The Gospel of Hope
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 25th May 2008
Romans 5:1-11

Hope is a very little word that has a very powerful impact.  It's a word that has figured very heavily in the presidential campaign of Barak Obama.  It’s a word that I heard this week on the lips of one of the rescue workers in the Chinese earthquake, who said that only a little hope can cause them to redouble their efforts to try and find survivors in the wreckage of that earthquake.  Hope has a tremendous power to inspire, to motivate and to encourage.
Yet surprisingly the word “hope” is very rare in the written gospels that we have in the New Testament. In Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the word occurs only four times, and in every occurrence it is used in a fairly ordinary, everyday sense.  We do not hear ‘hope’ from the lips of Jesus as one of the important dimensions of our Christian experience. Perhaps this is because, as Jesus said in another context, when the bridegroom is with them, the wedding guests do not fast. In the presence of Jesus hope is a redundant category of conversation and experience!
However, in the later New Testament it is a very different question altogether.  St Paul writes, And now faith, hope and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love. (I Cor 13:13). The writer of the Hebrews says, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  (Hebrews 11:1). For Christians who live between the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the anticipated culmination of history, the category of Hope is a very important dimension of our lived faith.  Thirty years ago in his book, A Theology of Hope the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann placed hope once again at the centre of Christian reflection and practice.
In the fifth chapter of Romans St Paul introduces hope as he begins an extended presentation of the essence of the Christian Gospel that runs through chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8. Having laid the foundation for his address to both Jews and Gentiles these middle chapters expound the nature of the Gospel.  These are wonderful chapters and if you don't know them take time out to read them!  It will only take you 15 minutes but these three pages of the Bible are some of the most profound, precious and powerful that you will ever read. In the first 11 versus of chapter 5 Paul offers a succinct and powerful summary of the Christian Gospel.
In these 11 verses he talks about being justified, about faith, peace, grace, hope, glory, reconciliation and salvation. All of the great words of the Gospel are there tightly knitted together in this explication.  One could preach on this text for weeks, but let us focus upon this elusive term hope that becomes so important in New Testament faith.
In engaging with hope, we have to acknowledge that we live in a social context in which hope is problematic. On the one hand there is a spirit of worry and hopelessness about our human activities and their implications.  There are deep anxieties about resource provision and environmental degradation into the future. There is a strong and pervasive sense of fear and concern around security issues and rising global tensions.  On the other hand we experience the unreliability of the natural realm as we witness disasters like the Burmese cyclone and the earthquakes in China.  We are told that when it comes to weather we may be in for more extreme events all around the world. What does it mean for us to hope in such a world? How can we believe in a God of goodness? How can we pray meaningfully in such a context and what do we actually pray for? Do the destructive forces of inanimate nature and the extent and randomness of the suffering that it causes reduce all talk of God and hope to nothing?  These questions must be in the backs of our minds as we engage this passage. 
Paul opens his explanation of the Gospel by recapping the foundation that he has already laid.  He says:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 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. (Romans 5:1-2).
As you read through the next four chapters you can see the unfolding of this statement until he comes to the treatment of the future glory of God in the end of Chapter 8.
Paul then immediately launches into one of those wonderful little ‘chains of causation’ that he sometimes weaves into his writing, where he explains how particular qualities or experiences of life build upon one another, cumulatively producing an impact within our lives.  He writes this in verses 3-5. 
And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 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. (Romans 5:3-5)
The first two links in this chain would be commonly accepted: suffering does produce endurance, as anyone who has suffered knows from their own experience. Similarly endurance produces character, as we know from observing those around us who have endured. It is the third link in the chain that is perhaps somewhat surprising where he says: and character produces hope (verse 4).
Hope does not come from the clouds as a gift from the gods. It is not something that is planted in our personalities or arises from our experience through prayer or desire. According to Paul, in this passage, hope is an expression of human character, forged through the crucible of suffering and the gradual development of endurance. It is something that arises within us through our disciplined engagement with life and its struggles.
In speaking of the connections between suffering, endurance, character and hope we need to be very careful. It is very easy for our words to become a glib denial of the profound depth and tragedy of human suffering. Paul is not holding up suffering as an ideal, nor is he saying of someone else’s suffering ‘this will be good and character-building for you’. To say things like that is to patronize those who suffer and to trivialize the great pain that suffering involves. Paul says that we boast about our suffering. He is speaking from the inside of the experience and says that for those of us who are people of faith there is a way to engage our suffering and through that engagement to come through into a place of hope.
Our hope is earthed in suffering. We sometimes think that suffering tends to snuff out hope. In our thinking hope is often associated with innocence. We think that it is those who have not suffered who have the most to be hopeful about.
Such was exactly the thinking of Laurence Holt, owner of the Blue Funnel shipping line in the Second World War. As the convoys that kept England alive in the dark days of the war crossed the Atlantic there were terrible losses from the attacks of German U-boats. As their ships were torpedoed the men would take to the lifeboats, sometimes drifting in appalling conditions on the open sea for weeks on end before they were rescued. Holt believed that the men most likely to survive would be those who were younger, who were fitter and stronger and had more ahead of them to live for.  What they actually found was that it was directly the reverse.  The men who survived were the older and the weaker.  Statistically the younger, fitter men were the first to succumb in the life boats.  The older men had been through more and were able to marshal their physical resources and to maintain a sense of hope, resilience and endurance towards the future.  In conversation with the educator Kurt Hahn, Holt theorized that until human beings have actually had to endure setbacks, struggles and sorrow they aren’t able to develop the capacities of resilience, endurance and hope that keep us going in adversity. Thus the Outward Bound program was born, using experience and challenge to help young men develop this capacity to survive in difficult circumstances. 
This hope that Paul describes, a hope born of suffering and endurance through character, is in turn as he says, met by God’s love which has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (verse 5) Note here that this is not another causal link in the chain – that is, it is not our hope that causes God’s love to come into our hearts. It is in response to our hope, or in meeting our hope, that God acts in pouring out His love in us. This is then unpacked in the latter part of verses 6-11 of this passage in which Paul speaks about the death of Christ for us, the ungodly, at the right time as the proof of God’s love for us. 
Now there is in this passage something about the very structure of faith. Christian faith is something now present, realised and active within us AND it is also something future, something that is yet to come.  There is always an unrealised dimension to the life of faith!!  There is still change to come. Our faith is not only about what has already happened in Jesus and the redemption of the world. It is also addressed to what is still to be: the remaking of ourselves and the transformation of the world still lie in God’s future. That future is the focus of hope, the magnet that draws our faith towards it.
Paul here places Christian experience between already and not yet. He says that justification and peace with God, the experience of grace and reconciliation, are things we already know. And yet full salvation and participating in the glory of God is something that lies in the future, something held in hope and we live by faith with the gift of love coming into our hearts now in anticipation of what is to come.   
Within this overall structure of faith, Paul in Romans gives us a map in which we can locate our experience. Further on in chapter 8 his argument comes to a conclusion where he writes about the current state of the natural world with its randomness and apparent senselessness, its ecological fragility. He writes:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will one day be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:20-21)
In an astonishing reversal of the romantic environmentalist vision, that sees humankind fulfilled and at peace when we model our lives on the ways and within the limits of nature, Paul says directly the opposite.  He says:
For the creations waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God … and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19, 21)
This tiny word hope is actually cosmic in its scope. It is intimately connected with our suffering and acknowledges and respects the individual tragedy and pain of suffering. But those who hope stand quietly and empathically, with deep love alongside all who suffer. Hope has vast reserves of endurance and resilience – it is a very robust virtue, an expression of a character well-formed in the fires of life.
It looks forward with joy, seeing the future ‘setting right’ not only of our own relationships with each other and with God, but also the relationships between all of the creatures that comprise the natural world, even those creatures of wind and weather, of fire and earth.
And the model of this fulfillment says Paul, is the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:21). Just what this means cannot yet be seen, but it has something to do with the way we are learning to live now. It is connected to our own love in which we reach out to try and help those who suffer, and it is connected to that hope which knows that the present tragedy is not the final word.
So we are called to be people who live out, not just out of faith and love, but also out of that profound sense of hope, looking forward to God’s future and realising that in some way our own shared life, our own living out of hope and openness, is itself the template of what the world is coming to be.  Far from being disabled by what we see around us, or crippled by the tragedy of the present, we are those who carry within ourselves the seeds of the future, not just for our community but for the whole world.
So let us, as God’s people, enter into that mystery in our praying and in our serving but above all in the way that we look out on the world, at the suffering and tragedy that we see around us, as those who are grounded in hope, the agents and the witnesses of God’s future.