“Visible Hope”
Psalm 40:1-4 and Romans 8:12-25
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/30/23
I put all my hope in the LORD.
He leaned down to me;
he listened to my cry for help.
2He lifted me out of the pit of death,
out of the mud and filth,
and set my feet on solid rock.
He steadied my legs.
3He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise for our God.
Many people will learn of this and be amazed;
they will trust the LORD.
4Those who put their trust in the LORD,
who pay no attention to the proud
or to those who follow lies,
are truly happy! (Psalm 40:1-4 - CEB)
12 So then, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation, but it isn’t an obligation to ourselves to live our lives on the basis of selfishness. 13 If you live on the basis of selfishness, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the actions of the body, you will live. 14 All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
18 I believe that the present suffering is nothing compared to the coming glory that is going to be revealed to us. 19 The whole creation waits breathless with anticipation for the revelation of God’s sons and daughters. 20 Creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice—it was the choice of the one who subjected it—but in the hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from slavery to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 22 We know that the whole creation is groaning together and suffering labor pains up until now. 23 And it’s not only the creation. We ourselves who have the Spirit as the first crop of the harvest also groan inside as we wait to be adopted and for our bodies to be set free. 24 We were saved in hope. If we see what we hope for, that isn’t hope. Who hopes for what they already see? 25 But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:12-25– CEB)
In the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul crafts some of his most memorable and influential writing. One of my seminary professors said that, because of the passion and depth of this chapter, some scholars wonder if Paul wrote it while in the throes of some sort of spiritual ecstasy.
Whatever the case, a clearly inspired Paul is writing the first systematic theology. When he began writing to churches, Paul handled new Christians as a parent cares for a newborn. “I couldn’t talk to you like spiritual people,” he tells the Corinthians, “but like unspiritual people, like babies in Christ. I gave you milk to drink instead of solid food, because you weren’t up to it yet.” (1Cor. 3:1b-2 - CEB)
In Romans, though, the apostle seems to expect more from his readers. Still, with all of its grownup philosophy and studied argument, systematic theology is, to me, kind of like plain yogurt. It has nutritional value, but to be interesting, systematic theology has to be mixed with something else because the most transforming theology is not systematic; it is systemic. Good theology is not organized and argued. It is discovered in the messy, day-to-day realities of life. It is told and shared as narrative. Good theology is lived, because it is story.
Story puts “flesh” on theological arguments. And because that flesh is human flesh, much of it is imperfect. Nonetheless, if the story is to hold relevance, all that flawed flesh is necessary.
I think Paul understands this. He begins his letter to the Romans lamenting that he can’t be with them in person. (See Romans 1:11-12) He knows that there is no substitute for face-to-face relationships, no substitute for storying one another, especially in spiritual matters. As human beings, we don’t experience and relate to God through systematic arguments, but by participating in the organic processes of life. The best theologians are like gardeners. They have dirt under their fingernails.
Aware of this, Paul embraces his role as a kind of midwife for the new life which God is revealing through the story of Jesus. And while Paul’s letters provide valuable insight on Jesus, their real authority comes from Paul’s own story.
Think about 1Corinthians 13. The so-called Love Chapter brings a bright clarity to life’s dark mirror because we know the relational process through which God transforms Saul into Paul. We know how God stories this man from a systematic persecutor of Christians into a man of buoyant, infectious faith.
Paul’s conversion from persecutor to preacher is only part of the story. Paul also suffers as he travels the Mediterranean world sharing the gospel.
On one voyage, while heading toward Italy, Paul endures deep sufferings and groanings because, for one, he’s among several state prisoners. Then a storm causes the boat to run aground. Washing up on the shores of Malta, Paul finds new life and renewed hope when he and his fellow survivors are greeted with kindness by the people they meet. As these new friends light a fire to warm the castaways, Paul gathers an armload of brush for the fire. When he throws it toward the flames, a poisonous snake rushes out of the fire and bites Paul on the hand. The Maltese people recoil saying, “This man must be a murderer! He was rescued from the sea, but the goddess Justice hasn’t let him live!” (Acts 28:6)
Ironically enough, Paul is, in fact, a murderer. However, since God’s justice is restorative rather than retributive, Paul not only survives, he turns around and heals someone else.
By the time Paul writes to the Romans, he’s been living a life which reveals all manner of unseen hope. Maybe he calls it unseen because so many of his readers have yet to live into their own stories of adoption and redemption, and, through those experiences, to gain the new eyes of faith.
Like Paul’s boat, our world is relentlessly rocked by violence, by war, by hate between religions (and within them), by children and adults dying of starvation and preventable diseases, by hateful rhetoric, by the degradation of climate and environment. Every day, we can hear enough discouraging news and see enough naked hopelessness to drive us into tombs of despair. And when the Church bows before despair, our buildings become bunkers of brick and mortar. We seek certainty and safety rather than faithfulness. In the sanctuary of despair, we remove ourselves from the ongoing story of God’s work in the creation—maybe because so much of it happens, as Paul says, in deep groaning. So, we retreat, trying to recreate all that we remember from days that are gone forever.
An irony emerges when we discover that the more we allow our stories to intertwine with the present sufferings of the creation, the more we enflesh our “breathless anticipation” with acts of defiant love and daring hope. When we’re honest about our own suffering, and when we enter the suffering of others, we participate in God’s always creating and re-creating story.
The irony deepens, because to embrace the good news requires a letting go. “By the Spirit,” Paul says, “put to death the actions of the body.” His word for this letting-go is kenosis. The fifth chapter of The Wisdom Jesus, our current Monday-night book, is entitled “Kenosis: The Path of Self-Emptying Love.” One of the points the author makes is that, through Jesus, we may enter and even welcome all things. Nothing is “renounced or resisted,” she says. The trick, however, is “to cling to nothing.”1 For those living the Christian path, everything is about experiencing and sharing the love of God in Christ. While we may claim some things, in the eternal sense, we own nothing, because, ultimately, nothing is truly ours. To realize this is to enter a new freedom. When we are owned by nothing, we can commit all things, including ourselves, to ministries of God’s creative and unifying love.
This is no easy path. We get on it, then leave it, then back on it, and leave it, again. Richard Rohr observes that, “Jesus clearly taught the twelve disciples about [this kind of] surrender, the necessity of suffering, humility, servant leadership, and nonviolence. [But they] resisted him every time, and so he finally had to make the journey himself and tell them, ‘Follow me!’”2
To follow Jesus is to enter his ongoing story. And as both Jesus and Paul reveal, that path leads us into deep suffering as well as great joy, because the two cannot be separated. And it is exactly there, in the tumult of life’s painful and glorious realities, that our stories, that our own love-redeemed and hope-revealing lives, really begin.
1Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming the Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Shambhala, Boulder. 2008. P. 70
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