Hope: God’s Great Gift!

Harvard psychologist and researcher Daniel Gilbert opens his best-selling book Stumbling on Happiness with what he calls "The Sentence." The Sentence begins with these eight words: "The human is the only animal that …." [repeat] Gilbert then argues that every psychologist needs to finish the sentence.

How did Gilbert finish The Sentence? What does he believe is the defining feature of our humanity? Gilbert’s answer is insightful. He wrote:
“The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future …. [Human beings] think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple … ordinary act is the defining feature of our humanity.”

Hope is something like that. Hope is thinking about the future, whether the future is around the corner or miles ahead. Hope is wishing about a good future. Hope is imagining a better future.  But for hope to have real substance, hope also has to include believing – believing that the good future we wish for, the better future we can imagine is entirely possible for us in some way.

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, talked about hope this way:
"The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”
And he believed that kind of world was entirely possible to reach.

Martin Luther King’s power to keep hope alive in his people depended on his ability to keep them focused beyond the abuse they experienced and the daily degradation they saw with their eyes to a land where life could be decent and fair to all. King discovered that if the vision became blurred, the hope became weakened as well. On August 28, 1963, Dr. King gathered 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to make a massive appeal to the conscience of America. Now, it’s ok to have a strong conscience, just don’t get too emotional. So King was persuaded by government advisors to keep his rhetoric cool. Dr. King gave in to them -- for just a little while! -- And read a careful, thoughtful speech that seemed deliberately devised to keep all hearts from flaming. But then a fire glowed from behind King on the platform. It is believed Mahalia Jackson, that beloved gospel singer shouted out to him: “The dream, Martin, the dream! Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!”

You know that dream, don’t you! You know the hope residing deep in Martin Luther King Jr’s soul:
"I have a dream that, one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Hope is like that. It sees beyond injustice and hurt and despair. It sees the possibility that a dormant conscience can be awakened. And the inspiration of hope can be passed from one to another to another -- and yet another. Hope is a great gift!

Emil Brunner, a Swiss theologian, observed: “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.” “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.”

In recent days, news reports have wedged some haunting images into my consciousness. One is viewing distraught-looking church members and families showing the anguish, despair and even hopelessness of having nine friends die by the hands of a lone gunman at a Bible study of all places in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. What did they think now of the dream, the hope? And it seems almost daily that the evening news screens pictures of men, women and children being captured or murdered by terror groups like ISIS and Boko Haran around the world. The emotional and spiritual toll on the lives of affected families and friends both here and across the world is huge, almost incomprehensible. You see, there can be a problem with hope. You can be crushed when your hope is not realized.

Yet, if you are talking with my wife, Marg, for very long, don’t be surprised if she says: “Hope! That’s my favourite word!” Hope is not merely a very important word; being hopeful is vital for our lives.

One Christian philosopher and ethicist believes:
“There is nothing more important in the entire world than keeping hope alive in the human spirit….hope is so close to the core of all that makes us human that, when we lose hope, we lose something of our very selves. And in the process, we lose all reason for striving for the better life we were meant to live, the better world that was meant to be.” [Lewis Smedes, Standing on the Promises, p. ix]

I believe God has implanted hope into the fibre of what it means for us to be human. Our spirits were made to hope the way our hearts were made to love and our brains were made to think. Our hearts are drawn to hope as an eagle is drawn to the sky. The famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger called hope a “life instinct.” If we keep hoping, we keep living. If we stop hoping, we die inside.


Now, we do not hope primarily because we believe in God. We hope because we are human beings created by God to hope. We hope, sometimes even against hope, like every other human being, whether a believer in God or not, who has known anxiety, struggle, suffering, unfulfillment and a longing for a better world. That’s why the Apostle Paul reminds us in Romans Chapter 8 [Romans 8:20, 21] that the story of all fallen creation is a story of groaning but also of hoping.

Even those who believe in God share in the groaning -- but they also rely on God. God is their strength and refuge in times of trouble, to keep their hope alive [Psalm 46:1]. My faith connects me to God as the reason to keep hoping when fear or doubt gets a grip on my soul. For my trust in God through Jesus Christ enables me to know that, one day, I will see clearly God’s own vision of the good things God promises and that I hope for too.


In another Scripture, I Corinthians 13, Paul linked faith and love with hope. In that famous chapter, Paul acknowledged, “now we see through a glass, darkly.” The Message Bible puts it this way: “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But the day will come when the weather clears and the sun shines bright!” One day, Paul tells us, “we’ll see [everything] all as clearly as God sees us, knowing God as directly as God knows us!” But until that day comes, we have three things to do in this life according to the Apostle Paul’s words of profound wisdom in 1 Corinthians 13: one, we trust steadily in God (that’s faith); two, we love God and all humanity extravagantly and three, we hope unswervingly.

One way or the other, people hunger for hope -- even when their hope is dashed -- because our Creator made us to live by hope!

This is the gracious design of creation: God has given us fuel for our uncertain journey -- the gift of hope to keep us going even in seemingly unbearable situations.

Herman was a popular university piano teacher. One night at a concert, when a distinguished piano player suddenly became ill and had to stop playing, Herman quietly rose from his seat in the audience, walked onstage, sat down at the piano and with great mastery completed the performance. Afterwards, Herman was asked how he was able to perform such a demanding piece so beautifully without notice and with no rehearsal. His answer was wonderful.

"In 1939, when I was a budding young concert pianist, I was arrested and placed in a Nazi concentration camp. Putting it mildly, the future looked bleak. But I knew that, in order to keep the flicker of hope alive that I might some day play again, I needed to practise every day. I began by fingering a piece from my repertoire on my bare board bed late one night. The next night I added a second piece and soon I was running through my entire repertoire. I did this every night for five years. It so happens that the piece I played tonight at the concert hall was part of that repertoire. That constant practise is what kept my hope alive. Every day I renewed my hope that I would one day be able to play my music again on a real piano, and in freedom.” [Illustrations Unlimited, Tyndale House Publishers, 1988, p. 293]

But you and I know – sometimes through terrible, personal experience – that our dearest hopes die. Sometimes our hope is cut down with shocking swiftness when the one thing on which we set our deepest hope is blown out of our lives, like a tent in the path of a hurricane. Other times our bright hope dies slowly, darkened by disappointment. Maybe we should put up a sign: Caution! Hope can break your heart!  
 
A young man who suffered from HIV came into an outpatient AIDS clinic for his regular dose of medicine. He sat in tired silence while a new doctor at the clinic poked his arm and, without looking up at his face, asked, “You are aware, aren’t you, that you are not long for this world – a year at most?”
 
On his way out, the patient snapped at one of the doctors he knew: “That S.O.B. took away my hope.”
 
And that doctor replied: “I guess he did. Maybe it’s time to find another one.”
 
And that’s the critical question, isn’t it? Is there another? It may not be too difficult to find another doctor but is there another way to find hope again? When our dearest hopes die, we face the ultimate question of hope: Is there a hope beyond human hoping?

Every one of us here has his or her own share of troubles to face. And in the Scripture this morning from Romans 5, the writer, the Apostle Paul, made several linkages. He linked our sufferings (our troubles) to endurance or perseverance. Persevering through our difficulties by believing God compassionately understands our distress and difficulties, by knowing God is with us through them all and by trusting God’s strength to develop in us a character that pleases God. And then Paul linked our stronger character to a new attitude of hope. The Message Bible vividly puts it this way: “[Hope] keeps us alert for whatever God will do next.” I think the famous Dutch Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh caught this new attitude of hope.

While I am not an artist, I understand that how artists use colour is significant. This was true for van Gogh. Throughout much of his life, van Gogh experienced bouts of depression and suffered greatly. He had two unhappy romances as well as several unsuccessful work experiences. Life was very difficult for him. But somewhere in the latter years of his life (he died at 38), van Gogh caught a sense of hope. And he gave that hope colour -- the colour yellow. We can see his hope in the gradual increase of the colour yellow in his paintings. Yellow evoked (for him) the hope and warmth of God’s love. In his famous painting Starry Night, done during one of his depressive periods, we see a yellow sun and yellow swirling stars, symbolizing this hope. But he also used the colour grey as his colour for the church building. Unfortunately, his experience with the church was not a happy one. But his response to God was not grey. It had grown into yellow! By the time he painted The Raising of Lazarus, depicting the story in the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, the entire picture is blindingly bathed in yellow. And if we look carefully, we will see something quite fascinating in the picture! Van Gogh put his own face on Lazarus! Did he feel like a dead man locked away in a dark tomb? Yet something was going on deep in his spirit, I believe. Not merely a wish or merely a part of his imagination. Instead, he connected his human hoping to include God. He particularly, coupled his hope with a belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And he hoped in Jesus Christ --calling him from death and from his own hopelessness to life and to hopefulness!

I believe one of the reasons God plants us in the church (in all its various expressions) is to give us hope. Every time as the church we come together -- whether on a Sunday morning such as today or with a small group such as Tuesday Bread or the men’s retreat I was involved in a little over a week ago or every time the church celebrates Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist we renew our hope that the life, death and bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ by the power of God have the deepest significance for our faith and for our lives. In fact, without the life, death and resurrection of Jesus from the dead, we as Christians have no real substantial reason to hope in this life, let alone hope for what God will do next either in this life or in the life to come.

If you had ever visited in the northern part of Lithuania before it was occupied by the Russians in 1940, you might have come on the Hill of Crosses near the village of Siauliai. It is a mound of earth about 30 feet high, covered with homemade crosses that villagers had planted upright in the ground. At that time, it was a forest of crosses. High iron crosses, towering like tall pines over an underbrush of stubby wooden and cement crosses. You could hardly see the ground for the crosses! Each cross represented a loved one who had died as a stranger in exile or in prison. The Hill of Crosses had been sacred to the villagers for a hundred years. It was a mystic place to them, a holy place where the pious gathered almost every day to pray and remember. Then, in 1940, the Soviet Army came. To the army, the crosses were nothing more than a superstitious insult to rational atheism. So they made a law against cross planting. But it did them no good. Villagers sneaked in under the cover of night and planted their crosses anyway. The Russians rolled in their bulldozers. They burned the wooden crosses, buried the cement crosses and melted the iron crosses. But still the people came, one or two at a time, and planted their crosses at night. And still they came to pray during the day. At last, in 1988, the Soviet occupiers gave up and left the Hill of Crosses in peace.

Now, the crosses have taken on a new meaning for the people of Siauliai. People cluster around the hill and remember how the mighty mustered their machines against their crosses and how the crosses beat them back. Each cross planted during the time of occupation when it was forbidden to plant them has become a reminder that more things are possible than they had dared dream of then. The hill of memory has been transformed to the hill of hope.

Hope is like that. Hope is thinking about the future. Hope is wishing about a good future. Hope is imagining a better future.  But hope is also believing. The people of Siauliai believed that the good and better future they longed for and imagined was entirely possible to achieve.

Listen again to Romans 5, this time verses 9 to 11 in The Message Bible:
Now that we are set right with God … there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. [Instead] We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!

This is the hope that connects with God. This is the hope that believes the evidence is there to experience God’s loving friendship! This is the hope that will not disappoint anyone who centres his or her life in the friendship of God through Jesus’ life, his sacrificial death and his resurrection. Jesus defeated death and the ultimate hopelessness of despair by being raised to a new life. And Jesus conquered death for us to give us a new life with him and with his Father and with the Holy Spirit, beginning right now and extending throughout all eternity.

Friends, may this hope be so for you and for me. This is our time to hope! Amen.