Sermon on the Second Sunday in Lent: How dare we hope?
For almost a year now, we’ve been living in a hard time of pandemic. Whole swaths of our economic and social lives shut down; life became more fearful of contagion, disease, and death; arguments and fights have proliferated about everything from science to justice.
Within the wide sweep of history, things might not seem so bad, though. Because the march of history so often disappoints in how it gets out of step, off track, tumbled into a ditch. To study how the past has become the present might incline one to be a disillusioned pessimist.
And that is where the phrase from Paul, in our translation “hoping against hope,” comes to some sort of rescue. In his epistle, Paul is using those words to explain the story of Abraham to the Romans. Some of those Romans, who were converted Greeks, might not have been very familiar with one of the crucial stories of biblical history. We, of course, get part of it in our Old Testament reading: how God promised Abram, now Abraham, a son by his wife Sarai, now Sarah and that their descendants would be multitudes. Among those would be the chosen people of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob or Israel.
In explaining this history, Paul emphasizes the importance of faith over law. Laws are social contracts that can and are often be broken. In contrast, faith is the gift of grace, freely bringing righteousness or salvation. Abraham, skeptical and practical, had no real hope that God would grant him and his wife a child. Yet, he hoped against hope, being optimistic despite the unbelievability of such a promise.
In many ways, that attitude describes my relationship with Christianity. History has failed to bring lasting success to the faith. Christianity has not convinced everyone around the world, and with good reason, as so often believers have failed to live up to the ideals and virtues of the good news. In so many ways the world remains broken, through our own fault, our grievous fault.
Hoping against hope, however, keeps me faithful. There is so much good that has been done, can be done, could be done to make the love of Christ real. Attempting and approaching those efforts gives me some motivation to move forward. The divine things called for by Christ can redeem the sinful human things followed by so many. It only remains for us to transform hope into change.
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2021 February 28
URL: <http://therev.brianpavlac.org/srms/20210228.html