June 6, 2004 - Dr. Stephen C. Lien, "Hope for the Long Haul"

My text for this morning is from Romans, Chapter 5, and my sermon title is "The Hope for the Long Haul." I don't know about you, but I need hope in my life, especially for the long haul. If it's just for today, then I can sort of manage things on my own. But I think there are so many times and situations and challenges in our lives when we really need hope for the long haul. We can get over the little hurdles, the little momentary challenges. But it's the things that feel more intractable in our lives that are the things that can really weigh us down and discourage us. It's the unresolved difficulty; it's the relationship that just doesn't quite work; it's the loneliness that doesn't go away; it's the disease that keeps nagging and getting worse and worse; it's the regret sometimes that we carry around with us; it's the wounds and the scars that we nourish from long ago. These are the things that for most of us really, really cause us to despair many times. I believe God wants to give us hope for the long haul, for the long haul of life. Not for a day, or season, or situation, but for a lifetime. It is one of God's gifts to us today.

The Apostle Paul talks about it in the fifth chapter of Romans. Before we get there, just a few words about the Apostle Paul and the Book of Romans, this letter to the church at Rome. That's why it bears this name. The Apostle Paul didn't know Jesus personally. He started his ministry maybe 30 years after Jesus died. We talk about Paul a lot, but maybe we don't know too much about him. Just a quick history. He was a Pharisee of the Jewish faith -- a super Pharisee. He had a pedigree that just wouldn't quit. He was so devout and so faithful in his Jewish faith that he wanted to stamp out the Christian faith. So he was part of a Pharisee "goon squad," if you will, that was running around the then-known world trying to arrest and prosecute Christians for this heretical faith in this person named Jesus, this Man from Nazareth. Paul, however, had this life-changing experience when he was on the road to Damascus. I want to tell you in the words of Frederick Buechner what this was like:

He was still in charge of a Pharisee "goon squad" in those days and was hell-bent for Damascus to round up some trouble-making Christians and bring them to justice, and then it happened. It was about noon when he was knocked flat by a blaze of light that made the sun look like a 40-watt bulb and out of the light came a voice that called him by his Hebrew name twice.

"Saul," it said, and then again, "Saul! Why are you out to get me?"

And when Paul pulled himself together enough to ask who it was he had the honor of addressing, what he heard to his horror was, "I'm Jesus of Nazareth, the one you're out to get."

We're not told how long he lay there in the dust then, but it must have seemed at least six months. If Jesus of Nazareth had what it took to burst out of the grave like a guided missile, he thought, then he could polish off one bowlegged Christian-baiter without even noticing it, and Paul waited for the ax to fall. Only it wasn't an ax that fell.

"Those boys in Damascus?" Jesus said, "Don't fight them, join them. I want you on my side."

And Paul never in his life forgot the sheer lunatic joy and astonishment of that moment in his life.

Everything he ever said or wrote or did from that day forward was an attempt to bowl over the human race as he had been bowled over himself while he lay there with dust in his mouth and road apples down the front of his shirt . . .

"By grace you have been saved," Paul wrote to the Ephesians, and "grace" was his key word. GRACE. Salvation was free, gratis. There was nothing you had to do to earn it and nothing you could do to earn it.
(from Buechner's Peculiar Treasures, p. 145ff )

That's who Paul was.

Paul, after that day, became one of the most prolific missionaries the world has ever known. Through the ministry of that man, history has literally been changed. Paul went all over the then-known world of Asia Minor, all the way from Rome down to Jerusalem and Antioch and Crete and Malta and all over kingdom come. And whenever Paul had ten minutes, he'd sit down and write a letter to somebody else, telling them about Jesus. Paul was persecuted for his faith, thrown in prison, and was shipwrecked many times. He was starving, without food, and again and again persecuted for his faith. But Paul had hope for the long haul because he had met Jesus in this radical conversion experience. Paul traveled the equivalent of about 13,000 air miles. Imagine that! On foot and boat, 13,000 miles for the cause of Christ. He wrote almost a quarter of the New Testament. Paul had this bright and capacious mind, a bright intellect, articulate, well-schooled in the Jewish faith in all of the Old Testament Scriptures. He met Jesus personally, even after Jesus had risen to Heaven. He made it his life's goal to follow Christ. He said, "For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain."

It is important for us to be able to know some of the heart of this man who wrote this letter to Romans, because Romans is sort of the mother lode of Christian theology. It's not easy reading. It's unabashedly theological, the Book of Romans. But when you spend some time there and plumb its depths, there's rich treasure for us. Today I encourage you to go home and read through the Book of Romans, if you dare, if you want to give your mind a challenge. The fifth chapter is something to tuck into your heart, the eighth chapter you ought to memorize. It talks about how nothing can separate us from the love of God. Here in the fifth chapter, we come upon what Paul is talking to us about: justification, and some heavy and weighty words here. And we're going to unpack those a little bit. But listen while I read for you Romans 5, Verses 1-5.

"Therefore," Paul begins. Whenever you see a "therefore," you need to ask, "What's it there for?" (laughter) It's there to connect us with Chapter 4, when Paul has again been talking about some of the fundamentals of our faith. He says - and watch the verb tenses as we go through -

Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace with our God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings . . .

Not rejoice because of our sufferings, not rejoice for our sufferings. We rejoice in our sufferings. Sometimes I think it is a simple matter of obedience. That's what I'm learning. Rarely am I ever thankful or rejoicing for my suffering. But sometimes when I can rejoice in them, the feeling follows afterwards. Do you know what I mean? Thank you, God, for this impossible situation because you deal in impossibility.

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Will you join me in prayer?

Lord God, whoever we are in this room, we really come needing hope for the long haul. It's really in short supply in our world, and in our own lives. It's so easy that our hopes and our dreams feel dashed, and we place them sometimes irresponsibly in other people, or in situations or a dream or a job or a family or a reputation or a portfolio or some expectation. God, we pray that you would help us today; even in this time we share today, to place our hope in you and find that it's hope for the long haul. We pray that you give us humility to recognize that you are the God of the universe of all creation, of all eternity, and that we come before you on our knees asking for your help, for your hope. And pray that your word might be in my mouth and your thoughts in each of our minds, that we might know and understand you in a new and more real way, that it will produce hope for the long haul. We pray for the sake of Christ. Amen.

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you and peace from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I want you to hear clearly today the Word of God. That's the point. That's always the point. Paul writes,

Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace with our God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Tumbling out of Paul's mouth is a whole mess of really significant theological words that most of us are clueless about. You've got to spend some time understanding, and I want to unpack some of these theological words.

"Justified." We talk about being justified. We are justified by faith. In the words of Frederick Buechner, to justify means, in printer's language, to set type in such a way that every line is of equal length and it's even with margins on left and right side. Right? It is made right in proportion to the page and each other line.

The religious sense of justification is almost the same. It's being made right. We are justified with God. There's been a problem between humanity and God. It's called sin. And not just sins, plural, but sin. It's rebellion, it's anger, it's doing our own thing, it's going in our own direction, it's disobedience, it's not living up to the expectation that God has for us. And the Bible calls it sin. God is holy, cannot tolerate the presence of sin, and so God has provided a way through Jesus Christ to justify us. We are justified; we are made right with God. We are brought in right relationship. Paul uses it for the first step in the process of Salvation. At a moment in his life when he had least reason to expect it, Paul was staggered by the idea that no matter who you are, what you've done, God wants you on His side. You have nothing to have, or be, or do; it's on the house. It goes with the territory. God has justified you, lined you up. To feel that somehow in your bones is the first step to being saved.

We have peace with God, Paul tells us, through Jesus Christ. You know, peace is not the absence of conflict. It's the presence of Christ. Peace, in the Biblical sense, is the sense of wholeness that is irrespective of the circumstances. The Hebrew word is shalom. It's a fullness, a wellness, a wholeness. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. It's all through the love, life, death, resurrection of Jesus that we have access. The Greek word for access has two beautiful meanings. One is like access into the throne room of a monarch. When you walk through the door, someone has made access into the presence of royalty and majesty and mystery. Jesus has provided access to God. The other sense of it is that of a safe harbor. In a tumultuous sea full of storms, there's a safe harbor. It's access, through the access that Jesus has provided us to God.

And through grace - my, how we bandy about that word all the time. Grace is the sheer, undeserved, incredible kindness of God. Someone said it's God's riches at Christ's expense. Grace. God's riches at Christ's expense. Mercy is not receiving what we do deserve. Grace is receiving what we don't deserve.

Buechner again: "Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it, deserve it or bring it about, any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream." Isn't that a nice way to put it? "A good sleep is grace and so too are good dreams. Most tears are grace. Loving somebody is grace. A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do."

Do you get that? There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. It's on the house. It goes with the territory.

Buechner continues, "The grace of God means something like, 'Here's your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here's the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can separate us. It's for you that I created the universe. I love you.' "

And then Paul goes on to give the mother lode of what our lives are like. He says all of that is true, but more than that, we even rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God, and we rejoice in our suffering. You don't need any help figuring out the sufferings, do you? All of us suffer, in one way or another - psychically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally - we suffer just because we live life. We're anxious about the future. We're remorseful about the past. We're full of angst even about the world in which we live. There have been days in the last few weeks and months where I can't even read the paper. I have to go to a different section. It is just so much more of the same, and it's just a new facet to what's going on in the world and in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It is so horrifying, and it's just more and more and more. There's so much suffering in the world that we just reach our capacity to even comprehend it all.

And Paul tells us by the grace of God to rejoice in all of that? To bring it all to God? We rejoice in their sufferings because when we do, our suffering produces something in us. It produces hupomone, endurance, staying power, a perseverance that's beyond us, that comes out of all the suffering in which we're engaged, when we turn it over to God and learn to rejoice with it. Hupomone means the spirit which can overcome the world. It means the spirit which does not passively endure, but actively overcomes trials and tribulations. It's sort of like chutzpa. I love that word! Chutzpa is Yiddish for supreme self-confidence, nerve, audacity. It's pluck . . . courage and fortitude and bravery and spirit.

Our suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character (the Greek word for character is dokime translated as 'sterling') - it produces something purer. Metal that is full of alloy is placed in a crucible and a fire is lit under it and the metal is purified. It produces this character, dokime. It produces sterling in us, and character produces hope - hope for the long haul when it comes from God.

Again, Frederick Buechner writes:

"For Christians, hope is ultimately hope in Christ, the hope that He really is what for centuries we've been claiming He is. The hope that despite the fact that sin and death still rule the world, God somehow conquered them. The hope that in Jesus and through Him all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them, too. The hope that at some unforeseeable time and in some unimaginable way God will return with healing in His wing."

In his book Credo, William Sloan Coffin has such wonderful tidbits. Here are two about hope. He says, "If faith puts us on the road, hope keeps us there." And this: "Hope has nothing to do with optimism. Its opposite is not pessimism, but despair."

And if Jesus never allowed His soul to be cornered into despair, clearly we Christians shouldn't, either. Hope. Hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. It's called hope for the long haul. It's something we desperately need.

There's a young man in our congregation, well-known to many because we've been part of a struggle that has lasted for over a year. Jason was diagnosed with cancer just more than a year ago and just a year ago had a bone marrow transplant. I shared with Jason on Thursday evening that I was preaching on Romans 5 today. As I often do, I invited anybody to help out in any way they knew. Jason the very next day sent me an e-mail. He wrote this:

"The Book of Romans has a special place in my heart. I read it during my darkest times while in the City of Hope just about at this exact day this last year. I was in a spiritual crisis in a big way. I didn't feel God, I didn't feel good, I didn't feel anything but a paralyzing fear of dying. Why was I suffering? Why did I turn out to be that guy, you know, the one who gets cancer? I never thought it would happen to me. I wasn't even a dad yet. I hadn't even gotten my career into full swing. I was so lonely at night after everyone left, nothing but the beeping of my i.v. drip and sleepy hum of the air vent over my head. What I didn't see was that Christ walked with me as I made the long journey down the hall to Wing 5, the bone marrow transplant unit. I felt like I was walking the Green Mile, dead man walking. But Christ was sitting in the chair next to my bed watching me cry, finally watching me drift off to sleep. Christ was there listening to what my doctor had to say when he came in every morning at seven-thirty. He prayed for me when I couldn't pray for myself. He knew what suffering was. He mothered me. And you know what, He fathered me, too. God whispered in my ear, "You have to fight. You have to be strong. And most of all, let go of your fear of dying, Jason. Then you can start living.

"I realize nothing can separate me from God's love (Romans 8:38-39). Fear separated me from seeking God's love, but fear cannot separate me from His love. My fear was death, and it was very real to me, but even death will not separate me from His love.

"Isn't that the ultimate goal? To be bathed lavishly in God's love for eternity? What paradise, what serendipity. I wish I could say now that I never fear anything. I do every day. But what I know now is that I am empowered with the truth of God that will never pull His love from me. He is our parent, our father, and sometimes you have to let your children suffer so that they learn, so they can be tempered by trials, so that they can appreciate true blessings in life. And when it gets too great, like any loving parent, God steps in and swoops us up in His arms and protects us. It's all there in Romans 5:3-5.

"I believe in only two root emotions in this world, fear and love. Love is fear's ultimate adversary. But, love always, always defeats fear. Just as God defeated Satan and light won out over darkness. This is the legacy I want to leave, whether my time is next week, next year, or 50 years from now. Love is a promise: God's promise that He is joyously waiting for us. Amen!"

That's hope for the long haul, isn't it? Hope for the long haul, eloquently shown by someone in the midst of suffering and trial, where it's produced endurance and character and hope.

As I was coming to church early this morning, this glorious, glorious old hymn by Nicholai Grundtvig was playing on my CD. It's called "O Day Full of Grace." This is a day full of grace. Listen to the words:

O day full of grace which we behold,
Now gently to view ascending;
Thou over the earth thy reign unfold,
Good cheer to all mortals lending,
That children of light in every clime
May prove that the night is ending.

How blest was that gracious midnight hour,
When God in our flesh was given;
Then flushed the dawn with light and power,
That spread o'er the darkened heaven;
Then rose o'er the world that sun divine.
Which gloom from our hearts hath driven.

Yea, were every tree endowed with speech,
And every leaflet singing,
They never with praise God's worth could reach,
Though earth with their praise were ringing.
Who fully could praise the light of life
Who light to our souls is bringing.

With joy we depart for the promised land
And there we shall walk in endless light.

Hope for the long haul, day full of grace. This is a day full of grace when God gives us, again, hope for the long haul. Amen.

Now may the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope!

Amen.

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