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Scripture for Sunday, December 18: Romans 5:1-5
Additional Scripture: Hebrews 11, 1 Peter 1:3-7
Our Advent journey has taken us from wilderness to prison cell with John the Baptist. We've kept company with Mary as Gabriel's announcement changes her life forever.
And this week, we join the story of God's people throughout the centuries seeking his kingdom in hope.
We use the word "hope" in everyday ways to express our wishes for inconsequential things that may or may not actually come to pass: "I hope it doesn't rain today." "I hope I can come to your party."
We also express our hope when the stakes are higher, when things that really matter to us are out of our hands.
We're invited for the first job interview after being unemployed for the better part of a year. And we hope.
A long-desired pregnancy is progressing well. And we hope.
An estranged family member reaches out to us after years of distance. And we hope.
And sometimes, God works in by his Spirit and through our prayers in our circumstances. Our hopes pinned on the good gifts of God's created world and his love for us this side of new creation receive an answer. The job offer comes through, the child is born healthy, and the relational rift heals.
And sometimes.... Sometimes our hopes are dashed. We wonder where God is and what he is up to. We feel stung and humiliated; silly, really, for hoping at all.
It seems easier--or maybe just more rational--to stop getting our hopes up.
But Romans 5:5 says, "hope does not put us to shame." So apparently hope is a fruit of a life rooted in Christ that we get to keep cultivating.
When our hopes our dashed, we lament. Yet through the process of lament, we also have the Spirit-given opportunity to lean on the "living hope" the Apostle Peter says we receive as God's people (1 Peter 1).
This living hope is rooted in ultimate reality: God's promise of restoration in Christ. This hope is certain; it cannot humiliate us. This kind of hope shines all the brighter as God refines it through times of suffering.
Rooted in Christ, biblical hope cannot fail.
Reflect
1) Where in life has your hope in something brought you shame or humiliation? In what ways have you experienced God's mercy in times of dashed hopes?2) For more about hope, including its attributes of passion for what is possible, power to mobilize change, pain and risk of heartbreak, and the promise of God, listen to a 20-minute sermon by Dr. Lewis Smedes called "Keeping Hope Alive."
