Maybe rightly so, Advent caught me busy and off guard enough that last week’s text and sermon went by without blogging anything. So here we are preparing for the second Sunday in Advent, following our church theme for the season of “Rise and Shine,” which was last Sunday’s sermon title.
For this week we turn to a text, Romans 15:4-13, which is largely about hope. There is a great deal we can say about this wonderful gift of God, which is also one of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Yet as I read through this text, which begins and ends with verses speaking about hope, I was particularly struck with how that hope is represented here, in a way that may be contrary to our usual grasp of what it means to hope.
George Frederick Watts painted an image which characterizes how we often think of hope. He portrays hope as a bent, bowed woman, blindfolded, in a tattered dress, sitting atop the world and playing a harp with only one string. Hope, then, is a person clinging desperately to some faint note of music heard only dimly despite hardship and tragedy.
There is value in understanding that hope can exist even in the cruelest and most desperate of circumstances. But the painting’s depiction of hope leaves out much that is important in the Christian understanding. G. K. Chesterton criticized the painting, saying that it would be better titled “Despair.”
The primary deficit of Watts’ painting is the loneliness of it. Hope for him is a solitary figure playing one lone string, listening to her own music. In contrast, after calling attention to the encouragement and hope promised in the Scriptures, Paul in verse 5 of our text speaks of our harmony and unity with each other. Hope is not the solitary desperate optimism of a person alone, but the united “one voice” of God’s people together.
Then in verses 7 to 12, Paul expounds on Scripture’s promised hope by talking about how we welcome each other in Christ because God has welcomed Gentiles into salvation alongside His chosen people, the Jews. Verses 8 and 9 argue that the confirmation of the promises made in Scripture to the Jewish patriarchs is this new welcome of all people into God’s love and mercy.
So Christian hope is a virtue we share in as a gathered, united people. It happens in company with one another, where barriers that divide us are transcended and broken down. If you wanted to follow out Watts’ imagery, hope would be several ragged figures, maybe each playing only a single string or raising a weak voice, but together creating a glorious symphony or chorus of praise to God.
I see hope, then, when we open our church doors on cold nights for warming those who need shelter. Volunteers, both from the homeless community and from well-off homes in our church, work side-by-side to care for those who will be guests for the night.
I see hope when I enter one of our Sunday School classrooms and see children of two or three different races and languages gathered around a little table learning about Jesus.
I see hope when our congregation exchanges greetings and pictures with Christians in India, supporting each other in mutual prayer.
I see hope whenever people come together and unite, despite differences of all sorts, in faith in Jesus Christ and with confidence in what He is doing in the world to heal our conflicts and divisions and bring God’s joy and peace to all people. That’s the hope Paul means here, when in verse 12 he points to Isaiah 11:10, who speaking of the Messiah, the “root of Jesse,” says, “in him the Gentiles will hope.” And then in verse 13 prays that the “God of hope” will fill all His people together with joy and peace, so that they may “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
May we keep on rising and shining with that hope, showing the world how people can live together in joy and peace which come from God the Father through Christ our Savior by the power of the Holy Spirit.