HOPE BEYOND BELIEF

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.  Romans 15:13

In my post" Faith Beyond Belief", I introduced the affective elements of faith, hope, and love.  In that post I wrote about faith as an active force that affects how we act and do things.  In this post, I will give some thought to the second affective element, hope.

THE GOD OF HOPE

When I was a Lutheran, I recall sermons in which pastors presented hope as a sure thing if you believed in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior; as in, "We have a sure hope in the risen Christ."

I remember getting stumped by that statement - questioning in my mind, "What is a sure hope? Certainly that's a contradiction in terms. Hope, to be hope, is anything but sure."

What those pastors were doing was paraphrasing a section from the Letter to the Hebrews:

"We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain,  where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." Hebrews 6:19 & 20 
                       The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984, International Bible Society 

If the concept of a "sure hope" wasn't confusing enough for me back then, Paul's Epistle to the Romans is even more challenging.

In the verse I selected at the start this post, God is described as the God of hope.

We sometimes become numb to radical nature of what we call God. We want to have a god of control in order to know where we stand because we know where God stands. 

Hope, attached to God, seems to lessen the appearance of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being who has everything under control.

What use is hope to God?

Hope expresses a sense of patient anticipation.  As an attribute of God, hope says something about the workings and the will of God. The hopefulness of God hints at the subtle accommodative way in which God works to do God's creative will. 

The hopefulness of God gives us space and time. It accommodates all of our perspectives and experiences which buffet, twist, and turn us in the sea of life while anchoring the substance of our being, our souls, in God's patient anticipation.  

In other words, God is ever-emerging in and through the activities of life and ever-interacting with life, which bears witness to the old saying, "Where there is life, there is hope" and by extension to say,  "Where there is hope, there is God."

HOPE BEYOND BELIEF

Hope in the Face of Hopelessness

The eminent Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Victor Frankl, wrote about his observations of those who lived and died in Auschwitz in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning."  In his book, I found a lot of hope.  What Frankl observed is that there were those who died simply because they succumbed to the hopelessness their Nazi tormentors wanted them to succumb to.

Frankl also observed that there were others who faced certain death, who knew that they were scheduled to be executed the next day, who decided in their last moments to celebrate life with their friends and neighbors in that dreadful place as the last willful action of their physical life.  They chose hope beyond belief and in so doing they offered hope, offered life, offered strength to their fellow prisoners.  They demonstrated hope to be an anchor of one's soul that is secure, steadfast, and cannot be taken away by anyone or anything.

Hope in the Fog of Uncertainty

That hope is attached to nautical imagery is not surprising. I think the idea of hope being an affective element in our lives was instilled in me for the first time when I stood next to an actual lighthouse looking out over the Pacific ocean on the Oregon coast.

Walking along this coast with my wife was magical.

The air was a scented mix of pine and saltwater that reminded me of saltwater taffy, and walking on or near the waterfront or beach there was a constant low-level hum even when the ocean was relatively calm that indicated the presence of submerged rock outcroppings that posed a real threat to any ship trying to dock.

Then there was the fog that became so thick that it made it hard to drive on land, and I could only imagine what this was like at sea. I began to understand that the lighthouses became much more than a beautiful sight to behold on land; that it was an essential  beacon of hope pointing to a safe haven. Hope in God is such a beacon amidst the dense uncertainty we encounter throughout our lives.

Hope Amidst Despair

Hope is at the heart of every search and rescue mission that is undertaken in spite of all the evidence - all the knowledge that can shape one's belief that doing so will prove to be an act of futility.

Yet, this is what we do as humans.

We search for the one lost sheep, the one lost person against all odds, and we rejoice when the lost is found. We know that in every culture, regardless of religion or ideology, human beings of all nations will work to save the lost and will cross borders to do so.  This is an amazing testimony to the motivating power of hope.

This was Jesus's mission, to give hope, to be hope, "to be a light to the nations." As Christians this becomes our mission as the Body of Christ in the world.  This is where hope proves to be an attribute of God and demonstrates that hope is anchored in the very activity of God.  All who live in hopefulness present the image of God.  Where there is hope, there is God and this crosses all religious and ideological divides.

Hope as Light

Hope is life-giving.  It allows us to be creative  - to bring about life.  Hope motivates us to live,  to move, and to be in and fill the void of apparent nothingness.

"Let there be light" (Gen. 1:3) was the first hopeful act of God that directly resulted in my writing this post, you reading it; in essence, it led to existence, the being of all that is.  We are the result of God's creative hopefulness.

Hope as a Way of Life

God's hopefulness continues with us. "Let your light shine that others may see your good works," (Matt. 5:16) says Jesus.

Let the creative light of hope become a beacon to the good that results from our acting in faith and out of love. These three elements are bound together with the strength of God's love for what God created.

The God of Hope is the sure and steadfast anchor of our souls.

Until next time, stay faithful.