Hope Is a Good Problem to Have

 Easter Sunday  C   April 17, 2022
Isaiah 65:17-25  Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26  Luke 24:1-12

Lectionary Link

What happens when we try to force more air into a balloon.  We just keep pumping and soon, bang!  The balloon breaks, and why?  There is more air outside of the balloon that cannot be contained in the balloon.  The balloon does not have the capacity.

We also have a similar problem with hope.  Hope resides in the fullness of God.  And God is the great Container in whom we live and move and have our being.  We just don't have the capacity to contain the fullness of God; and we don't have the capacity to contain or fulfill everything that we hope for.  God has the capacity to be in synchronicity with everything all the time, we are so finite, the best that we can hope for is to expand our capacity in time, taking in new in things in piece meal because we do not have the capacity.

And here is the human dilemma; we are made in the image of God, and God's greatness implants within us hope, and it sometimes seems as though the hope that is given to us requires much more than we can fulfill.

The hope comes to us in our youth as naive blind idealism; when we want to do everything, go everywhere, meet everyone and sometimes we wear ourselves out trying.  We eventually learn to limit ourselves to our space and time capacities, if we are wise.  But we are always left with the nagging of hope, for what is always put on hold.

How are we do deal with the problem of hope?  Are we taunted by hope to want too much?  Is this the great tease of God to want us to hope for so much and then discover that we have very limited capacity to fulfill all that hope seems to invite?

What do we hope for that does not seem to happen?  We hope for world peace.  We hope for war to end now in Ukraine.  We hope that tyrants and the greedy would be converted by love.  And this hope is macro- or large scale hope.  We also have so many personal hopes, family hopes, and local community hopes.  We hoped that we had had more time with someone who is dead and gone.  We hope that our relationship could have been better.  We hope that we could have said more.  We hope that current relationship would be better with people.  We hope that we would be in the kind of personal maturity so as to express better love with the people in our lives and in our world.  We hope for people to be converted to love, care, and justice so that everyone would have enough and everyone would have the dignity of their life situations and gifts completely affirmed.

Can we see the problem with hope?  How should we process the great problem of hope, of wanting, wishing, and dreaming for so much more than can be immediately fulfilled or even fulfilled in our human lifetimes?  Should we be angry about a God of hope who makes us have such hope and be upset and taunted by having such limited capacities?

Part of the problem with hope can because of sin.  In sin, we have degraded hope into wrong desire, want the wrong things at the wrong time.  In sin we have thwarted the good energy of hope.  God gave Moses, the law, and the prophets to help us learn to retrain wrong desire into wanting the proper and excellent objects of hope, but the patterns of wrong desire just seem to ingrained.

God gave us Jesus as the way to work toward the sublimation of wrong desire toward the perfect targets of hope.  Jesus began a movement of people; these people were people who saw in him the possibility of the conversion of wrong desire into the excellent targets of hope.

But the people of power asserted the power of wrong desire and managed to kill Jesus.  And for the followers Jesus, it seemed as hope died when he died.  All they could do was put perfume on his dead body and store it in a tomb.  All they could do was make his tomb a shrine to visit, a place to come and cry about what might have been.  And this they did; especially his women friends and disciples, and as they attended to their grief at the place of the shrine of the end of Jesus, they were greatly surprised.  God's messenger at the tomb made them the first apostles of the resurrection of Christ.  Hope became reborn for them and all the disciples when the resurrection appearances of Jesus occur.

Imagine this: If one person proves to have personal continuity after he has died and tells us that we will have personal continuity in our afterlives, then indeed hope has a chance.  Why?  Because, time, time, is on our side, if we have the promise of everlasting life.   And so everlasting life gives us the time to come to fulfillment in all that we have hoped for on the grand scale and on the local and personal scale.  Everlasting life means that love will eventually win through the hopeful persuasion of a loving God.

Friends of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, let us be joyful today that our hope is not in vain, our hope is not God taunting us about what we cannot have in terms of ultimate excellence in love and justice.

I am here today to say that because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, time is on our side, for all of the excellences of hope to be fulfilled.  This hope does not give us permission to put off hopeful things which can be attained while we yet live; but this hope is the assurance that in the end the love of God will win.

And in this optimism we make the Easter shout: Allelutia! Christ is Risen!  The Lord is Risen indeed!  Alleluia!