Psalm 65; Romans 5:1-5
Jean Kerr, author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (a humorous look about suburban living and raising boys who also happens to be from my wife Stefanie’s hometown of Scranton, PA) once penned these words about hope – “Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.”[i]
There are, of course, some truly good feelings we want to hold onto and to trust in as eternal. But I like this quote because it points to how hope can help us let go of the not so good feelings. Hope pops up quite naturally to say on any given day that when upsetting and unsettling feelings such as sorrow, anger, and anxiety arrive, they will also come to pass. This gets me wondering -- when hope does nudge us into letting go of the troublesome stuff, where do we release it all to?
As the great hymn of faith goes, we have a friend in Jesus and so we should be releasing all our trials and tribulations to our Lord in prayer. How exactly we do this is a personal decision. We can hold our prayer petitions silently in our hearts. We can ask others to also hold them in their hearts as well as name them among faithful friends. We can journal them, turn them into original songs or pieces of art. We can knit with them and produce a prayer shawl. There are countless ways. How do you usually make petition to the gracious power of the Lord?
This past week, one of our church members told me about a daughter whose mom had a really awesome way of doing this. To honor her late mother’s life, she’s written a gift book about this called “The God Box.” Listen to the daughter’s description –
“The God Box was Mom’s secret stash of notes to God. She’d grab any handy piece of paper – from a ‘While You Were Out’ slip to a receipt or a Post-it note – and scribble, ‘Dear God, Please take care of …’ She would dash off the petition in her natural, heartfelt style, date it and sign it ‘Love, Mary.’ Then she would keep folding the paper until it was really small and place it safely in the box. The God box,” she further writes, “came with one caveat. If any of us ever worried about the request, Mom would say, ‘If you think you can handle it better than God, it’s coming out.’” The author then explains what happened after that comment. “Just the suggestion that we thought we were more powerful than God put us in our places and made us stop fretting and start believing. We loved how the God Box gave her such comfort and relief, and were always happy to have our hopes and fears stored inside.”[ii]
Following her mom’s passing, when Mary Lou Quinlin had full access to twenty years worth of God box petitions, she noticed that her mom often made the same request multiple times. Was this a sign of frustration for prayer her mom felt went unanswered? Not at all. “I attributed that,” she writes, “to her unflagging ability to hope, not to any doubt she hadn’t been heard.”[iii]
It sure seems to me that this is one Christian woman and mom who focused on living the words of today’s New Testament reading. The prayer deposits she made in the God box reveal how deeply she trusted that hope does not disappoint us. And not just any kind of hope or vague feeling of hope. Not the sort that half-heartedly sputters the words, “Well, I hope so.” This is bold hope born of God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ. It’s the hope poured into us through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the hope also found in Psalm 65, hope that waters and enriches and blesses and grows our hearts so that we bear witness and branch out the glory of God to our family trees.
In addition to not being vaguely defined, this hope is also never something saccharin. It’s not artificially sweet as if free of real and often sour world flavor. To think it is, quite frankly, is to somehow believe Jesus only experienced love, joy and peace while walking among us. Every reading of the Gospels dispels this Pollyanna perspective pretty quickly. The holy hope that is seeded and watered in our hearts by grace and through our faith intimately knows all of our not so good feelings -- all the degrees of sorrow and despair, of anxiety and anguish, of distrust and depression. By honestly experiencing all this, it leads us closer to Christ and thus to greater strength, profound peace, and ultimate joy for our journeys.
All those who stood and barked criticism at the Apostle Paul absolutely could not grasp this concept. They regarded him as unimpressive and as having too many adversities “to be able to claim a victorious life with God.”[iv] Long after his death, a description of Paul was written down that said he was “bald-headed, bowlegged, a man small in size, with meeting eyebrows, a rather large nose.”[v] Combine this physical appearance with his radical message against prevailing worldly ways and I think that if Paul had had a God box, his opponents would have regarded it as full of soiled, useless tissues from a sniveling sort of fellow.
But Paul embodied nothing but great hope, always seeing it beyond any and all suffering. Following the example of his Lord, he celebrated that “life is hard on the path of discipleship” and so he was able to turn discrediting words into his greatest qualifications. [vi]
The poignantly descriptive Presbyterian author Fred Beuchner says this is what got Paul through “the ups and downs. The fights with his enemies and fights with his friends. The endless trips with a fever. Keeping one jump ahead of the sheriff. Giving his spiel on windy street corners with nobody much to hear him most of the time excepts some underfed kids and a few old women and some yokels who didn’t even know the language.”[vii] To absolutely all of this, Paul kept going, empowered by the holy hope both rooted in and branching up out from his heart, bearing witness to it with the words “we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”
How amazing for us to believe and to experience and to share this in so many ways. What gratitude we have for having been shown the way of truly holy hope by Jesus, by Paul, by countless witnesses on through so many mothers and others. Glory be to God, Amen!
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