hope--a few days later

1 Corinthians 13:13

And now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three...

At the end of his famous ode to love in First Corinthians 13, Paul identifies two other indispensable qualities of a life spent with God: along with love, faith and hope are the must-haves for every friend of God.

My own experience of these three is that, as a rule, we preachers break them down in the following way: we concentrate on love on wedding days, faith on Sundays, and hope on funeral days.

In fact, I'm trying to think of the last time I heard (or preached) a non-funeral sermon on hope.  I suspect that this light emphasis on hope has something to do with our fairly well-managed, comfortable, and more-or-less financially stable lives...where's the need for hope, really, when we're paying the bills, getting the children to bed on time most nights, and having some sort of vacation every year?  What's left to hope for?

And yet Paul places hope alongside faith and love as one of the three indispensable elements of the Christian life.   What do we do to cultivate hope in our lives?  How do we build ourselves up in hope?  What do we do to inspire hope in others?

In the case of me and this rotten diagnosis, I feel like Elise and I are still figuring out how to hope, what to hope for, indeed, what it would even look like if our hopes were fulfilled.  Survival, sure.  But what else dare we hope for?  That I sail through this experience without any of the dreadful side effects they've described as possibilities?  Or is it more appropriate to hope for the perseverance I need to withstand the challenges when they come?

I guess what these questions boil down to is what shape my prayers should take.  How do I pray for the future with confidence and truthfulness and boldness, and not get discouraged when the going gets rough?

When I look to Scripture for guidance, hope seems often to come as a surprise to the people involved.  Who'd have thought of ravens, really, when Elijah was thinking of letting hope go?  Who'd have thought of Abraham and Sarah when God was looking for where to get hope started again?  And who'd have thought of one convicted insurrectionist saying to the other, "Today you will be with me in Paradise!"

So I guess even as I am trying to latch onto hope in a way that keeps me going during these difficult days, I'm trying to leave the door open to being surprised by hope as it takes shape for us in the days to come...

And what if these hopes of surprising provision fade?  What if the hope that we're hoping for doesn't materialize?  What do we do with dashed hopes, if hope is so essential to the People of God?

What I think I believe is that our ultimate Hope is the Hope of life with God.  This is the Hope that along with Faith and Love will one day be perfected by the Source of all faith, hope, and love--the One whose Faith doesn't fail, the One whose Love doesn't end, and the One whose Hope in us and for us doesn't waver. It is this ultimate Hope that Julian of Norwich names in the sentence she claimed to have heard from God's own voice…"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."  This mantra, repeated with courage and conviction, is the stuff of Ultimate Hope, hope that extends beyond the needs and aspirations of daily living to the telos (goal, end) of all things.  This ending point gives us a point of reference for our ultimate Hope, as in this description at the end of John's Revelation:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

So this passage promises that we will receive personal parenting attention from the One who has watched our struggles, witnessed our failures, and winced at our deceptions small and large.  It also offers the renewing, re-creating, re-claiming Hope that could only come from the hand of our Savior. 

Faith, hope, and love, these three: let us not neglect hope, nor relegate it to funerals or memorial services or letters of condolence.  Let us hope fervently for the daily Providences that sustain us in our living.  And let us take hold also (or be taken hold of by) Ultimate hope: hope perfected, hope fulfilled, hope rooted firmly as a tree in a garden, once the source of our predicament, now become our deliverance.