Hoping against Hope
Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16
Romans 4: 13-25
Mark 8: 31-38
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Several years ago I was feeling a bit depressed about my kids. You know how it is with kids: They’re born and it’s great, but it’s downhill from there. My daughter was getting ready to go off to college, and I was concerned that I hadn’t done enough to prepare her. It suddenly seemed that time had telescoped, and that I only had a few months to teach her everything she needed to know to be an adult, and that I should have done more to get her ready for the real world. I was talking to Shirley Meinen about it, and she said the most amazing thing. She said, “You know, our kids are in their forties, and our relationship to them is better than ever. It’s grown and changed over the years. Your relationship with your kids doesn’t end when they go off to college. You have it the rest of your lives.”
She’d hit the nail on the head: that’s just what I was thinking, that somehow it was eighteen years, and done. But Shirley took the long view, and so she gave me hope. That hope has not disappointed.
From a Biblical perspective, that’s the nature of hope. It takes the long view. It has to.
In our Genesis passage, Abraham is challenged to take the long view. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, which means “father of a nation.” It’s not the first time God has told Abram that he’ll be the father of a nation. But Abram’s gotten old and has every reason to doubt that the promise will come true. He’s too old to father a child, and Sarai is too old to bear one. His hope is that God will do what God has promised. But as yet, he doesn’t have much to go on.
Paul, on the other hand, looks back on the story of Abraham from the perspective of 1500 or more years, and what Paul sees is the fulfillment of God’s promises. Abraham does father a child, Isaac, and so begins the nation of Israel. God has fulfilled the promise. Paul has the advantage of the long view—he can look back on the past and see what’s actually happened, whereas Abraham in our Genesis reading is still in the middle of it, not sure what lies ahead. He’s experienced disappointment after disappointment. He’s even tried to do an end-run around the problem, by having a child by his wife’s maidservant. Paul holds Abraham up as an example of faith, but the truth is his faith up to this point has wavered. By the traditions of the day, if he had a child by the servant of his wife, Hagar, it could be considered his wife’s son. So that’s what he’s done. Apparently he got so frustrated with God that he thought perhaps God needed Abram’s help in getting that child born. He thought he wasn’t doing enough, so he went and did something.
That’s kind of what was going through my head when my daughter was going off to college. I had hopes. I even trust that her fate is in God’s hands. But I didn’t have the long view. I thought I needed to do more to ensure that her future was safe in God’s hands. But Shirley challenged me to take the long view—to see there’s a future far ahead of the moment I was in, and to trust that future can come to pass. It was a lesson in faith.
In our Genesis story, Abraham is not yet the exemplar of faith that he will become. But this moment, when God renews the promise to him, is the make-or-break moment: Will Abraham put aside his doubts, his fears, his disappointments, and trust God? Will Abraham live into hope?
The word that scripture defines as “living into hope” is faith. Faith is believing that your hope is real, and having it influence the way you live today. Faith, says the author of Hebrews, is “The substance of things hoped for.” Faith is what makes our hope real, concrete, a reality. Hope is about the future. Faith is living as if the future you hope for is real. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” King and his followers experienced plenty of setbacks—beatings, jailing, plans that went awry, incredible cruelty and bureaucratic intransigence. His listeners had plenty of reason to be discouraged. But King pointed them to the future. One day, children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. God in Person wanted racism and classism overcome; it was promised over and over in Scripture. That was their hope. That infinite hope had to keep them going despite finite disappointment. They had to take the long view, because God was on their side but they had to take the long view to see it come to fruition.
We often talk about the importance of faith, but our scriptures today remind us that you can have faith in the right thing—or faith in the wrong thing. In our Gospel, Peter has faith that Jesus is the son of God—but he thinks “Son of God” means something entirely different from what Jesus thinks it means. For Peter, the Son of God was the One sent by God to bring victory, the destruction of Israel’s foes, the restoration of Israel to its glory days. So when Jesus said that the Son of Man was to suffer and die, and then on the third day rise, that didn’t fit into the picture of the messiah and the future that Peter had envisioned. Rather than accept that he needed to retool his hope, Peter tried to retool his savior. “He took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him!” Really! He rebuked the Son of God!
But how can we judge Peter when so often we do the same thing? We have false hopes we have set up for ourselves—false futures we’ve envisioned—and when it turns out that’s not the one God has planned for us, we decide we aren’t the ones who are in the wrong—it’s God!
The most unsettling thing about our hope is that our hope doesn’t look like anything we’d hope for. Jesus is not the victorious war savior, nor does He call us to victorious living. In fact, Jesus tells us our hope lies in our willingness to take up our cross—to make sacrifices for the sake of others, to take risks, to dare to fail in the name of God. Our hope doesn’t look like hope.
But that’s because our hope is built on a God of grace—a God who gives, willingly and completely, even to the point of dying for our sakes. This is a God who loves, who forgives, who reaches out to us again and again. This God is the all-powerful God, but doesn’t come in power; He is Lord of all, but he doesn’t come with demands and commands; He could easily bend us to His will but he comes to us with persuasion but also challenge. Amazingly, God comes to us with humility, taking the form of a simple human being, a servant. And that is our hope. God is not the God of the winners, but the losers; the God of the victim, not the victimizer; the God of the passionate, not the passion-less; the God of the helpless, not those who help themselves. And that’s who God welcomes into God’s Kingdom. Those who see their own humility and treasure it, because it makes them like God; those who look at the humble people around us and say, “Those people—the humble, the weak, the needy– are like God.” The Kingdom we await is the one where those who know they are needy have their needs met. It’s a place of peace, where the “us versus them” mentality of the world is forgotten, and people dwell together in unity with one another and with God.
That’s what we hope for when we hope in Jesus Christ.
Faith means we live as if we believe that hope is true. We befriend the needy. We act with humility and kindness. We take risks that may hurt us in the short run, because we take the long view—we know that Kingdom we long for, and that humble gracious God we serve, will win in the long run. So if humility and taking the side of the least of these gets us in trouble right now, we know that we’re living into the hope we have in Christ, so disappointment is short term, but hope is eternal.
Paul illustrates that eternal hope in the future. Even as he’s looking back on how God has already fulfilled the promise to Abraham, Paul looks ahead to the ways the promise will still be fulfilled. Paul tells his Gentile readers that the promise made to Abraham in the past, and fulfilled in the people of Israel, is still a living promise, and is now expanded to include all people, Gentile and Jewish–in other words, everyone on earth–who has faith in this amazing God of grace. The hope remains infinite, and keeps expanding, reaching out, embracing all peoples, because, as Paul says, “Abraham is father to us all.”
That’s the ground of our hope today. The church universal is really facing massive change. It is now thriving in places like South America and Africa, whereas it is bumbling and confused and apparently in decline in the US! England, and Europe. One could say the same thing about the Western church that Paul says about Abraham–it is “already as good as dead.”
Which Abraham was right before he sired the son who would make him the father of a nation.
This time of finite disappointment is exactly the time we are called to infinite hope. In Paul’s day the gospel had expanded to include the Gentiles. In ours, it’s expanded to include the people that statisticians call the “nones,” people who claim no religious affiliation, people who look with suspicion on the church and its legacy. They’ve come to believe we don’t have anything to offer them or the world. Yes, we do. We have Jesus Christ. But just as Paul needed to go against the grain of his religious tradition In order to reach out to non-Jews, so do we have to do the same, and for the same reasons–because of our infinite hope in God. We can’t afford to make Peter’s mistake, and be so wedded to a worn out tradition that we rebuke Jesus for being who He really is. He is the gracious humble savior who puts aside pride and glory for the sake of the lost. He is the demanding savior who tells us that if we serve Him we have to take up a cross–put aside our pride and our fixation on what once worked and reach out to new people in new ways, because we believe in the infinite hope of the gospel rather than in the finite strategies of a bygone era.
The good news is that the hope we have in Jesus Christ always propels us forward– it always welcomes new people in new and exciting ways, even as it always strengthens and challenges Those who’ve always trusted Christ in new and exciting ways. If we cling to our hope inJesus Christ, we can have faith that our future is secure in the hands of God, who always fulfills gods promises.