Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 29, 2011

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.

As most of you know, I used to be a lawyer. Some of you accuse me of still thinking like a lawyer from time to time, but I guess that’s better than having you accuse me of not thinking at all. I don’t deny having been a lawyer, nor do I apologize for it. It’s not as bad as some of you think. You know how in courtroom dramas some lawyer is always jumping up in the middle of a trial and yelling Objection! In trial work there are rules about what are proper questions and what aren’t proper questions, and when you think your opposing counsel has asked an improper one you stand up, say objection your honor, and state the grounds of your objection, that is, you say what you think is wrong with the question that has just been asked. One of those possible objections is “assumes facts not in evidence.” (I’ll bet you didn’t know you were going to get a lesson in evidentiary law here this morning, did you. Consider it a bonus.) “Assumes facts not in evidence” is a valid objection when a question makes an assumption that hasn’t been proved or that you can’t expect the person of whom the question is asked to share. The classic example is the question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The question assumes that the person of whom it is asked either is beating his wife or has done so in the past. A question that makes an assumption like that forces the person answering it to accept the assumption, and that is improper. Objection, we say. Assumes facts not in evidence.

Now, the author of the letter we know as 1 Peter isn’t asking questions exactly, but when I read one of the lines from the passage we just heard I wanted to jump up and shout Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence! anyway. It’s the line where he says “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3:15 Do you hear the assumption in that statement? The statement assumes that the members of the author’s audience actually have hope in them. And I wanted to say “assumes facts not in evidence.” I wanted to say that, you see, because I really struggle with the concept hope. I find hope hard to understand and even harder to hold onto. Maybe you do too. Let me try to explain.

Hope is of course a traditional Christian virtue. But what is hope? Although we often confuse hope with optimism, hope really isn’t optimism. We can hope for something without being optimistic that it will actually happen. One dictionary definition of hope is “desire accompanied by anticipation or expectation.” Whatever that means. Hope is some kind of attitude toward the future, but what kind of attitude is it if it isn’t optimism? I recently heard a colleague suggest that we can’t understand or even have hope if we haven’t experienced hopelessness, and I found that way of looking at the matter helpful. Perhaps it will be for you too.

Hopelessness is actually easier to explain and to understand than hope is. Hopelessness is despair. Hopelessness is the conviction that there is no use in anything. Hopelessness is having no reason to do anything, indeed no reason to go on living, because everything is so negative, so bleak, that there simply is no point in anything. Nothing good can happen. No positive change can occur. Hopelessness is the feeling that all is lost so why go on trying, why go on living. I experienced this kind of hopelessness years ago when I was suffering from clinical depression. Perhaps some of you have experienced it too.

Hope is the opposite of hopelessness. If hopelessness is the conviction that there is no use in anything, hope is the conviction that there is at least some use in at least something. If hopelessness is having no reason to do anything, hope is having at least some reason to do at least something. If hopelessness is having no reason to go on living, hope is having at least some reason to go on living.

It certainly is easy enough to fall into hopelessness in this world. All the problems seem so intractable. We pray for peace, and wars continue to rage. We pray for justice, and oppression and exploitation persist in some form or other everywhere in the world. We pray for renewal and transformation, and the old ways of the world that diminish us and all people persist. It can all seem truly hopeless. There can easily seem to be no reason for keeping on keeping on.

So is hope even possible? The answer of faith must be that hope is possible. People of faith are people of hope. St. Paul lists hope along with faith and love as the chief values of Christianity. If we are to be people of faith we must be able to answer yes, hope is possible.

But how? In the face of all the reasons for despair, all the reasons for hopelessness that confront us every day, how is hope possible? That’s where our passage this morning from Acts comes in. In that passage Paul quotes some ancient Greek poet or other as having said that it is in God that we “live and move and have our being.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, and a profoundly true and important one. It says that God is the ground of our being. God creates us and sustains us in existence. Everything that is, is in God. God is of course greater than creation, but all of creation exists continually in God, grounded in God, sustained by God.

God is the ground of our being, and because it is God that is the ground of our being, the ground of our being is the ground of our hope. God is the ground of our hope. Only God can be the ground of our hope. We have hope because we have God and only because we have God. Hope is having a reason to keep on living, and God is our reason to keep on living. Hope is having a reason to keep on going, and God is our reason to keep on going. Hope makes living and acting possible, and God is the ground of hope. God is the reality that makes living and acting possible. God is the reality that makes living and acting worthwhile.

It is so hard to find reason for hope in ourselves or in the world. Yes, there are many good people in the world. Yes, people do many good things in the world. People work and sacrifice for peace and justice. People care for their families. People donate to charity. People do what they can to minimize their negative impact on the environment. Yet for all that the problems persist. For all that peace seems never to come. Poverty never goes away. Justice never fully prevails. The environment continues to suffer degradation at the hands of us humans. Politicians continue to fail to address problems in a way that benefits the people rather than the moneyed interests who finance their election campaigns. I can’t speak for you, but when I look only to humanity, only to the world, I see some reason for hope, but not enough. I acknowledge the good that people do, but it just isn’t enough to give me much hope.

Since we can’t find a ground for hope in ourselves, we must either look beyond ourselves for something bigger, something surer, as a ground of hope or fall into hopelessness. God is that something beyond ourselves, something bigger, something surer that is the ground of hope. We can trust that God is with us and with all of creation. We can trust that God is present in the world working in gentle, subtle, spiritual ways to move the world in the direction God desires. We can be sure that while we often want to give up on the world God will never give up on the world. God loves the world, just as it is, with all its problems and all its failings. That is the assurance about God that we have in Jesus Christ. That’s why we can hope. That’s why we can keep on keeping on. God is the ground of our hope. If, in the words of our passage from 1 Peter, someone demands an accounting of us for the hope that is in us we can answer with one word: God. God gives hope. God is hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.