Pentecost
1, Year C
Romans
5:1-5
I recently listened to a podcast
that examined religion from the perspective of a social psychologist. This psychologist has examined religions over
the centuries and millennia from a Darwinian perspective---trying to figure out
why some religions flourish at specific times and then diminish in importance
or disappear altogether. One of his
theories is that religions that emphasize a God who judges and punishes are
more likely to succeed because fear is a powerful motivator. If you are taught that if you don’t go to
church, you will go to hell, then you might very well go to church. However, religions or denominations like our
own that emphasize a loving and compassionate God are less likely to
survive. If you look at the history of
the Christian Church, it was a much more powerful church when we were using
fear. It was not necessarily healthy or
good, but definitely effective.
We all know that fear is a powerful
motivator. We see it in our political
atmosphere all over the place. And this
use of fear to control people is not a new method. In Jesus’ time, one of the ways the Romans
controlled the Jews was through fear and violence. They often used violence or
threats of violence to quell insurrection. This is one of the reasons why
crucifixions were public spectacles. The
Romans knew how powerful fear was. There
were some Jews who felt that the best way to respond to violence, was with more
violence. And one can hardly blame
them. It’s a natural reaction.
Yet Jesus and his disciples refused to
respond with violence. Jesus wielded his
power in a much different way. He did so
with love and hope. This idea of hope was not new to the Jewish people. They
had been hoping and praying for a messiah for centuries. Jesus was able to embody that hope for many
Jews—and that was why he became a danger to the Romans. So the Romans killed Jesus….at least they
thought they did. As we know, Jesus conquered death.
While Jesus’s resurrection was real
and profound, it was witnessed by a limited amount of people. Those who witnessed it tried to spread the
news, spread the hope, but it was difficult news to digest. It caused more divisions in the Jewish
community. Consequently some Jews felt
that they had to respond with fear and violence against this break away group—the
Christians. Paul was one of the worst
oppressors of the new Christians. He had
not known Jesus when he lived and certainly had no reason to believe that this
rabble rouser was the messiah and had been resurrected. Because of this, Paul persecuted the
followers of Jesus, and when I say persecuted, he killed them. That was how he displayed his power and
wielded control.
Paul had little reason to hope in this dead messiah, until that fateful
day on the road to Damascus when a bright light from heaven struck him blind
and he heard Jesus speak to him. From
that moment, Paul went from persecuting Christians, to being one of the
greatest evangelists of all time. From
that flash of light and hope, Paul’s life got a lot more dangerous, a lot more
uncontrollable.
Several years went by before he wrote
the letter to the Romans which we heard today.
During those years Paul converted thousands, and planted communities of
Christians over hundreds of miles. He
was also beaten and imprisoned for the message of hope that he carried. While he accomplished a great deal, he was sometimes
discouraged by the fickleness of the new Christians. He would plant a church of passionate and
zealous Christians only to later hear how they had been manipulated by false
messiahs and wooed by messages of easy answers and immediate
gratification. What is the point of hope
if you can get everything you need in an instant? That is one of the things that the false
messiahs provided, immediate gratification.
That is one thing our culture has gotten very good at providing.
In these five verses from Paul’s letter
to the Romans, Paul tells the story of hope, the birth of hope. “…we also boast in our sufferings, knowing
that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and
character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us.” It is essentially a recipe for hope. Yet unlike most of those tantalizing recipes
we see in magazines with ingredients like grape seed oil and shallots, this is
a recipe with very basic ingredients, ingredients that most of us already have,
or ingredients that are presently growing inside us.
That is the good news. The challenging news is that some of the ingredients
that grow inside us… grow despite our best efforts to avoid them. No one wants suffering, but it is
inevitable. For some, it comes in the form
of a natural disaster like tornadoes or flooding. For some it comes from unnecessary and
preventable shootings in our office buildings, schools and streets. For some, in the form of health problems; physical
or emotional. For many it comes in the
form of loss; loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of a dream. Whoever you are, suffering at some point in
your life is inevitable.
Yet my point is not how or why we
suffer, but what we do with the suffering.
Often suffering leads to despair, an uncontrolled and unrelenting
despair. But Paul, who was no stranger
to extreme and extended suffering, believed that suffering produces endurance,
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope doesn’t
disappoint us. In my suffering, there were moments when I felt like despair was
the only possible outcome. What always
protected me from abject despair was God’s presence, even when God’s presence
felt murky and undefined, I could still feel it.
It is times like that, when we have to
choose between despair and hope. It is
times like that when hope feels incredibly dangerous. It is not the canned hope
that so many things in our culture provide.
It is not the isolated hope that self-help books give us. It is wild hope, dangerous hope, hope that
cannot be controlled because it is not ours to control. It is God’s.
Often times we try to control hope with
phrases like “cautiously optimistic.” I
have used that phrase. It’s a smart way
to be. It’s a safe way to live. I am just not sure it’s Christian. I often think that I can protect myself
from disappointment if I do not let myself hope. But that is kind of missing the point. When
Paul spoke of hope, it wasn’t the verb….it was the noun. We don’t hope for something. We strive to live a life that will lead us to
hope itself…because the embodiment of the hope is Jesus Christ our Lord and
Savior. Hope is not the means to an end,
it is the means to glory.
There are some churches, some religions
that still use fear as a motivator. Yet
we---Christians—have something so much more powerful than fear. We have
hope. Ironically hope is a much braver
tool than fear and in some ways, it’s a more dangerous and scary tool to wield
because it is completely beyond our control and it requires things like
suffering and sacrifice. However, Jesus
promised us in our Gospel text that we would never be alone in this journey
toward hope. The Holy Spirit is with us.
Jesus calls us to live with the power of Holy Spirit-- to a wild and
untamed hope that leaves us breathless and sometimes terrified. The best way to face that fear, is to do it
together, as a community of faith. Let
us together throw cautious optimism out the window. Let us be dangerous--dangerously
hopeful.
The podcast I referred to in the beginning is: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god
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