Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
June 16, 2019 (Trinity Sunday)
Scripture: Romans 5:1-5
What do you hope
for? In the deepest, most hidden corners
of your heart, of your soul, what do you hope for?
“Hope” is a funny
word. It’s one that we use frequently,
along the lines of “I hope that we get some rain for my garden”; or “I hope
that the blackflies disappear before I need to cut the grass.” This spring, I heard a lot of, “I hope that
the river doesn’t rise as much as last year.”
Used in this way,
“hope” means something like wishful thinking.
Something that you would like to happen, but that you’re not too
terribly optimistic about it because it’s a long shot. Those blackflies probably aren’t going to
disappear before the next time I need to cut my lawn.
But hope has a
different meaning, a deeper meaning, a God-centred meaning as well. We often hear it lumped together along with
faith and love as a virtue; but used the way that we normally use it, like
wishful thinking, well, where’s the virtue in that?
But like I said, this
deeper, God-centred hope is more than wishful thinking. This God-centred hope is more like confidence
that something good is coming; confidence that God’s plan for all of creation
is going to come true.
And when I read this
week’s passage from Romans, it was that word “hope” that jumped out at me. Hope does not disappoint us. Our hopes that are wishful thinking – like
the blackflies being gone when I cut the grass – these hopes might be
disappointed, they might not come true.
But our hopes that are centred on God – this is the hope that does not
disappoint us, because we can have confidence in God.
Now the book of Romans
in the bible is a letter that was written by the apostle Paul to the early
church in Rome. Paul’s writing is famous
– or maybe infamous – for being convoluted, full of logic statements that
require you to follow along twists and turns to get to the conclusion, filled
with therefores and throughs and whereases.
And it is one of these
logic chains that leads us to that word “hope”; but when I looked at the logic
chain, it disturbed me a bit. Working
backwards from hope, we have hope coming from character or experience. And that character or experience is coming
from patience or endurance. And that
patience or endurance arises out of suffering.
Therefore hope comes from our suffering.
And much as I love thinking about hope, I don’t like thinking about
suffering.
But the thing about
hope is that when things are good in life, you don’t need hope – you have
everything that you need in the here and now.
But it is when things seem absolutely hopeless – that is when you can
only cling to hope. That is the time
when you have to trust in something that seems to make absolutely no sense at
all. It is only when things are
hopeless, that we can find hope.
Today is Trinity
Sunday – the day when we get to celebrate that God is three and God is one; the
day when we get to celebrate this mystery of God that is beyond anything that
we could wrap our minds around; the day when we get to celebrate this God of
all times and all places and all people.
And because God is
Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us when we suffer, because
God has been there before. God, in
Jesus, knows what it is to suffer, to be abandoned, to experience grief, and to
die.
And because God is
Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us as God’s Word made flesh
– God made human. Jesus Christ, both
fully God and fully human has brought our humanity into contact with God, so
that we can no more be separated from God.
As Paul writes to the church in Rome, “we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in
which we stand.”
And because God is
Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us always, because the God
the Holy Spirit is moving and dancing in all of creation, always pulling us
into the dance of God. As Paul writes to
the church in Rome, “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
These verses have
sometimes been used to justify suffering or oppression. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering
produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces
hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”
Paul says that suffering leads to hope, and hope is a good thing,
therefore suffering must be a good thing.
But I don’t think that
is the case. I don’t think that God (or
even Paul) wants us to suffer – I think that Paul is just commenting on a
fact of life. Suffering is present in
the world – I don’t think that there is anyone who gets through life without
suffering of some sort. Pain, grief,
illness, these are all real things in our world. But what Paul is saying to the church in Rome
and to us is that suffering isn’t the end point. That there is hope on the other side of our
suffering, because God is there.
There are many images
or metaphors used to try and describe the Trinity. You have a three-leaf clover – three parts
but one whole. You have a flame that is
shared between three candles – is it one flame or a single flame? You have a person who is, at the same time, a
mother, a lawyer, and a spouse. All of
these metaphors catch a hint of the Trinity, but none of them perfectly
describes it. My favourite metaphor is a
dance with three dance partners, swirling and moving as one, so that it is hard
to distinguish one from the other.
God is dancing in the
world, and we are invited to join the dance.
We are invited to turn away from fear, and trust our dance partners, and
embrace the hope that comes from God. We
are invited, especially when shadows lurk all around us and suffering seems to
be the only way, that is when we are especially invited to trust in these
promises of God, to reach out, and to allow ourselves to claim that hope from
God that comes through Christ.
And so I ask you
again. What do you hope for? In the deepest, most hidden corners of your
heart, of your soul, what do you hope for?
A Round Dance - my favourite metaphor for Trinity!
(Photo from Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )
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