Way back in March of 2005, I began a seminary

internship at Morningside Presbyterian Church in

midtown Atlanta. My first assignment was to create a

new Sunday morning Bible study. The topic was left

entirely up to me, with two important requirements.

The first was that this class had to be appealing

to the scores of new members who had recently

joined the congregation—many of them young

professionals choosing a church for the first time as

adults. The second requirement was that the class

needed to start as soon as humanly possible. Now,

that semester, I was enrolled in an enthralling course

on Paul’s letter to the Romans. We were reading the

letter in English and in Greek. We were studying the

ancient context in which it was written. We were

considering its unrivaled impact on all of Christian

theology from Saint Augustine to John Calvin to Karl

Barth.

In short, the course was something close to seminary

geek heaven. I could not have been more at home.

And so, I thought, what better topic for my new

Sunday morning class than the letter to the Romans?

I could start immediately. The syllabus was already

in hand, and surely it would attract crowds of these

new, young parishioners, if not drawn by the intern

instructor than surely by this catchy title: “Studying

Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” I thought of that myself.

I prepared my notes. I gathered two stacks of

Bibles. I arrived early to be sure that the room was

comfortable, that three dozen chairs were set just

right, and the flip-chart markers were fresh. And

then, I waited. And I waited. And twenty minutes later,

with three faithful souls in class, I decided it was time

to start. Lesson learned. Experience gained. What’s

an internship for, anyway? The opposite of isolation is

connection. The cure to an epidemic of loneliness is

the creation of communities of belonging. And here’s

the good news in the Church: that is precisely what

we are called to do and be together. Earlier in John’s

Gospel, Jesus declares his God-given purpose this

way: “I have come that they may have life, and have it

abundantly.”

The Letter to the Romans is a weighty theological

document. It is not the most accessible of our

Biblical texts. If you want to introduce the Bible to

someone new to the Christian faith, you’re better to

start with the Gospel of John or perhaps the Letter

to the Philippians. Romans, on the other hand, is

an advanced course in the essentials of our faith.

And yet all these years later, I remain convinced

that the situation into which this letter was written

bears a striking resemblance to our own. Consider

this. Paul is writing to a community of sophisticated,

thoughtful, educated, intelligent, well-meaning

people for whom Christian faith was simply not an

assumed way of life.

If you were to walk into the office on Monday

morning in First Century Rome and announce with

passionate zeal, “I have been buried with Christ and

raised to new life,” you would have been met with

the same blank stares and raised eyebrows that

would greet you tomorrow morning in Indianapolis

(and I suggest you try it). For then, as now, people of

class, people of culture, did not wear their faith on

their sleeves, and Christian faith itself was a foreign

concept. The small band of Jesus followers in that

big city struggled to cling to faith in a complicated

and sometimes hostile environment. They were

looking for a word of hope in a time of despair. And

this, behind all the theological concepts and the

abstract language, this is what Paul aims to offer.

Hope. Hope grounded in faith.

So far, our Lenten sermon series has introduced three

tangible, practical virtues. Kindness. Truthfulness.

Friendship. Now, they may not be easy to practice,

but we know them when we see them. This Sunday,

we turn to a virtue that is harder to nail down and

more difficult to describe. One of our early worship

attendees described it as “squishy,” a virtue that

can be dismissed as a wispy feeling or a vacuous

emotion. A friend of mine put it concisely this week

when I told him the topic for the sermon. He asked,

“How do you practice hope?” Perhaps that’s the

question at the heart of today’s sermon. How do you

practice hope?

We might begin by naming what hope—at least in

the theological sense—is not. Christian hope is not

a synonym for optimism. This idealistic confidence

that everything will work out in the end may be

a byproduct of hope, but it does not name the

substance of the virtue. In my experience, optimism

tends to skate on the surface of experience,

bypassing the reality of pain and the certainty of

suffering. Hope goes deep—in the words of our

Declaration of Faith, plunging us into the struggle,

asking for something from us. Hope is not naïve.

Neither, however, is Christian hope compatible

with the kind of cynicism that has overtaken so

much of our discourse. We are all encouraged

to distrust everything and everyone, from oncevenerated institutions to colleagues and classmates

to neighbors and even members of our own family.

There is a brooding, general lack of faith in the

human species, an assumption of the worst in

others. Maybe you’ve heard this modern take on the

beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the cynical, for they

shall not be disappointed.” We have lifted cynicism to

the realm of virtue.

The wreckage of this idolatry surrounds us. We

see it in diminished expectations for the future

among emerging generations. We see it in broken

relationships. We see it in the lack of concern for

those who will follow us, who will inherit what we

pass along. We see it in a general sense of foreboding

and pessimism. A few weeks ago, columnist David

French wrote an essay reclaiming the original intent

of President Jimmy Carter’s so-called “malaise

speech.” The 1979 address was widely panned and

even blamed for Carter’s political demise. But French

(from the other side of the political aisle) sees in

the speech a prophetic word that went unheeded,

writing, “The trends [Carter] saw two generations

ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body

politic.”

One of those fruits is surely the cynicism that

simultaneously produces both selfishness and

despair. As Carter said, “We have learned that piling

up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives

which have no confidence or purpose.” Have we

learned that lesson?

I believe this is the quality that distinguishes the

virtue of hope from airy optimism or tempting

cynicism: purpose. Purpose.

Ultimately, hope that is not anchored to something

more sturdy than human ability or enterprise will

succumb to the battering reality of life in a broken

world. True hope must rest on a deeper sense of

meaning, a firmer foundation of faith, a greater sense

of purpose

And this was the Apostle Paul’s message to the

Romans. Hope does not disappoint us when hope

is tethered to God’s presence, to God’s power. It

was Václav Havel—the poet and statesman whose

own life was characterized by suffering and periods

of deep despair—who could still write these words:

“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of

the spirit…It transcends the world that is immediately

experienced. It is anchored beyond our horizons.”

Without a sense of transcendence, true hope will

always elude us. Yes, we can do much good. We can

celebrate many successes. We can effect change

and accomplish genuine improvement simply by

relying on our goodness and ingenuity, but these

efforts will never be enough on their own. We cannot

create the kingdom of God. We are creatures and

not the creator. And if our vision is limited to human

endeavor, the result will always be disappointment.

When our hope is rooted in this transcendent faith,

we can pursue with passion the work that is ours to

do, trusting that it will always be incomplete because

only God is sufficient. We can practice selfless

service. We can give with generous hearts. We can

listen with an open mind. We can speak the truth in

love. We will be filled with an irrepressible energy

that is not contingent on the immediate success of

our efforts. We can be a people fully immersed in

a faith that we did not create and a grace that we

cannot achieve. True hope will come as gift. As gift

from God.

How do we practice hope? What does hope look like

in our lives and in our church? Remember that virtues

are cultivated over time and deepened by repetition.

Let me then suggest that hope is a discipline. It

involves a kind of dogged determination to trust even

when we can see God’s grace least clearly.

When I think of hope, particularly hope as

irrepressible energy that comes as a gift of God, I

think of our son Benjamin who turned six last Friday.

Ben exists in my life as a constant reminder of the

spiritual gift of hope and the irrepressible energy of a

child. A few weeks ago, on a very dark and very cold

morning, I woke Ben up as I do on many mornings,

trying to gently rouse him from sleep and move him

through the morning routine as efficiently as possible.

There are eighteen minutes between his wake up and

when the bus arrives in front of our house, and we

need to make the most of every single one of those

eighteen minutes. When he finally opened his eyes,

his first words were, “Dad, is it Friday?” In the interest

of efficiency, I briefly considered lying to my son to

get him out of bed, but I decided to tell him the hard

truth. “No, buddy. I’m sorry. Today is Wednesday.” Ben

sat straight up in bed and declared, “Oh. Well, that’s

okay. Wednesday is another one of my favorite days.”

Friends, the circumstances of our lives do not have to

dictate the character of our hope. We can anchor our

confidence in the reality of God’s presence. We can

practice hope by looking everywhere for signs of it.

While a resident chaplain at a children’s hospital

during seminary, I met a woman, a mother whose

five-month-old twins had still not left the hospital.

Every morning, no matter how early I arrived, she

was there. And every evening, no matter how late I

stayed, she was there. Holding her babies. Praying.

Crying. Waiting. Pleading. Rituals of compassion.

“What gives you strength?” a novice chaplain asked.

With a confident smile and eyes that showed wisdom

beyond her nineteen years, the mother simply

responded, “I see a new day coming.”

This is our hope. Amen.