I Peter 1:3-12 "Hope For a Little While" Scott Hoezee

High Hopes. As some of you know, the song of that title, as crooned by Frank Sinatra, was the theme tune for John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign for the White House. "He's got high hopes, he's got high hopes, he's got high in the sky, apple pie hopes." But really that is true of most every person who has ever run for public office. And as of Tuesday morning this past week, those hopes were flying high for most every person whose name appeared on a ballot anywhere in this country.

When on election day politicians say that the polls don't mean anything to them because they are still hoping to pull this thing off no matter how far back in the field the pundits say they are, those candidates are not just blowing smoke or putting a good face on things. They really believe it. They hope and so they believe the possibility. But by Wednesday morning when I began work on this sermon, something like half of all those high hopes had been brought back down to earth. Indeed, the hopes had died.

When you run for office, you know from the start that you have a 50-50 chance of seeing your hope either realized or dashed. The candidates who this past week had to bid a fond and sad Adieu to their political aspirations were not exactly shocked that this had happened. They had known all along that political hope is a precarious thing. Yet even so, hope is of such a nature that it stings to let that hope go. It doesn't matter whether we had been hoping for something that was highly likely, something that was highly unlikely, or something that was in between: once hope grabs us, all our energies tend to get caught up in seeing that hope realized. Both extraordinary, wild hopes and very routine, tame hopes work a similar effect on us. Once you start hoping for something, it is difficult to stop hoping and bitterly painful if the day comes when you have no choice but to stop.

Probably this is so because to have no hope is, in a real sense, to die. In Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh, we meet Harry Hope, who is the proprietor of a saloon populated by a band of drunks who live from drink to drink. Their sad and sodden existence shuffles between one drunken binge and the next. Yet still these drunks had some hope. They had the hope that just maybe the day would dawn when they would put the cork in the bottle once and for all, get their old jobs back, be taken back in by their wives and families, and just generally return to the land of the living that they knew was still out there beyond the confines of their saloon graveyard.

But then one day Ted Hickman, or "Hickey" returns to Harry Hope's saloon. He himself had once been a member of this sad society of lushes but had managed to kick his alcoholic ways. However, far from encouraging the other denizens of the bar to do the same thing, Hickey provides them with even more booze because, he proclaims to them all, "The only way to be happy is to abandon your foolish pipe dreams of a better life. Give in to reality, accept that you are permanent drunks, and then you will be at peace." But Hickey's gospel brings no peace. Instead, the message that they were in fact hopeless drunks caused these men to begin to die.

"Where there's life, there's hope," the old adage claims. "Hope springs eternal," another well-know axiom says. If so, then where there is no hope, there is no life. "Abandon Forever All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here." That's the slogan the writer Dante emblazoned over the gates of Hell in his classic work The Inferno. Just to make the point even more vividly, Dante later gives the reader a tour of Hell, in which one of the more sinister and terrible punishments inflicted on the damned is seen in a group of people whose hearts are perpetually puffed up with desire but whose minds perpetually inform them that they will never, ever see a single one of those desires fulfilled. They have desire but no hope, and the combination is hellish indeed.

Hope is what keeps us alive. Hope is that powerful force in our hearts that keeps people pressing forward in situations that, from the outside looking in, appear fruitless to the rest of us. Hope is what kept rescuers digging through the wreckage of the Twin Towers, looking for survivors even days and weeks after all good sense said it was impossible anyone would still be alive at Ground Zero. Hope is what keeps those black MIA flags flying in various places as parents and friends continue to hold onto the belief that just maybe a missing soldier is still alive somewhere in Vietnam.

But we Christians should not be critical of people who hold onto their hopes against all odds. After all, maintaining hope despite a welter of things around us that point another way is precisely where we Christians live. "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!" Those ringing words of the apostle Peter are among the more famous phrases in the New Testament. Our hope is alive because our hope is a person who was raised from the dead. Our hope is Jesus, who has stored up for us, Peter goes on to say, a wonderful inheritance that is of such high-quality material, it will never disappoint us by fading, spoiling, depreciating, or diminishing in any way.

It is difficult to imagine more soaring rhetoric than this. Seldom did holy hope have such an eloquent champion. But if that is so, then it is equally valid to say that seldom has holy hope had such a realistic champion. Because if Peter is good at celebrating Christian hope in Jesus, he is also adept at demonstrating why true hope is different from some of the counterfeit hopes proffered by our world.

Peter is not content just to needle the word "Hope" into some pretty, flowery counted-cross-stitch wall hanging with a gilded frame around it--something cute and saccharine that could be right up there with all those trite Christian bumper stickers or church sign slogans. The problem with trying to boil some Christian truth down to something that fits on a bumper is that you inevitably sever all ties to nuance and, thus, to real life. "Worry Ends Where Faith Begins." "We're Too Blessed To Be Depressed." Those slogans are catchy, but they have the minor disadvantage of being false. But since we are not supposed to bear false witness to our neighbors, I think a good many bumper stickers need to go.

Peter knew better than to be so trite. He was writing to congregations that were enduring persecution, worry, uncertainty, maybe even what we might call a form of depression. They found themselves in this dismal trough period of their lives not because they failed to have faith and not because they lacked blessings but precisely because of their faith and the very great blessing of living hope that God had granted to them by grace. In fact, from the sound of Peter's words in this opening chapter, it may well be the case that having Christian hope may make this life a bit more difficult to handle, not less so. We have a living hope, Peter says, but for a little while now we will have to hang onto that hope in and through some of life's harder knocks--difficult times that will surely come our way.

Perhaps what this highlights is the nature of true hope. Peter seems to know that Christian hope does not help us avoid life's difficulties but it does keep us from despair and resignation in the face of those trials. Hope makes us eager for the future whereas an attitude of resignation makes us either loathe the approach of the future or we travel toward the future with a fatalistic shrug of the shoulders. Whatever will be will be, and the odds are it won't be very pleasant. So all we can do is grit our teeth and await the next blow to fall. We tend to call such people pessimists, and it's probably not difficult to see how pessimism is very nearly the opposite of hope.

At first glance, therefore, you might think that if pessimism is the opposite of true hope, then optimism must come quite close to what hope really is. Actually, however, the kind of hope Peter talks about is quite different than even optimism. Because optimism is premised on the idea that things may very well get better. Optimism is contingent on a change in outward circumstances, which means that optimism can be dashed by those same circumstances. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is actually razor thin despite how those two habits of the heart appear to be polar opposites.

Because the optimist says, "Don't worry, it might not happen." But genuine hope says, "Oh, the worst might happen all right, but God will still be there anyway." The optimist says, "Things are bound to get better!" The person of genuine hope is able to say, "Whether things get better or not, by God's grace we will get better." Optimism spritely says, "Cheer up!" Genuine hope says, "Look up and behold the living hope of Jesus."

Optimism needs to be validated in the way future events pan out. Of course, there are some sunny-side-up optimists who are not easily deterred. If when something good they had been hoping for fails to happen, they maintain their optimism by shifting to yet another hoped-for future event. But without anything ultimate on which to base itself, optimism will always remain a prisoner of the future. And maybe at some point you've met up with a former optimist who now, whenever he hears some sunny prediction for the future, can do no more than sneer and say, "I used to think that way, but no more!" Sometimes optimism can curdle into a pessimistic cynicism, and when it does, it often becomes the most virulent form of such a gloomy outlook on life. So long as we stake all our hopes to the way things go in the future, shifting to cynicism at some point is always possible.

True hope, as Peter reminds us, is lashed to something that is already real now and that will remain real in the future: Jesus Christ. Our hope is alive. It's not something we suspect may come into existence at some future point, but rather the living hope of Christ is our bedrock throughout the ages. A week ago I was at Hope College in Holland for a conference, and when you walk across Hope's campus, you cannot miss the school's symbol on the front lawn: a large anchor. That traditional symbol of hope reminds us of the fixed point of Jesus on which we are anchored in ways that ensure we will not be moved.

Or so we say and so Peter wrote. But really, couldn't someone on the outside looking in claim that my attempt to distance Christian hope from mere optimism simply fails? Couldn't someone lump Jesus together with any other object of wishful thinking? An optimistic young woman may hope that not only is her Mr. Right out there somewhere, but that one fine day she's going to meet him and, when she does, she'll know that he's the one. Truth is, this mystery man, this hoped-for Mr. Right, may or may not exist such that using this anonymous person as the grounds for optimism is shaky. But why couldn't someone allege the same thing about Jesus: we claim that Jesus anchors our hope but, as Peter admits in verse 8, we have no more seen Jesus than a young woman has seen her Mr. Right. So what prevents Jesus from being himself an object of optimism, a hoped-for dream that may or may not be real, that may or may not become visible at some future time? What's the difference between our hope in Jesus and some woman's hope in Mr. Right?

Well, let's admit that this is not a weird question for someone to raise, and let's admit that it even makes its own kind of sense. The only answer Christians can offer, although a perfectly legitimate and good answer, is not subject to any verifiable proof. But then, if we could prove this, see this, lock this in, we wouldn't be talking about hope in the first place!

Nevertheless, our answer as to what distinguishes Jesus from some hoped-for Mr. Right or from any future possibility is our living connection with Jesus through faith. I can no more explain to you why in my heart and mind I just know that Jesus is real than I can explain how I know that my wife loves me or how I know that when I recall my First Grade teacher, Miss Veenstra, I am recalling an actual person. My awareness of how other people feel about me, and my memory of people and events long past, are not things I can explain very well or logically. And I could be wrong about such matters. I could be wrong about my wife's love and I suppose that some wicked psychologist could have hypnotized me at some past point and made me believe that a Miss Veenstra once taught me how to read (but really no such person ever existed). I could be wrong about certain things, yet with every fiber of my being I'm certain that these things are true. I just know it. It's basic.

That same kind of inexplicable, against-all-odds certainty is what faith provides, too. Not every person in this world has faith in God much less faith specifically in Christ Jesus as God's only Son. So we know that believing this is not some natural, obvious thing to which most everyone tumbles eventually. Faith is a gift, but once it is there, it is undeniably real even as it connects us undeniably to the joy of knowing that a loving and gracious God really does exist and that this God sent his only beloved Son here to save us. This is not optimistic wishful thinking, it is not a search for Mr. Right, not waiting for Godot, not pinning our hopes on a future something-or-other that may or may not come into existence. Christian hope is anchored by faith to the One we know exists now and forever: Jesus.

We have hope in this Savior and because we do, we also embrace his kingdom program. Again, however, such hope may not make life rosy. In fact, as Lewis Smedes has observed, if we are to be hopeful people in the deepest Christian sense, then we need to learn how to be content with discontentment. The hope-filled life, Smedes says, is filled with restless joys. The more we sense the reality of God's Christ, the more often we will realize how out-of-sync this world is with the kingdom of God. We're not "too blessed to be depressed" but rather we get a little depressed now and again precisely because we've been so blessed. Hope won't let us be content with how things are.

What's more, faith does not spell the end of worry but rather, again to quote Lew Smedes, "worry is hope's bothersome twin brother." Hope keeps us going, but we have plenty to fret, plenty to be worried about and careful about in a world where the darker things of life swarm around us constantly--we may even have more to worry about, too, precisely because we can't go along with the folks who look at immoral lifestyles but who then shrug it off by saying, "Don't worry, be happy." We'd just as soon worry about it, thank you, and we'll do it because we have a hope that it really can get better than that.

Depending on the time and season and circumstances of life, hope may or may not make things easier for us. Hope may or may not make life easier but hope does, by a miracle of grace, make life possible. But if we find this holy hope burning in our hearts, then this is surely something we should wish for all people. Smedes says that there are swarms of cold-eyed young men and empty-eyed young women roving the jungles of his nation's cities who would spit in your face if you told them that there was hope for their future. Most folks need to be able to remember some goodness from their past before they can embrace goodness for their future. But sadly there are people who cannot locate any goodness in the years that have already gone by in their lives.

We need to pray for such people. We need to find gentle ways to show them that one central spot of unalloyed goodness that really does exist in our collective past, and that is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Among the things for which we hope must be that others will find the love of Jesus and so, in this way, find hope for their future, too. If we love Jesus, then we dare hope for nothing less than hope for all. Amen.