.” He describes the tension that waiting
produces, but he also encourages us to remember that waiting for something
implies that we already have some part of it inside us. He writes, “Our time is a time of waiting;
waiting is its special destiny. And
every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time runs forward. All time, both in history and in personal
life, is expectation. Time itself is
waiting, waiting not for another time, but for that which is eternal.”
We do hold that hope that does not disappoint, and that hope
enables us to wait patiently for the way that God will work this whole mess
out.
And what about me, then, and my disappointed hope? Well – it’s a funny thing about hoping. You think that you’re just completely done
with it. You think you can just stop. But we are programmed, as healthy humans, to
hope for things. It’s an instinctual
urge that is a necessary ingredient for the human spirit. So I will be throwing my hat back in the ring
this December, to Stanford and to a slew of other schools. I have earned some character stripes in this
whole experience, and I have learned an important lesson about hope: when we can cease a tight attachment to an
expected outcome of our hope, it will never disappoint us.
