Dear Friends,
Today, I would like to offer a brief reflection on the Epistle Reading for this coming Sunday. As is our habit, let us begin with a prayer for insight and illumination before we read Romans 5:1-8:
God of law and grace, who shared our common humanity in Jesus Christ, we are drawn to your righteousness, believing that you will justify us and lead us to a wholeness that is freeing to us. We look to you, the divine source of true hope. Unite us in love for you and one another, that your will might find life in us and in everyone we meet. Amen.
Hope is one of God’s great gifts. Yet we often dilute the meaning of the word in our daily use (or should I say over-use?) of it. “I hope it doesn’t rain today.” “I hope we have enough food for the picnic.” “I hope I get a bike for Christmas.” I hope you’re thinking of your own examples at this time.
To use the word in this fashion falls short of the truest and deepest meaning of hope. At its essence, hope is God-given and grounded in a sense of confidence, expectation, and faithful anticipation. It comes from God’s abundant grace.
In verses 1 and 2 of today’s reading, Paul quickly summarizes the chapters before this one when 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.” Our faith brings us peace.
Paul then considers hope from the perspective of past, future, and present. First, he examines hope as one of the outcomes of the past event of Christ’s sacrifice for us. God’s abundant grace was made manifest in Jesus. Even though we are inevitably sinners and don’t merit such extraordinary grace, Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross has given us the hope of return to a justified state in the eyes of God.
Thus, the foundation of our hope rests on an event from our past: God’s sacrificial act of Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. This divine act of 2,000 years ago, or, if we were the first-century Romans to whom Paul wrote this letter, this divine act of 20 years ago, is the source of our ultimate hope.
Second, God’s grace is future-oriented; our sense of hope for the future, even in the midst of suffering, is how we respond to God’s grace. The mystery of our faith is that we recognize the promise God made in the resurrection of Christ. By faith, we have authentic hope that we shall ultimately share in the glory of Christ.
But look around. It’s difficult, sometimes impossible, to perceive that glory today. The world we inhabit and support is far short of God’s glory.
Even in the best of times, our Christian hope is always directed to our future with God. Hopefulness may not be apparent in our present world, but there is hope in the promised future, one that we are granted in faith through Christ’s sacrifice for us, sinners and angels alike. “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (verse 6) “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (verse 8)
And finally, as it is expressed in the present, hope is the bridge between the past and the future. It is God’s grace that gets us through today, so that we can also focus our attention on tomorrow. No matter how wonderful we may think our modern world is, we suffer. And now is a time when few of us think things are wonderful; we suffer significantly more than usual during this pandemic and our national and world-wide crisis of justice denied to far too many of our brothers and sisters.
In despair, many of us can fall into the trap of finding no meaning. If you occasionally find yourself there, dig deep into your faith. And listen to Paul, for whom our suffering is not meaningless. As he writes in verses 3b and 4, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. . .”
There it is again: hope! The hope that we experience in the present was founded in Christ’s sacrifice and promises a future infused by the grace of God’s love.
How reassuring Paul’s words are. In the midst of acute grief and pain, they provide immense comfort. We all experience suffering and, in these times, we are particularly aware that suffering is a universal experience of our humanity. Of course, not all people suffer equally, nor do all share suffering at the same time, but each of us inevitably suffers at some points in our lives. Such suffering is tempered by Christian hope.
But we must be warned as well as heartened. Suffering can also produce impatience. Impatience can become frustration, which may easily morph into despair. What makes the difference?
Paul recognized the weakness of all people, including Christians. If we can keep a firm understanding of our starting point in mind – that at the moments of our weakness, God offers up the divine self in Jesus Christ for us – we can move on to endurance, achieve character, and reach hope. It’s the great mystery of faith that makes the difference. And thanks to God’s grace, we are eternally offered this mysterious gift.
Sometimes, as in times like these, we know that even as we try to be faith-filled Christians, we still fall into hopelessness. But even in despair, I urge us not to overlook the times of grace-filled hope that we have been blessed to experience. We may chastise ourselves for not being filled with hope at all times, or we may dig deeper and try to tap into our memory of hope to advance our faith journey. I remind you again: God walks with us in our despair, and in God’s grace is hope.
A while back, a newspaper reported a glider’s ambitious attempt to set a long-distance record for hang-gliding. The glider went to a high, sheer cliff and jumped off. Thanks to his experience and skill, he was able to catch an upward spiral of air. In this spiraling column of air, he went around and around, silently gliding higher and higher. As he spiraled up many thousands of feet, he would get as high as he could and then break away from the column of air and glide across the countryside, looking for signs of another strong upward column. Up, up again, and then out again he silently went, searching for the next spiral. He set a new record when he ended his day 400 miles from where he had begun, after moving confidently from one upward spiral to the next.
I think this is a good image for what Paul is trying to tell us. Our life in Christ is an ascending spiral. We start with hope founded in God’s peace, and thanks to ever-available new currents of hope, we are able to venture out to find greater hope. Downdrafts occur, of course, but they can be altered by God into radical updrafts, providing constantly spiraling hope.
The experienced glider knows the signs of the updrafts and knows what sorts of conditions will produce them. He also knows that the inevitable downdrafts don’t mean he’ll be grounded; he has only to glide on softer currents of air while he searches for the next updraft in order to soar even higher.
It’s the same for followers of Christ. In our lives, as we move between the high currents of hope in search of God’s divine will for each of us, we learn the signs God gives us, and by God’s grace, we soar. Even in the worst of times, with faith, we will be able to find hope. Thanks be to God!
Let us pray together,
Lord, help us to hear you saying, "I am your hope" over all the other voices. God of Hope’s high spirals, you are the hope for the hopeless. With humble but optimistic faith, we run to you with hands stretched out, and we grab onto you, resting in your comforting presence. Fill us with faith so that we may discern the hope you represent. Give us a tangible reminder today that hope is an unbreakable spiritual gift forged in fires of suffering and endurance. Help us to understand that though we may not be able to find hope immediately, it is always there, your gift to us in the winds that swirl through our lives. May your gift of hope fill the lives of those who long for your presence. Amen.