Imagine that you are considering moving into a new neighborhood.  While finalizing the deal on a house, you meet up with your next-door-neighbor-to-be and ask her, “What is this community like?”  Imagine that she says this (it’s a mouthful!):  “Well,

• this community worships together…tells God where we’ve noticed Him at work.
• these people pray together…we believe we hear God better, and see God more clearly with each other.
• around here people have taken the time to get to know each other, to invest deeply in one another.
• when there is conflict, we approach it head on, person-to-person.
• people try hard to restrain themselves from gossip or talking too much.
• through the power of the Holy Spirit, it seems that God has been drawing many different kinds of people…into one family here.  It’s pretty amazing.
• I could show you a hundred pictures about life in this community…meals shared together, kids raised together, people supporting each other.
• you’ll find this to be a community that is intensely generous, helping when people are in need, making costly choices to share.
• and this is not a gated community…there are always people reaching out across boundaries, or being welcomed in from outside.
• Don’t let me mislead you, though.  This place is far from perfect, and when we gather there is always an acknowledgement that we’re broken and need the forgiveness of God and one another in our lives.”

Now, honestly friends…would you not buy in this neighborhood?!  Does this not sound appealing?   Wouldn’t an outsider be attracted to such a community?  

Following Jesus Together.  These are the ten characteristics we’ve talked about since last April, ten things that could mark the community belonging to Jesus Christ.  If such a people existed…it would stand in marked contrast to our world, wouldn’t it?  If such a people existed, it wouldn’t fix everything…but it would certainly shine the light of hope into our world.

Romans 5:1-8

An Anglican bishop from England once lamented his lack of impact on people by saying: 

“Wherever the Apostle Paul traveled, revolutions broke out.  Wherever I go, they serve tea!”    

In a dark world and pretty brutal world in the first century AD, Paul seemed to know how to live in hope…and revolutions did break out.

You don’t need me to tell you that there is a great deal of darkness in our world.  Whether we talk about the places of great pain around the globe: 

• Iraq,
• Gaza,
• Afghanistan,
• Darfur,

places where there is very little valuing of human life. Or whether we talk about places of suffering like those in Africa where the incidence of AIDS is 70%, where an entire generation has been practically wiped out.  Or if we talk about our own culture where wealth and things seem to totally outrank care for people and the common good.  Or in just looking at our own lives, where right here in this family, or slightly extended family…people get sick, family members die, relationships fall apart.  It’s a dark world.  It is easy to despair.

It is so dark, in fact, that one might easily be understood if we simply shut ourselves off from life, set up a little safety zone and quietly lived out our days.

But…wait! says the Apostle Paul.  Wait! says the gospel of Jesus Christ.  The community of Christ is a community of hope. 

• when the ancient Greeks talked about “hope,” they normally meant“an anxious and cautious optimism about what was to come,” or even a nervous “hope against fate.”
• when the Jews of the Old Testament talked about “hope,” they usually mean “a quiet confidence that there was a future,” but hope was eventually extinguished by death.
• when people today  talk about hope, it usually means “wishful thinking,” [“I hope the Mariners can win another game this year], or it means “a desire which may or may not ever be realized” [“I hope that the world becomes a better place or I hope my friend gets better”].
  

Usually our use of “hope” has to do with me.  It is tied to something I want or will try accomplish in the future.  And so, as the world has gotten darker and darker, we search around more and more frantically for something that will turn things around. 
What Paul tells us about in Romans, and in other places is this:

First, hope is not a wishful, fearful kind of uncertainty.  Rather, it is a certain, assured, confident belief in the ultimate victory of a loving God over all the forces of evil, darkness and death.  It is a knowing, not a wishing…based on our invitation to be with God through Christ Jesus.  This hope looks at the now only in light of the future.  It is an entirely different perspective that somehow sees both current circumstances and into eternity. 

We were up on Whidbey Island for a couple days this week.  Friday afternoon was about as clear as it ever gets up there, and I was struck by looking at Mount Rainier.   Now, if you are driving down Aurora (Highway 99) in Seattle,  and you come around the corner by the viaduct, Mount Rainier is right there and it is beautiful.  But it is one of many things on the skyline, and it competes on a pretty level plain with the buildings downtown and Qwest Field and Safeco Field and the huge cranes down on the waterfront.  The city looms large.  But when you get up to Whidbey Island (just 20 miles away), the perspective is entirely different.  Mt. Rainier absolutely dominates the entire skyline.  If you look hard you can barely see the buildings of downtown, but they are totally insignificant in comparison to the majesty and immense size of Rainier.

Our perspective is normally limited only to those things right around us, often the hard things of life dominating all else, and God can seem like just another competing force on the skyline.  From a more hope-filled perspective, though, we see that somehow and eventually, things are wrapped into the plan of a God who loves us.  And somehow, someway, even the difficult things of life (Paul mentions suffering and endurance) are transformed.

We get glimpses of this sometimes.  When I talk to folks who are in a crisis, between jobs or floundering in relationship, I often find myself saying,

“Don’t do anything rash.  This is going to look very different in a couple of months.  Let’s look for what God might be doing in this time.” 

When I left business to go back to school at age 35, it felt like jumping off a very scary cliff.  Thirteen years later, I marvel at how God wove together all the experiences of my life, including the years in business, to prepare me what I’m doing now…I just had no idea at the time. 

But what do we do when we can’t see the big picture?  Well, one thing is…we stick together, because when one of us can’t see, another can.  What do we do when we can’t see the mountain? 

John Claypool was a pastor from Texas with a right to ask this question.  His daughter  Laura died when she was just 9 of leukemia.  Claypool said he learned

“you go on living even though there is no complete explanation.  You can either wait to figure out all the answers and then live.  Or you can live and find the answers as you go."

Because of Jesus Christ, Paul says, we have access to the grace in which we now stand.  In Christ’s life, and death (and in his resurrection, Paul will say shortly), we have received what we could never earn: God’s presence in our lives and beyond this life.  That is our hope, and everything else grows small, and is seen in that light.

This is why the Apostle Paul can even write to the people of a young church in Greece and say to them, “

I know you thought that Christ might come again before any of us died, and now some of us are dying and it’s very difficult and disturbing.  And I know you grieve as you lose friends and family.  And that is right and good to grieve.  But do not grieve as those who have no hope!  We believe that Christ died and rose again…and that we will too.”

And so we live in the shadow of the mountain of hope, knowing that ultimately, victory is God’s.  Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of South Africa who lived through some of the worst atrocities of apartheid…once said,

“Even in the darkest moment…hold onto your hope! I’ve read the rest of the book…and we win!”

But what about now?  It’s great that in Christ, God triumphs and that will one day be completed.  If we say that we that we live in hope, in confidence in Christ’s ultimate victory…does it just make Christians into people who are “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good?”  CS Lewis didn’t think so.  He once said,

“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next…It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.”

In other words, hope for eternity spills over into the present time…it is no “pie in the sky” theology.  We do not simply throw our hands up now and wait for eternity.  The kingdom of God broke into this world in Christ, and God will fulfill, will complete his plans.  God can be trusted.  We can risk participating in the presence of the Spirit now because the power of grace is ultimately greater than darkness.  Even when we can’t see it all.  And we get to be part of it now, ministering and believing in a way that is often bewildering to the world around us. 

It’s the reason that people do things like some friends of mine, inviting someone in marital crisis to live in their spare room while the couple gets their feet back on the ground. 

It’s the reason that people from our midst right now…are leaving stable lives to follow God’s call to Nepal or Sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s the reason why every time 200 people gather for a meal on Wednesday Night, I think

“here is a picture of the kingdom of God…deaf, poor, rich, educated, homeless, stable, needy”

and for just a minute the room goes quiet as someone prays over the meal to thank God.  And then a host of volunteers serve the meal, and conversation erupts all around the room.  It happens every single Wednesday.  We live into hope now.

Finally, the clear message of Paul is that our hope is not in ourselves…but in God.  Listen to his words: 

“We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God…"

“Hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” 

“When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” 

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

At different points in modern times we have looked for hope in other places. In theories of progress (enough education, enough science)…in theories of the goodness of humanity (people will someday get our acts together)…in a particular economic system…or in Christian circles believing that the rapture will come and we just have to bide our time and be whisked away.  But history shows that does not happen, and the newspaper affirms it every single day. 

Our hope is not in ourselves.

Several years ago, when our kids were smaller, I went to an evening concert at the elementary school.  The kids were lined up on risers, just so cute and sparkling.  After a few songs, they pulled out the classic “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”  Except, of course, that this was a public school and they couldn’t sing a “God” song, so they simply changed the words to “We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands.”

Not surprising, but scary as anything.

Our hope is not in ourselves.  When Paul says in verse 2

“through Christ we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand,”

that word “access” is a word of doors and doorways.  It is as though we were standing outside a door, and it swung open.  Trembling we looked around, timidly we walked in, afraid that God might be huge, angry, demanding…and instead, we found behind the door a compassionate, forgiving God who loves us.

We know we are loved by the four-word gospel Paul sneaks into verse 8.  If you only memorize one sentence of scripture, this might be it:

Christ-died-for-us. 

Or, as Jim Edwards once observed, two words of history (Christ died) and two words of theological interpretation (for us).

We are a community of hope in Christ.  We must be diligent to remind each other of the hope, because sometimes we are too close to see it.  And we must welcome others into it, rejoicing.
I want to leave you with a story.  I like it, because it has in it exactly the things we’ve talked about:

• tough circumstances,
• the ultimate hope in Christ, and
• our living in the world. 

It’s from Fyodor Dosteyvsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov.  One of the brothers, the one with a sensitive heart towards God, is named Alyosha Karamazov.  Alyosha ends up sort of mentoring a group of boys, (there just happens to be twelve of them!).  One of the boys (Illusha) dies after a long illness.  It’s a difficult time, especially because the group had made Illusha’s life a little unbearable as the butt of many jokes.  So when he dies there is sadness…and some guilt as well.  It’s a hard time for the other boys.  They wrestle, and the leader asks Alyosha,

“Karamazov, can it be true as they teach us in church, that we shall all rise again, all, Illusha, too?’

And Alyosha answers the boys’ question by saying this: 

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened.” 

Half laughing, he said it. 

“How wonderful it will be!”

cries one of the boys.  And Alyosha says,

“Well, let us go!  And now we go hand in hand.”

And so we go.  The community of Christ, Following after Jesus…Together.  And now we go hand in hand.  Amen.