Hope Does Not Disappoint
Romans 5:1-5
Click here to view the full sermon video for June 12, 2022, entitled "Hope Does Not Disappoint".
Looking at one short passage from Romans on its own is like looking at one thread of a complex tapestry. You really need to see how all the threads are woven together in order to appreciate the artwork. Except we don’t have hours for a sermon here this morning, so this morning our thread from Paul’s tapestry, our Scripture this morning, is Romans 5:1-5.
Paul has just spent the first four chapters of Romans showing how all people, both Jews and gentiles, are justified by faith in Jesus Christ. This justification is now the grounds for everything that comes next about life in community called forth in hope - to which Paul shifts now in chapter 5
Hear God’s word for you this morning:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and 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.
This past Wednesday, a study was released from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study followed nearly 160,000 women for up to 26 years and their findings showed that higher levels of optimism were associated with longer lifespans, on average around 5.4% longer than pessimists, in fact - as important an impact on lifespan as exercise. Across a diversity of racial and economic groups, the power of optimism held steady in its effects of longer, healthier lives. I’m not sure how the study defined or measured optimism exactly, but it seems like it has something to do with noticing the good things in your life and the ability to turn a negative situation into a positive one. Which are absolutely helpful traits to foster, if you can.
Douglas Abrams, in his Book of Hope written with Jane Goodall, shares an old joke about optimists in his introduction – he says – have you heard what the difference is between an optimist and a pessimist? The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that the optimist is right!
There’s a truth hiding in this joke about the risk of shallow optimism detaching you from reality, the danger of rose colored glasses blinding you from the suffering in the world - The kind of denial that leads to false prophets declaring peace when there is no peace, as the prophet Jeremiah warns. Perhaps optimism can help you live 5.4% longer. But it can also lead to the brushing off of real problems that need to be addressed
Optimism is different than hope.
This is central to Jane Goodall’s thoughts in her Book of Hope. In it, she describes optimism as an attitude or a disposition. But hope, she describes, “is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.”
At nearly 90 years old, Jane Goodall has decades of experience to draw from – her years of trailblazing work as a naturalist and her later efforts at environmental justice – out of all she’s seen, from both the joy and the suffering, she has emerged as an ambassador of hope, convinced that hope is an essential human survival trait. Without it, she insists, in the face of so many challenges we have nothing.
According to Jane, hope runs much deeper than optimism. It doesn’t turn a blind eye to suffering or explain it away, but exists right alongside it, moving the world forward -- unlike optimism, which easily folds in the face of adversity.
On this point, I think Paul would agree.
Paul writes: “we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
Hope and suffering are not opposites. Suffering, according to Paul, does not negate the promises of God but rather, suffering leads to a tried and tested life full of experience that serves to strengthen our hope in God.
I feel like it needs to be said at this point, that Paul is not glamorizing suffering, or encouraging passivity in the face of it. That is a dangerous interpretation which has led to abusive and destructive silence in the church by those who would frame suffering as something to be gladly accepted, spiritualized, or even sought out. No, what Paul is doing here is acknowledging the inevitable reality of suffering in our lives and reframing it in a way that points us ultimately to Jesus Christ and the promises of God.
I’m on board up to this point. I know many people who, like Jane Goodall, have endured much in this life and have emerged from it full of endurance, character, and hope. But what was more difficult for me this week is Paul’s assertion that hope does not disappoint. I’m sure everyone here has been disappointed by hope at some point.
‘Hope does not disappoint” feels like a difficult, even naive thing to claim considering the monumental challenges facing our world these days: war in Ukraine, global pandemic, the threat of catastrophic climate change, fires raging through our drought-ridden state, the epidemic of gun violence and our seeming inability to pass gun control laws, basic rights that are being threated, and challenges to democracy itself.
Watching the news these days makes it hard to stand up here and simply say that hope does not disappoint.
What then can we say, about this hope?
Paul’s original audience faced their fair share of challenges. Early Christians in Rome were looked upon with suspicion, seen as unpatriotic and left on the margins. It was dangerous to declare loyalty to Jesus Christ over Caesar - and under the thumb of empire, they paid a terrible price. And yet, Paul still emphasized hope and dared to declare that it does not disappoint.
The hope Paul speaks of, however, is a hope of things not yet seen, it is hope in God’s sure promises. Hope of a kingdom different from the empires of this world. Paul’s audience would have heard a clear comparison in Paul’s words between the promises of God and the promises of Empire. The peace we are given through our Lord Jesus Christ stands in stark contrast to the pax romana – the Roman peace enforced by Lord Caesar through war and oppression. The boasting and glory-seeking which filled the Greco-Roman world, stands in stark contrast to Paul’s boasting in the sharing of God’s Glory
The hope Paul points us to exists outside of the system and powers which always disappoints us.
The promises of God stand firm from generation to generation, always calling us forward toward a new day, calling us forward despite disappointments, despite suffering, despite setbacks.
It would be easy, here, to think that Paul talks about hope as a pie in the sky promise unrelated to our present reality, something only existing in an unknown future -- allowing us to dismiss the world currently around us - but that would be missing a big piece of what Paul is trying to show us – that this future has already broken into our present. He says: We have been justified by faith, we have peace with God (right now!), we already have access to God’s grace, in which we stand.
We hope in God’s promise of a different kind of future, but the grace of God has already arrived in our broken world, making it possible for us to do the hard, and often disappointing work that needs to be done right now. Hope is what carries us through.
So, how can we say that hope does not disappoint? Because, as Paul declares: God’s love has already been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Hope does not disappoint, because it is grounded in relationship with God
Translators see ambiguity in this text, wondering if Paul is saying that: our love for God has been poured into our hearts, or if it’s God’s love for us that has been poured into our hearts.
The answer is yes. It’s both and I love that it’s ambiguous. The Holy Spirit has poured this love into our hearts – assuring us of God’s love for us, and enabling us to love God with all of our hearts, minds, and strength – reminding us that we are, in fact, God’s children and as God’s children, nothing in all of creation can separate us from that love, not any disappointment, or even death itself.
On this Trinity Sunday, we celebrate the mystery that somehow God is three and God is one, that at the heart of God is a dynamic giving and receiving of love. A “divine dance” as Richard Rohr likes to describe it. And today, we rejoice in the ways we have been swept up into that triune love and invited into that dance. The Holy Spirit has poured God’s love into our hearts, and so no matter what we face or whatever hard work we are given to do, hope does not disappoint like optimism does because it is grounded in the steadfast, unceasing, love of our triune God whose mercies are new every morning.
May it be so, In the name of the Father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen