Hope is the Best of Things

“So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh--for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Romans 8:12-25 NRSV

Did anyone understand that? Oh Paul, Paul, Paul. How long winded thou art.

I have a lot of respect for Paul as a missionary, for his personal story and struggles, and for his letters as he wrestles with the beginnings of the Christian church movement. I sometimes think he gets a bad rap by moderate Baptists, like myself. I sometimes tend get caught up in how Paul has been used by the church over the years in a way to support cultural issues. For example, for centuries Philemon and Ephesians were used to justify slavery in America and to keep blacks and whites separated. Though interestingly enough, Martin Luther King Jr used Paul's writings to show that integration and equal rights were a strong part of the Christian faith. In fact, two of my favorite King sermons are from Paul and from the Romans letters.

Paul tends to get a bad rap because of what we've created Paul to be. What I mean is we've often, as a Church, have tried organize Paul's thought around a single doctrine or theological perspective, for example justification by faith, instead of recognizing the multifaceted nature of Paul's thought and the interconnectedness of its many dimensions. An example of this would be Paul's stance on women in ministry. In 1 Timothy he writes that women are not to have authority over men or speak; yet in Romans he commends and lift up at least 5 women who are agents and ministers/deacons of the gospel.

In other words, instead of breaking Paul's thoughts down and trying to organize them into one singular focus, I have come to see that if we view Paul's letters as a set of theological reflections that brilliantly illuminate different aspects of Christ and its implication for Christian life and practice, I believe, we get a much richer reading and understanding of Paul's letters and of Paul. Paul then becomes less deified and more human, allowing us to be able to relate to him and his letters. This reading allows me to engage in the conversation with Paul as his letters were meant to do. It allows room to wrestle with his wonderful insights as well as his controversial declarations.

I say all this because as I read our passage today, I personally struggle with what Paul means when he writes, “We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh- for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Growing up I was taught that the word flesh was synonymous with sex, suggesting that flesh, sin, in it's most powerful form was sex and that was driven home to me as a teenager at every summer retreat we had. Now that I read this letter through a different lens I am able to wrestle with what Paul is really speaking of when he uses the words flesh and Spirit.

For Paul, it appears that the word flesh goes beyond sexuality and the use/abuse of God's gift of sexuality. Flesh is rather a whole way of being oriented toward ourselves and toward life itself. Paul's concept of flesh describes the process by which we seek to answer the anxieties of of our lives by turning to the fallen powers of the world, known as idols in biblical context.¹ Flesh, then, is a process. It is our human response to our existence, a response in which we cling to the idols of the world in order to ease our anxieties. We end up living in the power of the flesh, choosing death instead of life because it is easier. We are accustomed to living in the flesh because it is around us. We are wired in such a way that we are dependent creatures who do not like to be uncomfortable so we seek the power of the flesh because it makes us feel better.

If I burn my hand my natural instinct is to blow on my hand and on it. It's my natural instinct because I was raised in a house where if you burned your hand you put ice on it. So in order not to burn myself I look for something to ease my anxieties of getting burned. I go to the store and I buy pot holders. For Paul, flesh is the process by which we answer our anxieties as human beings by turning away from our true calling as children of God, of the Spirit, and turning to the answers of the idols of the world.² When we turn to the idols for answers we are unable to have our sustained. It's like eating a meal from McDonald's instead of taking the time to make a healthy dinner. Sure you're hunger will be satisfied for awhile but after an hour or two or three that hunger will return. And you'll be paying for it later.

This leads me to Paul's use of the word Spirit.

Paul emphasizes that we are offered a different and new alternative in Christ. This new way is different than the way of the flesh. Instead of leading to death, this new way leads to life. This is new way is found in the Spirit of God. In the humanity and divinity of Christ, we have a new way of life in the Spirit. Paul affirms that Christ has entered into the struggles of our existence, into this process of the “flesh” and he is showing us a different way to respond to our anxieties.³ Instead of turning to the instant and fleeting gratification of the flesh, we turn to the life of the Spirit having the strength of hope to call out in desperation, “Abba! Father!” and it is this Spirit that bears witness with us, with our spirit that we are children of God. In other words, it is the Spirit that lays on our hearts the hope that our cries have been heard, that we are received as children of God through Christ.

One day a teacher at a college, just for fun, decided one day to ask his students a question, “How many of you want to go to heaven when you die?” Everybody raised their hand. Heaven by a landslide. Then he asked, “How many of you would like to go tomorrow if you could?” All the hands went down so he rephrased the question. He asked, “How many of you would like to wake up tomorrow in a world where no child feared to dance in the street at night, or nobody ever pointed a gun at another human being, or no child ever starved, or nobody ever put you down because you were different, or no mother ever wept over a hungry baby? How many of you would like to live in a world that finally worked right?”

“How many of you would like to wake up into that good world, as good as the world? You had all the capacities and powers and freedom that you longed to have? You went into that world a terrific, fantastic human being. How many of you would like to wake up into that world tomorrow?” A hundred percent. He said, “Then you want to go to heaven tomorrow, because that is what biblical hope is about. God created this world. He's not that interested in getting us out of it. What God is interested in is getting it to work right.”

That is what Paul means when he writes, “But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, of the flesh, you will live.”

Last week I talked about having hope in these last days. That hope that I spoke of is not hope of the flesh but hope of the spirit. You see, hope of the flesh is placing our hope on the shoulders of presidents, governors, congressmen, pastors, friends, or family. We place our hope in people and in things that do not have the power to sustain that hope. It is easy to place hope in presidential elections because if it doesn't work out in four years we can always elect someone different. If our hope in our ministers fail we simply find new ministers. If our hope in our friends fail we simply go to a social mixer and make new friends. If our hope in our marriages or our families fail we simply divorce them. That type hope, hope that is of the flesh, is a hope that does not have promise. Paul is arguing for us to look to the Spirit for hope and not hope in what we have seen but in what we have yet to see. It is the hope of the Spirit that sustains our marriages and our communities not our hope in them.

It is hard to hope in the unknown because it can be painful. If we were to take an honest read of our scriptures we would find great pain followed by great hope. It is not hard for me to say to you that in the end all will be well. It is not hard for me to hope in the unknown because I know the one who has written the end. We know the end of the story but it is hard to go through the pain of living out this story just to get to the end. I know the waiting can be hard and in the waiting we turn to things that are of the flesh and not of the Spirit to help ease the pain or ease the anxiety so that we may feel good and safe for just a moment or two. But it only lasts for so long. That hope is fleeting.

Living a life of a Christian is living a life of hope. When our hope dies, our spirit dies. The hope of the flesh will eventually kill our spirits. The hope of the Spirit is a hope that will sustain us. It is that hope that I speak of when I say I have know all will be well. It is this hope that Paul speaks to when he tells that because we hope in what we've not seen, we wait patiently. Hope in the Spirit, of the Spirit, is a hope keeps our spirit alive during these last days. It is hard to have hope.

During my week, I try to get out visit as many of our shut-ins and elderly as I can. Each time I visit someone I am told of all the people who came by and saw them or gave them a call or sent them a card. It gives them hope and hope is something we desperately need as we get older. The older we get, the more time goes by, we slowly find ourselves looking back into the past and to the way life used to be. We dream of a time when the fields were green and the harvest was full. We dream of how great life was even though we know it wasn't always that great. We dream of better days and we look out towards the horizon and wonder if it is possible to hope for a better tomorrow. And with each new day we start to look forward. The older we get the harder it is, I believe, to have hope.

Paul understood the importance of hope, he writes, “For in hope we were saved.” Another translation reads, “We are saved, but all we have to show for it at present is hope.” Another reads, “We hope we are being saved.” We tend to place our hope in things that are not of the Spirit and when those things fail we start to question whether God is real. I sat with a church member last week and we started to talk about life and death as these things go when a pastor and sick person get together. In our conversation I could tell she was struggling with whether God is real. She struggled with her medical condition and wondered if God was real then why is she suffering. Did she do something to deserve this? Had she sinned and God has abandoned her? Questions that I believe we all tend to wrestle with in some way as life goes on. With each day hope becomes difficult.

But there is good news because there are two main hopes in the Bible. One is a hope in the future: we hope for a happy ending. In Christ we have a happy ending. Christ is going to win and make our whole world work right again. Life is going to win. Peace is going to win. Love is going to win, because God is going to win.⁴ We hope in this because we know the one who is writing this story. We can trust in this hope because it is a hope that is promised and God always keeps promises.

But we need hope for today and this is the second promise of hope God offers: I will be there with you when human hope fails.⁵ Such hope is hope of the Spirit. Knowing that God is with us in our struggles, in our praises, in our triumphs and our failures is to trust in the Spirit and to live by the Spirit. Keep on hoping because there is hope when life is hopeless. God promised. And while the scriptures speak to many things but the most consistent is of hope. Hope is a promise that is consistently fulfilled. If history teaches us anything is that the promise of hope will be kept. We just have to keep hoping.

So keep on hoping. No matter what always have hope because all will be well. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies (Shawshank Redemption). Keep on hoping. All will be well.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest int eh galle is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land

And on the strangest seas;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me. (Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”)

1Stroupe, Gibson. “Flesh And Spirit”

2Stroupe, Gibson.

3Stroupe, Gibson

4Smedes, Lewis. “Keeping Hope Alive”

5Smedes, Lewis.