Hope in Adversity

Hilton Head Island, SC – August 11, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Hebrews 12:7-11; Romans 8:28-39
A Sermon by John M. Miller 

Text – We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. – Romans 8:28 (RSV)

                                                                

The letter to the Hebrews is one of the most interesting and unusual books of the New Testament. For centuries it was postulated by biblical scholars that the anonymous author was Paul. In the past couple of centuries however, most scholars say that Paul was not the author. But unless you are into that kind of thing, you probably don’t need to give that much thought, because you won’t come up with any more definitive answers about authorship than the professionals.

 

Hebrews was written to and for people who were distinctively Jewish Christians. Either they had heard Jesus themselves in the Galilee or they heard other Jews who had heard Jesus, and they concluded that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah of God. Even though they, the Jewish Christians, may have been experiencing persecution from the Roman authorities as well as from the Gentile Christians who had become the dominant group in the newly organized New Testament church, they believed that things would ultimately turn out well. Maybe that was in part because of what the author of the letter to the Hebrews said in his epistle to them.

 

The eleventh chapter is the best-known part of Hebrews. It begins with that famous verse, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Then the writer went on with a beautiful litany of characters in the Hebrew Bible who lived through very trying circumstances, in which their faith was severely tested. Nevertheless their hope never failed them, and they came through their adversities, strengthened by their experiences, and deepened in their resolve, even if the experiences depleted them and challenged that resolve.

 

A month ago Snoopy sat down to begin typing an essay. Charles Shulz’s irrepressible beagle is one of the most beloved characters in the Peanuts comic strip. Snoopy can’t talk out loud, but he can think, and the encircled words with all the little circles leading down to the pensive dog’s head always tell us what he is thinking.

 

Snoopy began his essay with this title: Things I’ve Learned After It Was Too Late. The first thing he wrote was, “A whole stack of memories will never equal one little hope.” In the last frame, Snoopy looks at us and he says, with that familiar grin on his face and the blips descending from his thought, “I kind of like that.”

 

We all have a whole host of memories. Some are good, and some are bad. For optimists the good ones outweigh the bad ones, but for pessimists the bad ones may outweigh the good ones. Whether we are by nature optimistic or pessimistic, we all have painful things that have happened to us. Snoopy is right; a whole stack of memories will never equal one little hope.

 

Memories, by their very nature, take us backward. Hope, by its nature, pulls us forward. Hope carries us into the future with a faith that things will get better, with trust that God goes with us on the journey, and that come what may, we will not only survive, but thrive. And why? Because God is God, and He is good, and therefore He will be with us through everything that lies ahead.

 

The biblical scholars all agree that it was the apostle Paul who wrote the letter to the Romans. Most of them say that it is the most profound and complete statement of his understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is for Paul what the medieval Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas called his own Summa Theologica, his “Highest Theology.”

 

The eighth chapter of Romans may be the most familiar part of the letter, and the last two paragraphs of that chapter are perhaps the most familiar words. The section begins, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose: (8:28). The King James Version says, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, who are the called according to his purpose.”

 

This verse suggests that nothing that happens is outside God’s ability providentially to make it work toward our welfare: nothing. Everything works for good, everything works together for good. As bad as it may be, illness can turn out to be a blessing. We experience agonizing losses: the loss of people we love, the loss of opportunities we had hoped for, the loss of positions we coveted. We drift away from one another. We lose track of one another. We become separated from the people or things that have been most familiar to us, and we become engulfed in loneliness or fear or self-pity. How do we deal with that?

 

That’s where the letter to the Hebrews steps in to give us guidance. “It is for discipline that you have to endure” (12:7). The word discipline comes from the same root as the word disciple. It means “to learn.” A disciple is a learner. To be disciplined is always a learning experience. We call academic studies “disciplines.” In them we learn the substance and particularities of a subject: physics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, whatever. The disciples of Jesus were with him for three years of intensive study. He taught them what he thought they needed to know, and they learned it as fully as they were capable of grasping it.

 

“If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate” (Hebrews 12:8). If painful things happen to us, and we refuse to allow them to work together for our good, then we haven’t learned anything. We have prevented discipline (learning) from taking over. It is like a pitcher being told by the manager about a powerful right-handed batter, “Never pitch him a fast ball on the lower inside corner, because he may smash it over the left field wall.” So he pitches a fast ball on the lower inside corner, and the batter smashes it over the left field wall. He didn’t learn anything from what he was told. But next time he won’t forget it. Discipline is hard to come by sometimes, but when it comes, it sticks.

 

I had some long conversations with some high school classmates in Madison, Wisconsin before the eightieth birthday party and final gathering of our class a few weeks ago. Judy was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma fifteen years ago. She was given a round of chemotherapy, and her lymphoma has been in remission ever since. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. I know another woman who was diagnosed with another form of lymphoma at the same time. She too was given a round of chemo, and it put her in remission for two years, and then it returned. More chemo, more remission; then another return. Two more years, another return, another round of chemo, another remission. Etcetera. In everything God works for good. It takes years of discipline to know that. Some learning is more difficult, because the lessons are more prolonged or more ambiguous, but the learning is there, nonetheless.

 

Judy told me about Charlene, another classmate. Charlene lived in the state of Oregon, where they made physician-assisted-suicide legal years ago. Charlene battled cancer for several years. Finally she decided she was not going to put herself through any more suffering, and her doctor helped her to end her agony. All things work together for good.

 

Fritz has several physical maladies, the most debilitating being a pair of bone-on-bone knees which his orthopedist says are beyond surgery. Fritz is eighty, and his youngest son was fifty. His son died suddenly a few months ago. He left a woman with whom he had lived for eight years who was three months away from delivering their baby. Fritz being Fritz, he quietly wondered why Fritz didn’t die and why his son didn’t live. But also Fritz being Fritz, he quietly concluded there is no answer to that. If pressed, I think he might agree that in everything God works for good, though the pain of this experience may still too raw for him fully to appreciate that lesson.

 

Georgianna married Gary, who was a year ahead of us in high school. They live in Madison and attend a Lutheran church which, back in the day, was a very traditional church, as most Lutheran churches then were fairly traditional. But Georgie said their congregation recently called a transsexual male pastor. When he was a she, she had a very young daughter. Now the daughter is seven or so, and she still calls her mother “Mom” ---even though he now is a man. All things work together for good, but it can be very confusing, probably especially for that child, but also for the rest of us. Sometimes it is awfully hard to learn and to become sufficiently disciplined to understand and to affirm such things. In any case, Georgie and Gary are very proud of their new pastor, and I’m proud of them for being proud. I realize that having been raised in Madison, Wisconsin is one of the greatest blessings of my life, because Madison is nothing if not an open, affirming community used to new thoughts and ideas because of the university located there.

 

Bob married Karen, who also was in our class. I suspect that because of psychological changes that began soon after Bob and Karen were married, she became something of a recluse as time went on. They never attended any of our fourteen or so class reunions. Now Karen has dementia, and Bob is doing all the housekeeping chores. However, a few years ago he had heart surgery, and he is now afflicted with multiple myeloma. But as he always did what he did when we were teenagers, Bob just keeps moving forward, confident in the grace and goodness of God. All things work together….

 

When I returned from Madison, in the announcements I told you about Phil. Phil completely organized our last two reunions and our Big Birthday Bash all by himself. After the sixtieth reunion two years ago, he passed out one day with no warning. He was taken to the ER. It was discovered he had a severe leakage in the atrium of his heart. His long-time physician told him he would soon die. Therefore he gave away everything he owned. In the meantime, a friend suggested that he get a second opinion from a specialist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, which he did. That doctor told him he wasn’t going to die, and suggested a surgical protocol and some prescriptions which made him as good as new. Phil might live another twenty years, and he is happy about that, despite having to start life all over again at age eighty. All things….

 

Because we believe in God, we manage to find hope in adversity, for we trust that God is particularly present in the midst of hardship. We tell ourselves that in everything God works for good for those who love God, and we come to discover that it is absolutely true.

 

Mark Shriver is the son of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. He wrote a recent biography of Pope Francis I called Pilgrimage. It describes the circuitous path of a young Argentine boy who became a Jesuit priest and then the leader of the Argentine Jesuit order, and then the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, and finally he is the current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

 

Throughout his many years in Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was confronted by the extreme poverty among many of the Argentine populace, and also the extreme corruption among many of the country’s leaders. In his highly commendable service to Mater Ecclesia, Mother Church, he did his best to overcome both of those obstacles.

 

In Mark Shriver’s interviews with many Argentine contemporaries of Pope Francis, one of the Pope’s friends said that during a particularly chaotic time, Argentina had five different presidents in a ten-day period. They finally got a president who was willing to work with Cardinal Bergoglio to steady the quaking country enough to prepare it to become a highly challenged democracy.

 

Pondering what the interviewed associate of the Pope told the author, the ever-skeptical Mark Shriver wrote, “I thought for the first time there may have been a divine – and national – destiny in Bergoglio’s moving on from Jesuit life to become an auxiliary bishop. The move eventually led him to be cardinal of his hometown; it had also put him in the position to be the pastoral servant of a suffering people. Had he remained with the Jesuits, his role and effect would surely have been significant, but they inevitably would have been smaller, more localized” (Pilgrimage, p. 202).

 

All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose. Jorge Mario Bergoglio has the possibility of becoming one of the greatest figures in the history of world Christianity if those who oppose him fail in their efforts to thwart the reforms he is attempting to inculcate in the Roman Catholic Church. We shall probably know whether the hope we find in his adversity is fully realized only after we have we observed the opposition of the Pope’s adversaries for a sufficient length of time. Then we shall be able to see whether our hopes will be fulfilled. If Pope Francis lives long enough and in good health, we will be able to know if God’s providence through him has been enabled to come to full fruition.

 

Optimists can always maintain hope in adversity. Christians, whether optimists or pessimists, can discover hope even in the most challenging of adversities. However, it takes diligent discipline to be able to perceive that.

 

If life was easy, we wouldn’t need much discipline. But it isn’t, and we do.

 

God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Search the mysteries to discover the wonders.