The Object of Our Hope

A homily for the Dartmouth Ecumenical Christian Chapel, given Thursday, October 9th, 2008.

A wise man once told me that a Christian only ever faces two problems in life: fear and discouragement. As one prone to discouragement, I am either especially qualified or especially unqualified to speak to the theme of hope. In any event, the issue is unavoidable, for we cannot live without hope.

We might say that there are two sides to hope, the subjective and the objective. Subjectively, we cannot live without the experience of hope, something to orient our lives in a positive direction. Without this kind of hope, we give up, passively and actively destroying, rather than supporting, life. King Saul ends his own life when he cannot prevail over the Philistines, Peter abandons his Lord, Judas repents with bitterness and hangs himself. We abandon our families, betray our trusts, and stop caring for the "least of these" in order to take care of ourselves. Unrestrained, fear and despair lead to death.

We must experience a subjective hope, and we celebrate this kind of hope endlessly in our literature and media. In our children's literature this theme is particularly ubiquitous, with the "Little Engine That Could" as the preeminent example. However, nearly all of the stories we tell feature this theme, hope in the face of tough odds. We root for the underdog in our sports movies, and we know that the heroes in movies like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-man, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington will prevail, no matter how hard things get. It may be a particularly American phenomenon.

However, all too often we promote subjective hope with no tether to an object of any kind. Without the counterpart of objective hope, our hopes are mere wishful thinking. As a husband and father, I had the unpleasant privilege of catching rats for the first time last winter, and I learned something about hope. Some were caught in traps, but one of the rats was too smart for this, and he moved into our cabinets. Since I did not want either a dead rat in a trap or poison in with our food, I caught him with my two hands and a bit of Tupperware. Since he had clearly found his own way into my house, I couldn't simply release him. Fortunately, a friend had told me how to remove a rat's objective hope. Placed in a bucket of water, a rat will swim for a time, but no matter what his hope for escape may be, a bit of soap mixed into the water with objectively change his hope, for without surface tension, no one treads water for long.

Another name for hope with no object is false hope, and it is as cruel as it is foolish. No one would stand before a paraplegic and tell them that they can walk solely on the basis of a subjective hope, yet this is essentially what we do when we tell someone to do something because they can believe in themselves or the economy or some other abstraction. The unbearable cost of their actions are then recklessly reckoned to themselves or to others around them.

Our current economic crisis is born of such wishful thinking, with reckless behavior justified by the thought that since thing have been exceptionally good for so long, it must be that they will always be this way. We can fudge the numbers a bit, the economy can take it. Here at Dartmouth, students come to believe that they can push themselves ever harder, giving up food and sleep, until they disappear from our community on medical leave. Subjective hope is not enough; we must have an object that can bear and fulfill our hope.

The need for subjective hope is amply revealed by our cultural bias, but our need for objective hope is obscured by these same bias. While we are endlessly celebrating new life and hope, we are also endlessly avoiding the reality of death. "Time cuts down all, both great and small," and "Xerxes the great did die, and so must you and I" were rhymes taught to Puritan children to help them learn their alphabet- the letters T and X in this case- and though a tad morbid, they are absolutely correct.

Consider, of what use are our desires and efforts for social justice, equity, and improvement if the members of our someday socially just society all die? In many places, statistics such as infant mortality, life expectancy, and even relative wealth have improved, but the mortality rate itself remains the same. What comes of your aspirations the day you die? You cannot ensure that the goals you pursue and the causes you contribute to will continue beyond your own death, if you can even ensure them that far. The object of our hope must bear not only the weight of our lives, but also death itself.

This leads me to ask you the classic question: what is your hope in? Do you have an object that can sustain your hope? Our text today speaks of being "born again into a living hope" through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It would be easy to point to the resurrection as a remedy to death, as indeed it is, without asking the simple question: why do we die? The Scriptures tell us of several other resurrections, such as that of Lazarus, Jesus' friend, and strangely enough, these resurrections are not permanent. Both before and after Jesus' own resurrection, those few who died and were raised again merely died a second death. Simply reversing death is not enough, and so we must ask why death occurs in the first place.

Last week learned from Romans 5 about suffering, endurance, character, and hope. Later in this chapter we are told precisely why human beings universally die: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-- for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come." (Rom 5:12-14) In other words, death is a result of our offense to the God who made us and gave us all the good things we enjoy. It is, in fact, the result of our propensity to place our hope, faith, and love in any other object, rather than in Him.

Without hope, we die, and with false hope, we die. Peter speaks to us of a hope that is living because its object lives as the conqueror of both sin and death. Consider on one hand, the death of the Lord Jesus; simultaneously God and Man, willingly accepting the penalty of God's wrath in our place through His death on the cross. Death must occur, and so the Lord Jesus tastes it for us.

Consider also the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: by raising Him from the dead, God demonstrates His acceptance of the sacrifice, for if there is no longer any wrath, neither can there be death. This is why Peter speaks of being born again into this living hope, for what is needed is not merely a pep talk or an improvement to our lives, but a new life altogether, and such life is available to us in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We are offered more than just the avoidance of death, but participation in the very life of God. In Him we have the promise a coming day in which we will share in His indestructible life and be fully delivered from sin. In other words, there is real, objective hope for a day in which human beings treat one another with perfect love.

This should fuel our social concerns. Though some claim that to be too heavenly minded is to be of no earthly good, the truth is exactly the opposite. We who live in a hope that surpasses what we can accomplish in this life have a remedy for the despair that causes us to give up or compromise along the way, and we can work without giving in to fear for our own welfare.

I end with the question: What is your hope in? Can the object of your hope bear the weight of your life and surpass your death?