Grounds for Hope--September 18, 2023

Grounds for Hope--September 18, 2023

"...and character produces hope, and 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." [Romans 5:4b-5]

It's hard to risk putting yourself out there in life... because it is so easy to end up disappointed.

That seems to me to be the catch of loving anybody in this life, and also the price of hoping for anything in this world, too.  Both hope and love require taking a risk, and none of us is very good at being vulnerable, especially not in a culture that teaches us to project strength and make ourselves look "tough" or "great" in order to survive.  

Live long enough on this planet, and you'll get hurt. That by itself make it easy to put up defense mechanisms around ourselves like city walls to keep the pain of disappointment at bay.  You close people off.  You don't let yourself get too excited about possibilities or opportunities, because you're so afraid deep down that they won't pan out.  You don't open yourself to relationships or friendships, because you've just gotten let down too many times before.  I keep thinking of the song, "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" from The Music Man, and how easy it is to stop putting ourselves out there for other people, because we just don't want to get our hearts broken... again.  

Now, to be sure, there's a certain logic to that approach with the world, a sort of practical pessimism, but it is very easy for that mindset to harden into bitterness, paranoia, and hostility toward everybody.  After all, you can't be let down by a close friend if you treat everybody as a stranger or an enemy, I suppose.  And yet... that seems a terrible way to live a lifetime.

That's why, I believe, the voices of the Scriptures keep pushing us to take the risk of hoping in this life, exactly because hope and love are intertwined.  In these words from his letter to the Christians in Rome, the apostle Paul describes the community of Jesus' followers as one that practices hope, precisely because of God's love.  "Hope does not disappoint us," he writes, "because God's love has been poured into our hearts..."  The Greek we translate as "disappoint" is even stronger, actually--it has more of the feel of saying, "Hope doesn't put us to shame," which is honestly a risky thing to say about hope, since we all have lived through times when our hopes were disappointed, our risk of putting ourselves out there blew up in our faces, and we got hurt by being hopeful.  Anybody who ever rooted for the home team and saw them lose knows that hoping can be painful, much less anyone who ever prayed for a recovery that never came, or longed for a reconciliation in an estranged relationship that never materialized, or waited for a particular outcome that just failed to happen.  And when those things happen, we often find ourselves ashamed for ever hoping in the first place.

And yet for Paul, our hope doesn't disappoint, because it is grounded in God's kind of love.  And God's kind of love is not only reliable for us to pin our hopes on, but also gives us the courage to risk hope in the rest of our lives, too.  We can dare to hope in this life, to risk putting ourselves out there rather than being guarded cynics who wallow in expecting the worst, because we start from a place of knowing we are held by the Love that will not let us go.  Sure, other things and people and wishes in life are unreliable.  Sure, your team will sometimes lose, the diagnosis will not come back clear, and the people you counted on will flake out on you from time to time.  But (and maybe it is only ever hope that allows us to speak that word "but") despite the ways other people, circumstances, and systems will let us down, God's love is unshakeable, unconditional, and unstoppable.  And because God's love includes the whole world (that's basic John 3:16-Christianity-101 level stuff there), there is always grounds for hoping that even our worst circumstances can be used for good by the God who loves.

That's different, of course, from saying, "Christian hope means that everything wish you make will come true," but it does mean that God is both able and willing to take the worst  catastrophes of our lives and to fashion good from the broken pieces.  And it's not just a hypothetical or some abstract thought experiment--we don't just believe that "theoretically God COULD take our ugliest situations and weave them into something beautiful," like the old philosophical debates about whether God is powerful enough to do X or almighty enough to do Y, or the old riddle about whether God is able to make a stone so heavy that even God couldn't lift it.  Paul doesn't say "Hope doesn't disappoint, because we have a theological argument that says God could, in theory, do good when we cannot see how," but rather, "Hope doesn't disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into us, and God's love irrevocable."  It's God's love that gives us reason to hope, not merely our theorizing and theologizing that gives us grounds for hope.

And that, dear ones, is where we begin today--with hope.  In particular, we face today with the hope that comes from God's love, a love that is both for us and in us.  As we explore in the coming days how Christ-like love leads us to "always hope" (or "hope all things," as the familiar translation puts it), remember where we begin.  In a world full of shakable and uncertain things, we start with God's love within us, and that gives us the courage to risk hoping even with our eyes wide open to all the disappointments and letdowns to be found around (and within) us.  We start with God's love--that is our ground for hope.

Lord God, help us to know and sense your love for us, and let it make us brave enough to risk putting ourselves out there in the world... which you also love.