Hope is a Four-Letter Word
First Sunday of Advent
How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Welcome back to Advent. I don’t mean to sound like a TV host, that’s just what Advent feels like to me each year, a welcome back. The calendar has turned over again, welcome back. The snow is back; welcome. And with the Advent wreath as our guide, welcome back to your walk with Christ. The next four weeks, we’ll focus each week on the themes of our candles, starting with hope. Today, I want to talk not just about hope in general, but what makes Christian hope unique, focusing on flavors of Christian hope we find in 1 Thessalonians. But first, let’s get some background.
New England Hope and Christian Hope
I had a week where “hope” sounded like a four-letter word, and that was before our car slid off our friend’s driveway on Thanksgiving night (to be thankfully rescued by friends of friends with trucks without damage). There are many times when hope feels naive, or at best an annoying reminder, like a chore, “Okay, I know I’m supposed to hope today.” Every appointment in Vermont has to be scheduled weeks in advance, why would our hope be different? It also seems like New England hope always has a dash of depression with it, a hope that carries the weight of reality, Vermonters rationing their hope like winter sunshine and cords of wood for the stove.
But I don’t know how unique New England really is in having pain-seared hope. I’ve lived many places. Humans everywhere have deep scars and wounds around our hope where it didn’t pan out.
For its part, the Church has always been rooted in hope. Lots of people are hopeful. But true Christian hope is unlike the world’s hope because it’s not contingent on what’s happening in the world. Our hope is not based on that; our hope is not from here. Our hope is aware of what's happening in the world, it's active in the world, it bears witness in the world, but our hope is never dependent on the world. In this week’s Luke passage (Luke 21) and so many other apocalyptic readings in the Gospels, Jesus tells us that things will get worse, but rather than being a reason not to hope, that’s a reason to hope.
I want to be careful, now. Sometimes Christians can think of Christianity as exceptional when we’re far from it. Other people find hope rooted in something virtuous and inspiring. But I do think authentic Christian hope has always been unusual from Christianity’s start, with a hope in the Messiah not all Jews shared, a hope in the afterlife and a kingdom that not all Romans shared, a hope for the hopeless not even the hopeless shared.
Tons of books document and theorize on the rise of Christianity (Rodney Stark and Tom Holland perhaps most famously). There are innumerable complex factors. But one thing that may have set Christianity apart was Christians were a people who hoped. While Rome burned, they were unusually hopeful people. And not just hopeful, but helpful. In antiquity, when the fate of the world and the city was tied to whether the gods deemed your sacrifices worthy or not, then as your world crumbled, your hope crumbled. And while the plague was spreading, the pagan priests usually were nowhere to be seen while Christians were.
One thing Christian hope is not is “optimism,” per se. Hoping Christians are not always going to be people who look at what is happening in society and are particularly optimistic, in fact, usually very much not. Our hope is not rose-colored glasses, whistling past the graveyard, ignoring problems. Christians don’t have to look at the climate and say well we should just be optimistic about it. We might have optimism in the economy, we can have optimism in our sports teams (or not, if you’re a fellow UNC football fan), but our hope is elsewhere. There is much more to it. What marks it?
H.O.P.E.
Hope permeated the early Christian community. Hope is everywhere in the Epistles. It is explicitly mentioned in almost every letter in the New Testament, and where it’s not explicit, hope undergids the words. No matter what was happening out in the world, these were a people who helped and hoped.
They weren’t perfect with either. Alongside our images of saintly groups, the earliest churches were also filled with people who struggled to serve each other and keep faith alive. Some were actively fighting over their version of the gospel, some were tepid and casual to the point of nonchalance. Others despaired.
In fact, Paul writes the Thessalonians because he was concerned about their hope wavering, knowing they had been persecuted, so he sends Timothy on a spiritual health checkup. It turns out, they're actually doing quite well! So 1 Thessalonians is a very hopeful letter: “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 1:2).
Because this first letter to the Thessalonians is so hopeful, and because I haven’t used a mnemoic in a while, I want to share how Christian hope is a four-letter word through its words. Each letter of hope, H.O.P.E., can stand in for four aspects of Christian hope.
H: Holiness
First, let’s start with “H” — holiness. Unlike disembodied hope, Paul shows how Christian hope is always paired with behavior that is attempting to be more Christ-like. Take our reading today in 1 Thess 3:13: “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” Elsewhere, Paul remarks how the Thessolonians “turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven,” (1 Thess 1:9-10), and he is “urging and encouraging [them] and pleading that [they] lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” (1 Thess 2:12)
This either may seem obvious because we’ve heard it so many times, but it also may not seem intuitive if we were to try to explain it. What is the connection between holiness and hope, between acting more Christ-like and hoping in him?
The way I see it, holy hope is a confident hope, a patient hope. So many of our sins happen because of convenience. It’s more convenient to hate your enemy than love them, and it’s more convenient to ignore people you’re supposed to help. It’s more convenient to have sin instantly gratify than it is to wait. So often when we’re sinning, we’re rushing. We start cutting spiritual corners, saying, “Ah, it doesn’t really matter how good I am,” a familiar part of our constant dance in Christianity with faith and works. After all, we don't want to be dead in the law. And yet our behavior matters to Jesus. If we’re truly hoping in Christ, his hope will shape us.
Paul urges that Christ’s hope shapes us in his call, that we “know how to control your own body in holiness and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one wrong or exploit a brother or sister in this matter…For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness. Therefore whoever rejects this rejects not human authority but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you.” (1 Thess 4:5-8) Growing in holiness is allows us to grow confidently closer and closer to God by practicing more and more of his character, a character that we lose when we sink into the false conveniences of sin. It is not about being holier-than-thou, but being called in hope to be holier than who we are in despair.
O: Ours
For “O,” again I will say Christian hope is not “optimistic,” but ours. That is, we share it together. It's our hope. It's not my hope, it's not Paul's hope, we share it with each other as believers. As Paul writes in chapter two, “For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? Yes, you are our glory and joy!” (1 Thess 2:19-20)
Christian hope is mutual. It’s not just, “Do I personally feel it?” It’s for all of us. And it’s also having hope for each other when some of us aren’t feeling that hope, and it’s having hope through each other when we feel distant from that hope ourselves. You may not feel hope today. But if you are in the Church, among members ofChrist’s body, you are with people who are holding onto Christ’s hope for you.
Hope in ancient Rome was not always so mutual. In fact, gods were very specialized. City-states had different gods from each other, different professions had different gods, even households had different gods. In that kind of world, my hope is not your hope—my city’s hope is not your city’s hope, my family’s hope is not your hope. And it can still feel that way to us today when we make our hope contingent on what is happening in the world to us and us only and not set in Christ.
But Christian hope is all of ours. It’s not even only our hope as believers, but something we share with the world, because Christ is the world’s hope.
P: Patient in Persecution
You may say I’m cheating by picking two…okay, caught me. But Paul shares how he and the church in Thessalonica had each suffered persecutions, and yet were still remaining patient in their hope, as would be a theme throughout the Church in early Christianity. This part of Christian hope mght be hard for some of us to connect to today. Most of us don’t face anything like the persecutions early Christians faced.
But even if you personally don't feel persecuted, maybe your hope has been persecuted. Maybe it is actively being persecuted this week, this month, this year, if not by people, then by spiritual forces. Maybe for one reason or another you've been tempted into unhope, which is also how Paul describes it: “When we were with you, we told you beforehand that we were to suffer persecution…so I sent to find out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain.” (1 Thess 3:4-5).
Despair is tempting. If you have lost hope, you are not alone, but are in the company of every generation all the way back to the Early Church. So often, the source of this temptation to despair is burdening by what is happening to the world, or in the case of persecution, happening to us. To put our hope back in Christ is to remember his kingdom is not of this world. To be patient is to resist the temptation to cynicism (when they say every preacher preaches to themselves first, I certainly am now). And maybe practicing holiness is important because holiness practices a patience we need when times are their toughest.
E: Empowering (through the Spirit)
Finally, a fourth flavor of Christian hope is that it is empowering; that is, Christian hope is empowered by the Holy Spirit. It’s not empowering to dominate in the world, not empowering to puff up into hubris, but filling us with the Spirit of truth and love that calls us back to humble self-sacrifice and pointing back to Jesus. Paul notes his friends’ “faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” arrived to them “in power and in the Holy Spirit…And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy from the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess 1:2-6)
Being empowered by, with, and through the Holy Spirit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re highly energetic; the Spirit has energy but is not simply synonymous with it (which I think was a mistake I made as a spiritual seeker). It meas to be connected to a source of hope that can never run dry because it is a source of hope that is always giving, never taking.
I know better than anyone that sometimes hope escapes us. It flickers even in good times. Sometimes it blows out and stays out for a long time. And when that happens, we start to look very much not like what we’ve talked about so far—we don’t act as God calls us to be, we get more and more drawn into ourselves rather than in community, and we are utterly impatient when things in the world get worse.
When that happens, even then there is reason to hope. For we, ourselves, are like one of the Advent candles being lit in churches all across the world today. If we fall over or a stiff wind comes, we might blow out. But Jesus has said you are fit to be his dwelling place. You are fit to be a candle to hold his flame. As his candle, you can always ask him to set you aflame again. Welcome back.
If your hope is not instilled with something of the Holy Spirit, maybe do a spiritual health checkup as Paul did on his friends, asking yourself, is my hope in the shape of Christ, or was my hope looking to the world?
Cruciform Hope
This idea of taking on the “shape of Christ” is key to this whole thing. The word theologians use for it is “cruciform.” What does cruciform mean? Literally, cross-shaped. Formed like a cross. Rather than terraforming Christianity—shaping Christianity fit the human preferences—we should be cruciform in our faith walk, spiritually formed in the cross. And lest we forget, the cross is a physical symbol for everything else in the Church. Everything we do should be cruciform, living a life conformed to the cross, which is to live a life conformed to Jesus, giving of ourselves for the sake of others. Our hope affords us that.
And so Christian hope is not just because of or about Jesus, but the shape of our hope should look like Jesus. Jesus himself was all four of those letters in H.O.P.E. He was Holy—he wasn’t just saying the rules don’t matter, he was holy, or “set apart,” and calling us to live holy, set apart lives with him. He was Ours—he was Emmanuel, God-with-us, not for himself but for us, he is ours. And we are his. He was more Patient than we’ll ever be in worse Persecution than we’ll face. And he was Empowered with the Holy Spirit, as well as Empowering others through the Holy Spirit, emptying himself of divine power and human power for our sake, because the Holy Spirit is a bottomless well of true self-giving power.
Indeed, Jesus Christ is our hope. He is the subject of our hope, the object of our hope, and the very shape of our hope. While I hope the acronym H.O.P.E helps you find your hope when you need it, it turns out Christian hope isn’t a four-letter word after all. It’s a four-pointed word; it’s the shape of a cross.
