Hope in Troubling Times
A sermon about becoming people of hope on the Sunday before Juneteenth
Tomorrow is Juneteenth so today’s newsletter is a lightly edited version of my most recent sermon. On Sunday I preached from Romans 5:1-5, “Hope in Troubling Times.”
Introduction
James Cleveland was born in Chicago and grew up at Pilgrim Baptist Church where he sang in the choir directed by Thomas Dorsey. Rev. Cleveland grew up to become a singer and composer himself, becoming so well-known that he became known as the King of Gospel. One of Cleveland’s most well-known songs was, “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired.” The entire song is great, but it was the chorus I thought of when studying this passage: I don't feel no ways tired / I've come too far from where I started from. / Nobody told me that the road would be easy, / I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me.
The Apostle Paul knew about being tired. I don’t simply mean the tiredness that comes at the close of a good day’s work. The tiredness about which Cleveland sings and about which Paul knew well was the kind of fatigue that accompanies persistent opposition, personal slander, and quiet despair. It is the kind of tiredness which comes when it feels as though the entire world is against you. It’s the tiredness that comes from trouble. And so, it’s notable that despite all the troubles he had faced, in these verses Paul taught the Roman Christians that, because they were justified by faith, they had hope.
You’ve already noticed that today’s worship service incorporates themes commonly associated with Juneteenth. Over the past five or six years, our church has found the history of this holiday, especially the prophetic witness of African Americans who learned of their freedom 18 months after the Emancipation Proclamation, to be important for our formation as followers of Jesus. We need – I need – to hold the memory of Holy Spirit-sustained endurance, defiance, and deliverance as we consider how to follow Jesus courageously in our generation.
One of the themes I find when reading about how communities first celebrated Juneteenth is hinted at in the last two lines of Rev. Cleveland’s chorus; first: Nobody told me that the road would be easy. The road wasn’t easy. Trouble was everywhere to be found for those first generations of free Black citizens: mob rule; disenfranchisement; white citizen’s councils for the respectable racists and the klan for the really ugly stuff; lynchings advertised in local papers, scheduled for Sundays after church, complete with professional photos turned into postcards. The road wasn’t easy; it was often terrible, terrorizing.
In her book, On Juneteenth, professor of history and law Annette Gordon-Reed writes about the days after news of emancipation finally reached Texas. “The fear of the Black imagination was strong throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.” No, the road wasn’t easy, wasn’t fair, wasn’t just.
And then the next line in Rev. Cleveland’s song: I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me. Troubles, yes, but not only trouble. There was also – there is also – a note of hope we dare not ignore. This is what so many of those saints, bearing up under the worst of white supremacist violence testify to across the generations. And this is the theme I want to consider with you this morning: God turns trouble into hope.
God turns trouble into hope. I wonder how you hear this. As we consider those who endured systems of exploitation, who pursued their emancipation against all odds, we might want to hear that God clears away our trouble so that we can hope. But that’s not what we find in this passage. Neither does the fantasy of a world without trouble align with the testimonies of the saints who’ve gone before us. Instead, our Christian hope is found in the middle of trouble. To say it more bluntly, our hope is formed from the troubling circumstances so common in this life.
How does this work? How can we have hope not on the other side of trouble, but when surrounded by it? How is it that, rather than stealing our hope, trouble can form it? Paul makes two claims about hope in this passage which show how God turns trouble into hope. The first claim is about the source of hope; the second is about the school of hope.
The School of Hope
Paul writes, 1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
This is justification, Paul’s great theme in his letter to the Roman Christians. We find a summary of this theme in the previous chapter: Jesus “was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” (4:5) Justification is absolutely central to our Christian faith; through his death and resurrection Jesus atones for sins, defeats evil, and raises victoriously over death.
So central is justification to our faith that, in the day to day, we can sort of forget about it. Some of you were motivated to pursue a degree, get a job, move into a neighborhood, or start family because of your vision of a life built on the reality that through his life, death, resurrection Jesus has renewed the world. And then, time passes and life happens. Rather than being motivated by transforming presence of Jesus, we are driven by other, more temporal concerns: getting our kids into the best possible schools, sinking deeper into consumer debt, moving from one job to the next in search of ever more status, meeting your parent’s impossible expectations, etc. We forget.
One of the problems with forgetting the centrality of our justification is that we begin living from our own strength rather than God’s grace. Yes, some of the tiredness we feel today is a result of very real trouble. But some comes from having traded the sure foundation of the finished work of Christ for a fragile foundation of our own strength.
In these verses, Paul teaches that peace with God and the hope of sharing God’s glory comes from being justified by faith. In other words, our justification is experiential; we’re meant to live our reconciliation with God. Forgetting the fact of our justification and living from personal strength rather than God’s grace is something like taking a hose that is bursting with cool, clean water and bending it onto itself. Yes, a trickle will still make it through, but its source has been obstructed.
Here's the good news: We are not the source of our hope, but with the Spirit’s help, we can choose to remain connected to the One who is our hope’s source. How will you choose to remain connected?
The School of Hope
Having reminded the Roman Christians about the source of their hope, Paul then turns to the school of hope. He writes, 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…
Having rooted hope in justification and being worthy of boasting – or, rejoicing, glorying – Paul takes same word, boasting, and applies it to affliction, trouble. The school of hope follows a 4-part sequence, with trouble coming first.
Trouble. There is nothing good about trouble, tribulation, or suffering. It’s the stuff we rightly avoid. Trouble can be personal: a marriage sliding slowly sideways; depression creeping back up on you; unsuccessfully trying to escape a toxic workplace; wanting to ask for help but being overwhelmed by shame. Trouble can also be societal. Here are a few examples from the past few days.
Trouble is the president, a Democrat, announcing a partial ban on asylum seekers last Tuesday when, as a candidate, he blasted the Republican president for a similar ban. Trouble is also a Republican party using immigrants, migrants, and asylum-seekers as a fear-mongering political tactic while sabotaging any bipartisan attempt to pass immigration reform legislation.
Trouble is the Oklahoma Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissing “a lawsuit arguing the remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre should be compensated by the city for damages”
Trouble is the FBI arresting a man on Wednesday who was on his way to shoot up a concert in Atlanta, targeting “Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” with the explicit intention of starting a race war
Trouble is the Depart of Justice on Thursday releasing a report saying that the “Phoenix police violate people’s rights, discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people when enforcing the law and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force.”
Trouble is the Supreme Court on Friday rejecting a ban on so-called bump stocks, a device which enables a semiautomatic rifle to fire at speeds close to that of a machine gun because while machine guns are illegal apparently guns that kill as effectively as them are not.
Trouble is real and its aims to turn us away from God and God’s good desires for us. There is nothing good about trouble.
This is why our justification as the source of our hope is so critical. Because neither was there was anything good about Judas betraying his Lord, about the disciples abandoning their Messiah, about the religious leaders scapegoating the embodied fulfillment of their law, about the empire’s representative washing his hands of justice, or about soldiers mocking the Son of God.
The justification which is the source of our hope grew from taunts and jeers, thorns and spears, suffering and more suffering. The claim that God turns trouble into hope requires the cross! Because it’s only here that troubles are not only troubling, wickedness is not only wicked, injustice is not only unjust, and evil does not have the last word.
Because at the foot of the cross, your worst troubles are not only trouble. At the foot of the cross you can stand in a frayed friendship and proclaim, I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me! You can face down a depleted bank account, you can hold on through anxiety, you can stand up to demeaning stereotypes, you can tell the truth when our society’s loudest voices profit from deception… in other words, you can withstand trouble because your hope is built on a foundation made from the rubble of affliction, trials, wickedness, and injustice.
It is the source of our hope alone which transforms the ugly purposes of affliction into the possibility of hope.
Endurance. The source of our hope allows affliction to produce endurance. Some of you know this firsthand. You’re living with a chronic illness. Your facing inequity at work. So, you also know how the power of affliction is magnified when there is no end in sight to your troubles.
Some of us might be feeling this sense of endless trouble as we survey contemporary society. One of our political parties is tolerating and utilizing totalitarian tactics. We’re living through successful attempts to roll back civil and voting rights legislation. 23% of Americans agree with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” We don’t know where or when these troubles end.
How do we endure trouble when we don’t see their end in sight? The Christian answers this always timely question via the eschatological nature of discipleship. As Paul reminds to Timothy, …if we endure, we will also reign with him. (2 Tim. 2:12) Christians know the end of the story. All of our afflictions are set in the context between our Lord’s resurrection and his return.
There is nothing good about trouble, but in leading to endurance we begin to see a glimpse of hope. Because Christian hope, rooted in endurance, is always eschatological. The hope sustaining Christians today in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, and the Middle East, the hope that sustained generations of enslaved Africans, this hope is eschatological. It doesn’t need easy solutions or to downplay what is wrong. It has a sure foundation in Christ’s return.
Which isn't to say that Christian endurance is detached or spiritualized. No, the roots of our endurance run through the empty tomb and are oriented toward Christ’s return which means that followers of Jesus will persevere not because we’re ignoring reality but because today’s reality is never the end of the story.
When you matriculate in school of hope find yourself enduring things that once would have overwhelmed you. For example, the constant code switching required of you to survive a culturally white institution. Or the people who keep insinuating that you were only hired to fill a diversity quota. Or being sidelined in efforts for racial justice because your identity as an Asian American makes you suspect. Or the family who turned against you when you betrayed the exploitative aims of racial whiteness.
I know that for some of you endurance isn’t an idea, it’s your everyday experience. I also know for a fact is that many of you haven’t forgotten the true source of your hope and because of that the afflictions you’re facing are producing endurance. Which brings us to the next step in the school of hope sequence.
Character. Afflictions happen to you, endurance how you respond, and character is who you become as you endure. The only way to develop character is by enduring afflictions. And Christians have always been interested in character because our Savior promised to transform us, to raise us from death to live, to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. This is why the Christian Nationalism movement, in which Christlike character is exchanged for a rough-and-tumble, utilitarian counterfeit, is so heartbreaking.
Character isn’t optional for Christians. Becoming people who exhibit, for example, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love isn’t something we can opt out of. It’s literally who we are becoming! And ultimately, Christian character looks like being …conformed to the image of his Son… (Rom. 8:29) And becoming more like Christ means becoming people of hope.
Hope. These, then, are the conditions for hope: affliction, endurance, and character. Many of us are looking for experience of hope: hope like a dose or hit, like an escape or a defense. But Paul says the conditions for hope are a Christ-like character produced by enduring affliction. Which is to say, hope is closer and more persistent than we have often imagined.
The person who has been to the school of hope will find that hope is not something they reach for occasionally, when things get bad, when they’re out of their depth. Rather, hope becomes your disposition, the lenses through which you view life. You speak with a hopeful accent, walk with a hopeful swagger, laugh with hopeful voice, and sing in the key of hope.
When the wind is at your back, you’ve got hope and when the world seems against you, you’ve still got hope. When the people closest to you are cheering you on, you’re resting in hope and when your community has abandoned you, you’re still resting in hope. When God’s vision for reconciliation and justice appears to be advancing, you lead with hope and when the world seems to be descending into nihilism and despair, you’re still leading with hope. When the entire country seems to be embracing a racial reckoning, your discerning with hope and when the opposition to justice reasserts itself with its typical tools of deception and fear, you’re still discerning with hope.
Because here’s the thing, unlike optimism, positivity, or idealism, the school of hope forms a hope that flows from the One who is the source of our hope. This hard-won, deeply formed, cross-shaped hope can’t be snatched or stolen because it’s just who we are as children of God. We have hope running through our blood, filling our imagination, and becoming our muscle memory. This is the hope you’ll take to the grave because this is the hope that transcends the grave because the source of this hope has already risen victoriously over the grave.
And it all begins by accepting trouble. The hope we each need to thrive in the circumstances we face requires more than an occasional brush with hope; we need to be formed in the school of hope which means that we’ve got to stop running from trouble and instead face up to this world’s afflictions as the pathway to endurance, character, and hope.
So, what are the afflictions you facing? What are the troubles you’ve been ignoring? What tribulations or even sufferings have you’ve been running from? I’m not going to try to downplay how difficult any of that is; the bad you’re facing is truly bad. But, as followers of the crucified Savior, of the Son of God who pulled life from death, we dare not overlook the way God will use our afflictions to make us into a people of hope. God turns trouble into hope through the school of hope.
Conclusion
After outlining the sequence of the school of hope, Paul then adds something surprising, …and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (5:5) We live in a moment when many in this country have decided that hope is too weak. We’re told that we need something stronger, more quantifiable. Something more guaranteed to get the results we require. Hope, it seems for many, has become too uncertain, too passive, too slow. Talk of hope sounds detached from a world shaped by violence and war, racism and poverty, disenfranchisement and depression. It’s not hopeful leaders so many are turning to but strong men, vengeful men, violent men.
So, I trust you won’t mind if I add my voice to Paul’s to testify that hope rooted in Jesus Christ has never put us to shame and will never put you to shame. A hope built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness will never let you down.
If this is true, then not only is hope available to each of us this morning because the One who is the source of our hope is available to us; and not only is it possible to become people of hope because the school of hope is always open for enrollment; but also, the hope that is the birthright of every daughter and son of God just is the sure and certain disposition that will carry us through every one of our afflictions.
Because, you see, if our God raised reconciliation from betrayal, community from abandonment, righteousness from injustice, flourishing from suffering, salvation from shame, and life from death, then He will produce in you hope from every one of your afflictions.
I don’t know about you, but in this season when hope can seem hard to come by, I’m choosing the way of hope. When others have decided to inflict afflictions on their partisan enemies, I’m going to walk my way into some trouble because I know there’s hope waiting on the other side. When our airways and feeds are full of demonizing despair, I’m going to speak hope and life. When powerful people and their corporations are making peace with wannabe tyrants, I’m going to get down on my knees and declare my singular allegiance to the resurrected Messiah with hope. When the powers and principalities are scheming ever-more insidious ways to exploit vulnerable people and extract wealth from vulnerable land, I’m going to give myself to the radical solidarity of wildly diverse women and men who are building coalitions of justice and grace on the foundation of the God who is our hope.
Is anybody else ready to become people of hope today? Is anybody else ready to enroll in God’s redemptive school of hope? Is anybody else ready to stop running from trouble and hiding from affliction? To see your trials transformed at the foot of the cross? To endure what should have crushed you? To become someone for whom hope isn’t an occasional experience, always slipping through your fingers, but a person who simply cannot be understood aside from the hope that is your inheritance?
This week I listened to an interview with a pastor from NYC. He pointed out that, early on, African Americans in Texas referred to June 19th as Jubilee Day. “Isn’t that something,” he said, “how a people who’d forcibly been made illiterate, who had the most liberating passages of Scripture kept from them, isn't it something that they still had found a way not only to learn how to read, but how to read, interpret, and apply the scriptures to their lives.”
You see, Jubilee refers to the sabbath of sabbaths, that year which came every 50 years when debts were erased, land returned, and anyone who’d been sold into captivity was set free. “Oh,” this pastor said, “it may have been President Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It may have been General Granger who finally alerted Galveston, TX to the arrival of freedom and equality. But these freewomen and men, astute biblical interpreters that they were, understood that it wasn’t a president back in Washington or a general commanding an army who were ultimately responsible for their freedom. Because as influential as any president might claim to be, as powerful as any military commander might imagine himself to be, there is only One who is responsible for Jubilee.”
It’s a bit of conjecture, but I don’t think those Black Texans were at all confused about the basis of their freedom. Because somewhere along the line, surrounded by unimaginable trouble, they met the man from Galilee who came suddenly into this troubled world with the Spirit of the Lord upon him, anointed to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free… and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. In other words, this Spirit-filled, good news proclaiming, freedom announcing, sickness healing, and captives liberating Savior came to proclaim Jubilee over this afflicted world: debts cancelled, land restored, and every enslaved image bearer of God set free.
What I’m trying to say is that when freedom came to Texas, there were some saints who were not rejoicing that a couple of powerful white men, a few hundred years too late, finally got around to doing the right thing. Neither were they praising a white Jesus who could finally be bothered to intervene on their behalf. No, there was a remnant of saint who knew something about their Jubilee-announcing God– the God who isn’t forestalled by trouble, who isn’t overcome by affliction. They knew this God because in Jesus he had entered into their troubles with them; their sufferings had been taken up into his own broken body.
And even more than not having forgotten their troubles, even more than having entered their troubles, those celebrants of Jubilee could testify that this was a God who knew how to turn their troubles into hope! That in the depths of their troubles, Jesus had never left nor forsaken them. That from the pit of affliction, God was working jubilee on their behalf. Can we join our testimonies with theirs today? Has anybody found Jesus to be your hope? You were surrounded by trouble, but not without hope. You were overwhelmed and overcome, but not without hope. Hell seemed to rage around you but, as the old saints used to say, with the hope of heaven before you were never without hope.
Can a few in the middle of trouble but still standing in the trouble people to praise him? Can a few can’t see my way through the-trouble but I found him in the trouble people praise him? Can a few trouble on my left and trouble on my right and Jesus in the middle of it all people praise him? Praise the God who is your hope in the valley and in the storm! Praise your God who fashions affliction into adoration and trouble into triumph! Worship the God who gives beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and praise for heaviness.
(Photo credit: Zain Ali.)
Race Against Gun Violence
On June 6 our family joined the New Community Outreach team in Grant Park for the race. It was a beautiful evening, I managed to complete the 8K, and our team surpassed our $30,000 goal. Thanks once again to each of you who donated! These funds will cover all of the costs of our summer leadership program which serves some amazing young people.