Hold on to Hope
based on Romans 5:1-5
by Rev. Dr. David Rogne

Several years ago the Los Angeles Times carried the story of a lady who was traveling with her husband on a cruise ship.  One evening, unknown to anyone else, she fell overboard. It was more than an hour before she was missed.  When her disappearance was confirmed, the captain turned the ship around and, several hours after she had fallen overboard, she was dis­covered alive, out in the middle of the ocean. When she was brought on board she was asked how she managed to stay alive. She said, "I never lost hope."

Emil Brunner, the twentieth century theologian, says that hope is as neces­sary to life as oxygen. "What oxygen is for the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of human life.  Take oxygen away and death occurs through suf­focation; take hope away and humanity is constricted through lack of breath." Martin Luther said centuries before, "Everything that is done in the world is done by the hopeful."

The problem for each of us is how to find that hope which will sustain us-especially when the lamp flickers and we are afraid of the dark.  In the passage which was read this morning, Paul gives a formula for how we are to arrive at hope. He said, "Let us rejoice in suffering, for we know that suf­fering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope." (RSV) Let's consider that formula this morning and see if it will help us.

The first thing Paul says is that hope begins in suffering or trouble.

It occurs to me that most of us have a rather different impression of where hope begins. If we are hopeful, it is because we are surrounded by hopeful circumstances.   In the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, "Oklahoma", the male lead, Curly, sings

"O what a beautiful mornin',
O what a beautiful day,
I've got a beautiful feelin' Everything's goin' my way."

He feels hopeful because everything is looking good, and that's okay. But it is a kind of "thermometer hopefulness;" it is likely to go up or down, de­pending on the situation.

What we need is a hope that will sustain us when the prospects aren't very encouraging. We need a hope that is more like a thermostat; one that exer­cises some control and keeps us in balance when trouble surrounds us. Paul knew about trouble. In another place he tells us, "Five times I re­ceived thirty-nine lashes, three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times shipwrecked;" (II Cor. 11:24-25 paraphrase) and that is only a partial list of his trou­bles. But none of this caused Paul to lose hope.

We may not have had to go through what Paul went through for the sake of his faith, but most of us could probably identify with Lou Holtzman, football coach for the University of Arkansas, who said, "I know God doesn't send us more trouble than we can handle, but sometimes I think He overestimates my ability."

But some people have found this endurance of which Paul speaks in the midst of troubles. When Beethoven was threatened with deafness, that most terrible of troubles for a musician, he said, "I’ll take life by the throat and go on." When Henley, the British poet, was lying in a Scottish hospital with one leg amputated, and the prospect that the other must follow, he wrote Invictus, in which he says:

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul."

I read some time ago about Major H. P. S. Ahluwalia, who once climbed the highest mountain on earth, Mt. Everest. Then in 1965, he was shot in the neck by a Pakistani sniper. For the past 25 years he has been confined to a wheelchair, unable even to climb the steps to his front door. During this time he has been learning to climb another mountain. He calls it "The Everest within." It is no less threatening, lonely and forbidding than the world's highest mountain, but Ahluwalia feels that this summit, too, is in sight. During these years of enforced inactivity, so much in contrast with his former active life, hope took root and survived. In time he had help; a young woman was attracted to him and spent time with him. Subsequently, they were married, "a heroic act" on his bride's part he said. When asked what attracted her to a man who was an invalid, the bride said, "It was his attitude, his not giving up. I knew we could build a life together on the hope we share."

This endurance is sometimes called perseverance.  When Winston Churchill was in his eighties, he was invited to speak at Harrow, his boy­hood grammar school, from which he had been graduated some 70 years before. There was a rustle of anticipation among the boys when he rose to speak, and then a breathless quiet. One of the modern masters of eloquence was about to address them. With a stern countenance, Churchill looked out over his young audience and said, "Young men, never give up." After a long pause, he continued, "Never give up." Finally, after another long pause, he concluded, "Never give up!" And then he sat down. The youngsters were stunned.  But he had given his whole autobiography to them in few words. Perseverance was the keynote of his entire life, and that kind of perseverance is born, as Paul noted, in trouble and suffering.

Paul then moves on to state that this endurance produces character.

A word he uses for "character" is used of a metal that has been passed through the fire so that everything that is base has been purged out of it. It is used of precious metal as we use the word "sterling." It describes some­thing out of which every baseness of alloy has been eliminated. When afflic­tion is met with endurance or perseverance a person may emerge who is stronger, purer, better, nearer God.  But that kind of character doesn't de­velop automatically. It is developed by learning to be patient with our limi­tations. We stop spending our time asking, "Why did this have to happen to me?", and we start asking, "How am I going to make the best out of these circumstances?" It is the

attitude of that prayer of serenity: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Character building means that we have constantly to work on those things that threaten to undo us.   Each year thousands of tourists journey to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota to see the images of four great presidents of the United States carved in granite. What the average tourist doesn't realize is the constant work that goes on to keep this giant sculpture from deteriorat­ing.  Each year workers go over the entire carving, removing bird nests, pulling out shrubs that have grown in crevices, and filling hundreds of natural rock fissures which, if left unattended, would fill with water, freeze, and shatter the image. Our lives are like that. We have to constantly tend our flaws and fill them with better things or our image will be shattered.

This "tending to our image" can be tough work in any field, and often the only thing that keeps us at it is a vision that we can be better than we are. That is an aspect of hope. I was interested to see a program on television a while back which described the ordeal involved in becoming a member of a special military strike force. The young soldiers were obliged to jump off of a dangerous cliff, to run nearly naked through the snow, and to learn to eat worms in order to survive. They did it because of a vision of excellence that spurred them on: the overwhelming desire to be part of that elite group.

There are musicians who have so dedicated themselves to music that they will spend most of their waking hours polishing their talent. There are ac­tors and dancers and writers who practice their art with precision and grace only because they have learned to endure when their bodies want to stop.

And in developing character, too, it is important to have a vision—a vision that we can be more than we are by enduring temptation. A number of years ago a man by the name of F. W. Robertson was trying to think through some tempting options which faced him. He retreated to the mountains in his search for strength. Later he gave this testimony: "The only way a person can come through the agony of his choices unscathed is to hold fast to those things which are certain--the simple landmarks of morality.  In the darkest hour through which a soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain ... it is better to be generous than selfish; better to be chaste than licentious; better to be true than false; better to be brave than a coward. Happy is the person, who in darkness of soul, has dared to hold fast these venerable landmarks." Endurance produces character.

The third thing Paul says is that character produces hope.

People of character are people who want to make a contribution. They see that there are problems in life, and rather than retreating to personal com­fort and non-involvement, they seek to be of use. There is a play about a man who died and woke up in the after-life. The after-life was beautiful be­yond his highest expectations. Everything was given to him before he could ask. Every potential desire was fulfilled before he could even know that he wanted it. He had to work for nothing; everything was beautifully presented to him. Finally, in the intolerable boredom of it all, he said to his attendant, "Now wait a minute, I want something that I am going to have to work for and wait for." The attendant said, "But that is impossible here." The man, in anger, said "All right, then I’ll go to hell." To which the attendant responded: "Sir, where do you think you

are?" Life without challenge is hell.  People of character are willing to accept challenges and face problems, and that gives meaning and hope to life; their lives and those of others.

Ultimately, however, hope does not spring exclusively from our own ability to meet challenges. Hope has something to do with God. At the turn of the last century Robert Ingersoll, a well-known spokesman for atheism, called God the creation of humanity.  Nevertheless, when his brother died, Ingersoll wrote: "But in the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of the wing." He, too, yearned for a hope which was beyond the ability of humans to create.

The hope of which Paul speaks comes from the conviction that God is in­volved in the world. At the beginning of the passage we read this morning, he says that our hope is that we will share the glory of God. That means we have a future that is related to God. Norman Vincent Peale once asked Dwight D. Eisenhower who was the greatest person he had ever met. Without an instant of hesitation he responded, "My mother. She never had much schooling, but she was wise in God's wisdom.  She went to school to the greatest of all books, the Bible. And she acquired real wisdom. He went on to say, "Once when I was a boy, my brothers and I were playing a card game with my mother. I had been dealt an utterly impossible hand, and I began to complain about it. She said, 'Boys, put your cards down. I want to tell you something, especially you, Dwight. You are playing a game in your home with your mother under loving circumstances.  We all love each other here, and you have been dealt a bad hand. Now,' she said, 'when you get out in life where they don't love you so much, you are going to be dealt many a bad hand. What are you to do? You are to pray to God. You are to trust God and, like a man, you are to play out the hand that is dealt you.' "And," said Eisenhower, "that is one of the wisest things I learned in my youth."

What Paul has been speaking about is not a closed circle that begins and ends with us. We are to play the hand with courage, but as Eisenhower's mother knew, our trust is to be placed in God.

Hope, then, is not an ill-defined longing--something to which we hold in spite of the obstacles. It is a trust that this is God's world, and that as we move out daily into our future we will encounter God and ultimately share God's glory. God is the Alpha and the Omega: the beginning and the end­ing. It is from God that we come and to God that we are returning.

Trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope and hope finds its fulfillment in God.  Isaac Watts discov­ered that 250 years ago. It is with his words that I close:

"O God our help in ages past.
Our hope for years to come,
Be thou our guide while life shall last,
And our eternal home,"