Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 14, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the great things about being a pastor is that I get to spend a significant amount of time studying scripture, reading great books on theology and spirituality, thinking about big, important things, and calling it work. As I do that, there are times when certain themes recur, certain ideas and issues pop up to which I find myself returning again and again. That has been happening for me here recently. For at least the last couple of months I have found myself returning again and again to the question of hope. I’ve preached about it a few times here, including at least one sermon less than two months ago; yet I keep struggling with the idea of hope. I know that at least some of you do too. For me, the question of how to maintain hope in this world just won’t go away. I won’t give you a litany of horrors about today’s world. You all hear the news as often as I do; and we’d probably all have different things that make us feel hopeless, either world events or events in our personal lives, or both. Suffice it to say that for many of us hope seems impossible in today’s world. So I’m going to take another crack at it this morning-because I need it, and I think maybe at least some of you need it too. Recently I was reading a little book called Why Christian? by the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall with an eye toward suggesting it as the subject of a Sunday morning education forum series. In that little book I stumbled across perhaps the best discussion of hope I’ve ever read. I want to share some of Hall’s discussion with you. It helped me, and maybe it will help you. Hall’s analysis of hope, as I understand it, goes like this:

First of all we must understand that hope, especially Christian hope, is not the same thing as optimism. In our culture today optimism is more often than not a kind of forced cheeriness, a grim if smiling determination not to acknowledge or even to look at our true reality. This kind of optimism is, psychologically speaking, only a form of repression; and the things we repress will find a way out, usually a hurtful, destructive way out. It is true that sometimes we have to adopt a dogged optimism as a way of helping us cope with some specific situation in our lives; but as a way of life, forced optimism is more hurtful than helpful.

So, if hope is not optimism, especially forced optimism, if it is not seeing things as all rosy and positive, if it is not a naïve conviction that only good will happen, what is it? To quote Hall’s pithy statement of it that you’ll see at the top of your bulletin, "hope is faith applied to the future." In other words, hope is not a distinct quality separate in itself. Rather, hope is a dimension of faith. If faith is something we have today, hope is what we have when we apply that faith to the future-the world’s future and our own future.

Well, OK; but just what does that mean? Because hope is faith applied to the future, we must begin our search for that statement’s meaning by looking at what faith is. That, of course, is a very big question, one that we could spend a long time talking about. For our purposes today, let me just repeat something I’ve said here before. Faith is not accepting as true facts for which there is little or no evidence. It isn’t really about believing facts at all. Rather, faith is trust. When we say that we have faith in God, we’re saying that we trust ourselves and our world to God. We trust that our ultimate reality lies in God and that ultimately God can be trusted to care for us, even when it is not exactly clear how God is doing that.

Hope is that ultimate trust in God applied to the future. Hall puts it this way:

If one trusts God, one trusts God’s ability and readiness to care for one in the future as in the present and past. [In other words,] one trusts the future to God-not to oneself, not to humankind as a whole, not to government, not to the church, not to history, not to some theory of progress, but to God.

So, hope is simply faith applied to the future. It is taking our faith, our trust in God, and trusting into the future as well as in the present. And here’s a really important point: Hope, especially Christian hope, unlike a rosy, unrealistic optimism, allows us to look all of the bad stuff, all the stuff that makes hope so difficult, all of the war, pain, suffering, despair, and even death that so characterize our world and, at times at least, our lives, squarely in the eye and keep on going.

How can it do that? Well, Christian hope can do that because of what our foundational story tells us about God. What is that foundational story? It is, as St. Paul said over and over again, Christ crucified. At the center of our faith stands not a rosy, unrealistic view of the world but a cross, the cross of Jesus Christ. Because at the center of our faith stands a cross we can, as Hall puts it, "believe that God is able to take all of the bad things into God’s own Person and, in ways that we cannot predict, make them serve God’s purposes." That, after all, is what happened on the cross of Christ. God did not will Jesus’ agonizing death on the cross (Mel Gibson and most of popular Christianity to the contrary notwithstanding), but when that death happened God used it to take all the evil the world had to give into God’s own Person in the person of Jesus and overcame it.

Overcame it? Overcame it how? We must be careful here not to misunderstand that cross at the center of our faith. The Resurrection does not cancel out the cross. The Resurrection does not make all the bad stuff go away. Rather, the Resurrection does, as Hall puts it, something much better than that: "It reveals the truth that God is present in the cross-in Jesus’ cross and therefore in all our crosses, whatever they may be." Our hope, then, is Resurrection hope; and Resurrection hope is not just Easter with its lilies and good feelings. It is also Good Friday. It is not hope instead of pain, despair, and death; it is hope precisely in the midst of pain, despair and death. It is trusting God despite all the pain, despair, and death; and it is the cross, and for us Christians at least only the cross, that makes that possible. In the cross of Jesus we know that God is always with us even when, or maybe especially when, everything seems lost and hopeless. With the cross at our center, we can face all the evil the world has to give, admit it, and keep on going. With the cross at our center we can stare the world squarely in the eye and say "nonetheless." Nonetheless I have hope because I trust not you world, but God.

Our scripture readings this morning promise the coming of a better world; but for Luke’s Jesus at least, that better world comes only after a time of great trials and tribulations. That Luke passage may perhaps seem a strange text for a sermon on hope, but I don’t think it is. Look at it this way: These texts that promise a better future beyond coming trials and tribulation are precisely texts about hope and not optimism. You can take them literally as predictions of things to happen in the future if you want, I suppose; but try looking at them this way. It is precisely in times of trouble, when the whole world and our own lives seem bleak and even lost, that we most need to cling to hope. Texts like this morning’s Luke offer us that hope: "Not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls." That’s the promise. That is a word of hope that can sustain us through the wars, earthquakes, famines, and plagues that the passage promises. Now, the text uses the future tense-there will be such things; but we don’t really have to wait for them. They are our present day reality, aren’t they? That time when all these disasters "will" happen, when there will be wars and insurrections, when nation will rise against nation, is now. That is our world today. And so the promise that we are nonetheless safe, that, in Luke’s metaphorical language "not a hair on your head will perish," that by our endurance we will gain our souls, is a promise for now too. It is a word of hope, a promise that despite everything we are safe, that we can trust God now, and if now then also in the future.

So, hope is faith applied to the future. It is, to quote that sage of Wenatchee Jane Ostby Sorenson, "hearing the morning news on the clock radio, and then getting up anyway." It is being able to take the reality of our nation, our world, and our lives just as they are, the good and the bad-especially the bad-and nonetheless saying Yes! It in fact being able to say Nonetheless! Hope is the great nonetheless. It is acknowledging all the bad stuff and nonetheless trusting that we are safe with God now and in the future, in this life and beyond this life. It is trusting that God will accomplish God’s purposes even though we cure can’t see how. It is, in other words, not something different from faith. It is in effect another word for faith. It is faith applied to the future. Amen.