An older person wrote Psalm 71. This person has lived long enough to have faced the difficulties that life brings.
This person knows that evil is a reality that just won’t go away, and how easily we can succumb to the evil that permeates our world and often seems to be beyond our control. How easily this person could become hopeless.
And yet this person has not given in to the fear of evil, or to the despair that evil brings with it. And the psalmist certainly has not given up hope.
Instead, this person hopes in the Lord.
“For you have been my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young. I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength.”
We followers of Jesus are people of hope. Hope is a major component of our spiritual DNA, which is made up of faith, hope, and love. Paul tells the Corinthians in his eloquent chapter on love that “faith, hope, and love, abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Paul says that love is the greatest of these three, but… like the Trinity itself, which functions as an intertwined eternal dance of love between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; so faith, hope and love are also intertwined, and none can exist without the other two.
Faith, hope, and love, these three.
So let’s take a quick look at faith and love before we focus on hope.
We Christians have faith, a strong belief and trust in God. We cannot see God, but God has given us infinite ways of knowing that God is an eternal, loving reality, the great creative intelligence that brought everything into being and that sustains creation.
We Christians believe that the best way to know God is through Jesus. Jesus, God’s Son, had faith and trust in God. The faith Jesus had in God, his Father, empowered and sustained him through an incredible life of ministry, a horrid death, and then resurrection. Jesus teaches us and shows us how to believe and trust in God, to be people of faith.
Christian love, so beautifully defined by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, is love that grows out of our faith in God. Our faith in God eventually brings to the realization that God IS love.
As the first letter of John, Chapter 4, verse 16 says, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Paul says that love never ends. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
In this great trinity of faith, hope and love, we find that love hopes all things.
So now let’s spend some time on hope, the confident hope that the Psalmist has in God, and the hope we have as Christians.
The Merriman-Webster dictionary defines the hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.” Hope is a strong and confident expectation. I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again, when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we are praying with hope, that strong and confident expectation that God’s kingdom WILL be fulfilled on this earth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In fact, this hope that God’s reign will come on this earth is our ultimate hope, for when God’s reign is fulfilled, peace and love will overcome the persistent evil that is still loose in the world.
Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist, is a hopeful person, despite the damaging changes to the earth that she has seen take place over her lifetime. She is most well known for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees in Africa. Goodall wrote about hope in her spiritual autobiography, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, and more recently in The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, co authored by Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson.
In The Book of Hope, Jane points out, just like the psalmist does, that evil is a reality in this world.
Jane says that “hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the danger that exists, but hope is not stopped by them.”
We act because we hope, despite danger. We act because we have faith that our hope will be fulfilled, with God’s help. Hope is living and active!
That’s why hope is not only a noun, but a verb! The dictionary definition of the verb form of hope is “To cherish a desire with anticipation.” Anticipation leads to action.
If we cherish the desire for God’s reign of love to be on this earth, and anticipate the coming of God’s reign, then we will get busy and do our parts to overcome the evil that still runs rampant around us—to make space for God’s love and peace to be on earth as it is in heaven.
As Jane Goodall says, “There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light……we see the light and also work to create more of it.”
Jane goes on to say, “It is important to take action and realize that we can make a difference, and this will encourage others to take action, and then we realize we are not alone and our cumulative actions truly make an even greater difference. That is how we spread the light. And this, of course, makes us all ever more hopeful.”
That is, active hope begets more hope, and helps others to hope as well.
I didn’t know until I started reading The Book of Hope that there is such a thing as hope science. Hope science has four components
— realistic goals to pursue,
— realistic pathways to achieve these goals,
— the confidence that we can achieve these goals,
— and the support to help us overcome adversity along the way.
Put Paul’s passage about love into the context of hope science.
For Paul, to love one another as God has loved us is a realistic goal.
And the way to achieve this goal of loving one another as God has loved us is to model our lives on that of Jesus, to do what he asks us to do, to treat one another with dignity as we would want to be treated, to look out for one another. No matter what our gifts and talents are, for if they are offered without love, they are nothing.
As Christians we have the confidence that we can achieve this goal of loving one another as God has loved us. We have this confidence because we know that God will show us the way, that God will forgive us when we mess up, and that God will never desert us. Our knowledge about who God is and how God loves us gives us confidence that we too can love.
Even though, as Paul points out, we cannot see the whole picture, we have the confidence that someday we will see God face to face, and the story of our imperfect efforts at love on this earth will be fulfilled and completed, and we will at last know fully. What a promise that is!
The last thing that hope science says about realizing our hopes is that we have the support to help us overcome adversity along the way. Jesus made it clear in his own life here, as he supported those around him and helped them to overcome adversity, that one of the most hopeful things we can do is to support one another.
Hope, faith and love are in St Peter’s DNA. We support one another and work together to achieve the goals that will bring God’s reign of love to fuller life in this world. We help one another bring light into the darkness. We work together to eradicate evil and to replace that evil with love.
My hope is that as this season after Epiphany continues to unfold, we may remember that we are faithful people of hope, and that we will continue to act with confidence in hope, so that God, who is love, can be known throughout the world.
And we’ll give the Apostle Paul the last word on hope as he brings us the benediction, from his Letter to the Romans.
“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”