The 2nd Sunday of Easter, 2021 - Hope

 Our celebration of the resurrection during this Easter season reminds us that we – as the people of God, as the followers of Jesus – are a people of hope! Hope – along with joy and peace, faith and thanksgiving, a servant spirit and love – shape our lives.

 Hope is the forward look of faith.

 “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24-25).

Hope is about what is not, but will be. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans, we hope for that which we do not see. Hope is about what will be in the future.

Hope is experienced in the midst of what is. It stirs as we long for something more than the present reality. It lifts our eyes beyond what is to what will be, giving us strength and courage to deal with what is. As Paul said, we wait with patience for what will be.

Hope grows out of faith. Faith is our trust in God – in God’s faithfulness, in God’s steadfast love that will not abandon us, in God’s promise to transform whatever comes our way into a source of life and blessing (Romans 8:28-29). Hope is faith lived out, trusting God is at work in what is, beyond what we can see. It is the quiet confidence that the present reality is not the final reality … that God is still at work … that the final outcome will be shaped by God’s steadfast, faithful love, not by the brokenness of our human condition.

 Hope is the forward look of faith in the face of any expression of death … physical and emotional sickness, broken relationships, our struggle with our own emotional wounds, immaturity, and sin, actual physical death. Those realities of life are a part of a world subject to decay – Paul again, Romans 8:20. But because of the steadfast, faithful love of God, they are not the final reality. We will be set free from those realities. But, even more, those realities will be transformed into life and blessing. Death – in whatever form we experience it – will give way to life! In other words, resurrection!

 Paul goes so far as to say that all of the physical world – creation itself – waits in hope for the time when what is will give way to what will be, Romans 8:19-25. Creation longs to be set free from the reality of what is. It looks forward – in hope – to being transformed into a new heaven and earth.

 Someday the reality of what is will give way to the new reality created by the transforming love of God. At that time, we will no longer live in hope because what we hope for will have become reality. But until then, we live in hope …. hope coupled with peace and joy, patience and thanksgiving, a servant spirit and love.

 “We also boast in our sufferings” - the reality of what is – “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 that has be given to us” (Romans 5:3-5, emphasis added).

 “May the God of hope fill you will all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).