Hope for the Wrong Thing

Intro

I must begin tonight with a confession - I’m afraid of the book of Romans. It’s not that I dislike St. Paul or anything like that, it’s just that somewhere along the way during my theological education I got the impression that the book of Romans makes Protestants go crazy. I am and always have been, an evangelical, so my first introduction to this book was through something called the “Romans Road”  - a proselytizing tool that somebody tried and failed to teach me at various points in my youth. To be fair, as a simple bible Christian, I was frankly a little concerned by the notion that the whole gospel could be reduced to a string of verses from one book of the Bible, so I didn’t try too hard to figure out what they were talking about.

When I got to Providence, I discovered more evidence that my distrust of Romans was well founded. As every good evangelical does, I entered my reactionary catholic phase, and was deeply suspicious of all things “Protestant,” so imagine my deepening horror when I learned that it was by lecturing through the book of Romans that Martin Luther had picked up a bunch of his dangerous ideas that sparked the Reformation! The rest of Protestant history, it seemed to me, was scattered with a bunch of guys whose lives got messed up by reading the book of Romans too much, so I figured I should do the sensible thing and avoid it.

When I graduated from seminary I figured I would give Romans another chance, so I bought a copy of a number of the classic commentaries on Romans and decided I would sit down and read through all of that and finally come to terms with this book. That idea lasted about 5 minutes, and those books have sat on my shelf for the last few years taunting me.

Luckily, the Revised Common Lectionary has assigned a reading from the book of Romans to guide our worship today, and so, here I stand, I must finally reckon with a part of this book, despite all of my Jonah-like avoidance tactics.

Trinity as Grammar

Before we turn to our passage from Romans, I’d like to acknowledge that today is Trinity Sunday, or as some have called it, “Heresy Sunday.” This is because preachers seem to have the mad idea that this is the one Sunday of the year that they have to try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to their congregations. Of course the doctrine of the Trinity is quite a subtle doctrine and attempts to package it into an understandable twenty-minute sermon usually end up relying on analogies that are simply reincarnations of precisely those heresies against which the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated to refute.

Relegating the doctrine of the Trinity to one sermon, one time per year, is bound to lead you in the wrong direction. The entirety of our christian life and worship is Trinitarian, and it is out of the practices and stories that give shape to our faith that we come to understand this doctrine and see how it is the indispensable core of the gospel. There is an apocryphal story attributed to St. Athanasius wherein somebody comes to him and asks him to explain the Trinity, he refuses, instead inviting the seeker to live and worship in community for 3 years after which time Athanasius would explain the doctrine to him.

By drawing attention to the stories and practices that shape our lives, I am inviting us to consider the method by which the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated by the early church. The champions of Nicene theology, like Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers, paid careful attention to the prayers of the church noting the characteristic grammar by which Christians pray, to God, by the Son, in or with the Holy Spirit. Reflecting on these prepositions, to, by, in, and with, led theologians to be able to understand how we can speak of various works being properly the work of one person of the Trinity, yet at the same time be that of the whole Godhead, or, as this particular trinitarian doctrine was named, “the doctrine of the unity of operations.”

What is striking about the development of this doctrine is the way theologians leaned so heavily on the common prayer language and practices of Christians. A common response to critics of the Nicene position was often, “but we have prayed this way from the beginning.” In particular, the church had prayed to Jesus in a way that is only fitting to pray to God from the very beginning - for the defenders of the Nicene position, this practice of prayer ruled out alternatives that sought to subordinate Jesus to the Father.

Theology as Grammar

I could go on giving a lecture about the various component subdoctrines of the doctrine of the Trinity, but that would take us far away from today’s sermon. What I hope I have drawn your attention to is that, when it came time for the Church to articulate a robust doctrine of God, it was by paying attention to the way words run in the worship and everyday use of Christians that gave direction to the development of orthodox doctrine. This is just to say that trinitarian theology is not arcane, but arises out of the ordinary language of Christians who read the Scriptures faithfully and pray as the church has always prayed.

Having said that, there may be some of you who are thinking of the many ways that the prayers of the Church have gone wrong - indeed our own denomination is currently considering a resolution at the upcoming General Synod to revise prayers around the conversion of the Jews. Theology positively arises from the way we pray, but it also has the critical task of making sure that the way we pray is worthy of the gospel we have received.

Here, at last, is where we arrive at today’s passage from Romans. Allow me to read it again to freshen the text in our minds:

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 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. 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, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

This is one of those passages that sounds nice, but the more I read it, the more I’m troubled by it. I’m particularly troubled by verses 3-4 “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” What could it possibly mean to boast in suffering? Is Paul really aware of what suffering looks like? Where is the opportunity to rejoice for the immigrant woman whose husband divorces her, leaving her without a sponsor, money, or a home? What’s to boast about for the indigenous man who is put in a coma after having his head kicked in by a group of guys looking for a few bucks? What kind of God forms a family’s character by allowing a random act of drug-fueled-violence to take their child from them as he sits in his home doing his homework? Where is the hope for the 10 year old girl who comes home to find her newly potted plant spilled on the floor and eaten by the rats that infest her home?

It’s passages like this that make me nervous about the book of Romans. Here in Chapter 5 we get a great summarizing conclusion of hope, and this hope, so we are told, will not disappoint. But how in the world are we expected to actually tell somebody something like this when they are in the midst of suffering? Telling people that their suffering builds endurance and character and hope sounds a lot like exactly the kind of pious nonsense Kate Bowler critiques in her book, Everything Happens for a Reason, and other Lies I’ve Loved. Bowler argues that our ordinary Christian language has gone horribly wrong when it comes to dealing with suffering. We live in a society of extraordinary privilege, and any evidence that evil and suffering can still get at us is dealt with by the stubborn insistence that these things too will turn out for the best. So, naturally, we look to passages like the one before us this evening and deploy the theological conclusions of Paul’s careful argumentation as a panacea for suffering, effectively absolving us of any need to actually enter into the suffering of our neighbours, and allowing us to offer callously sentimental remarks like “God is never late” in the place of any actual hope.

The problem is one of overconfidence. As Bowler describes it, our society forms us to expect instant resolution to our problems - the great promise of our consumer capitalistic order is that we can always buy something to get us out of trouble. Intractable problems merely await market innovation. But is this confidence warranted? TS Eliot does not think so, as he writes in his poem, “East Coker:”

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

When we offer the vain hope to people who suffer that their suffering is all part of some big plan or serves a greater purpose, we offer hope for the wrong thing. We are a people who do not know the direction our hope should be directed because we do not know what the object of our love properly is. We are too easily captivated by vanity and distraction.

The grammar of our pastoral care too quickly takes the conclusion of St. Paul’s argument as a premise. We assume that we know that tribulation produces endurance, which leads to character, which leads to a hope that does not disappoint. But as Karl Barth asks, “Yet, do we know it? No! we do not know it. We know our ignorance. But God knows it; and we believe, and dare to know what God knows. We know that for us it is impossible to know the power and meaning of the tribulation in which we stand.” We do not know that everything will work out fine, we do not know that this is happening for a reason, and we do not know that there is some hope that will get us through - we offer only pious lies when we claim otherwise.

A Grammar of Hope

All we know, as Barth reminds us, is that God knows these things, and we know this one thing in faith. In the face of tribulation we would do well to wait without thought, for we are not ready for thoughts - our first thoughts too often reach for the conclusions of our faith when we should be reaching for the premises. There is a grammar to Christian hope, and it is a grammar that we find in our passage this evening.

Christian hope is derived from the prior reality of our justification by faith. But our faith is not a work of our own, in order that we might might boast. Indeed, as Barth notes, “in the moment when we dare to say we believe, we remain always under suspicion.” Our faith is not our own, it too is a gift of God. According to Barth, our faith justifies us because “God justifies Himself in our presence, and thereby we are justified in His presence. By making us His prisoners, He sets us free; by rejecting us as we are, He affirms us to be what we are not; He takes our side and uses us for His purpose, and thereby His side becomes our side, His right our right, and His good work is begun in us. He acknowledges us, and is with us. He promises us salvation in His Kingdom.”

Note that certainty is not on our side, but on God’s. We do not justify ourselves, God does. We do not love God as we ought, but God in Christ does so on our behalf. In Christ we have been taken up in the rejection and justification of God and so we share in that divine peace and await in the hope of his glory. Our hope is, from start to finish, a hope in the finished work of Christ.

Christians do not believe that God has some big plan to make us better people through suffering. Christians believe that we can rest in the peace of God, hearts overflowing with the love of the Holy Spirit, because in Jesus, the power of suffering and death has been definitively broken at Calvary. The cruelest most dehumanizing depths of human suffering do not leave us in despair but have become opportunities for hope because Jesus has entered into those places with us and taken on God’s rejection on our behalf. The judge judged in our place is the one by whom we are justified by faith. We are offered peace with God and love from the Holy Spirit because in Jesus’ saving work for us, he does not act alone, but is in perfect harmony with the Godhead. The hope of the Christian Gospel is that right at the moment of our greatest tribulation, there is God; inviting us in to the inner reality of the Triune Oneness. Christians can, in the end, offer a boast in suffering, not because suffering is purifying, or part of a plan, or happening for a reason, or any of the other pious lies we might tell, but because even in our suffering, we are not abandoned, we are not alone, and we will not ultimately be disappointed.