Hope

Let's pray: Father God, as we listen to your word, we pray that you would teach, rebuke, correct, and train us in righteousness so that we might be thoroughly equipped for every good work and made wise for salvation through faith in your name. Amen.

I'm a hospital chaplain and often when people come into hospital, their worlds have become smaller; perhaps they've been treated for cancer, had surgery, chemotherapy, and they may not be able to do all the things that they used to do before and they're vulnerable to despair. I want to talk to you about hope this morning and the movement from despair to hope. I want to tell you a story of a patient and I want us to reflect together what hope and transformation mean for us, and these things may go together seamlessly or there may be some sort of, I don't know, dissonance to some extent, but I'll leave you to seek to resolve that.

The Complexity of Loving Enough

As many of you know, my wife suffers from early onset dementia and people are often very kind to me. People in the street will come up to me and say lovely things—how lovely I am with my wife—family members, friends, you here at church are often extraordinarily generous in your affirmation, but I'm only too [aware] that sometimes I love enough and sometimes I don't. The Irish poet Padrick Otuma, in a poem called "The Facts of Life," says that you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.

I want to talk about hope in a particular way today: how we can both be self-compassionate—that is, not fall into despair when we don't love enough—but also challenge ourselves and be hopeful that we can love enough. Are you with me? Do you feel that kind of tension? How do we live with that sort of complexity?

The Foundation of Hope: Raised with Christ

St. Paul says, "Since you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on the things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things above, not on earthly things, for you have died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory". St. Paul says we've been raised with Christ; it's a motive, isn't it?

When we became Christians, we became united with Christ in our baptism; when we put our faith in him through his death and resurrection, we became united with Christ and everything that is true of him is true of us. His death on the cross means that we are able to access the forgiveness that Jesus offers, but more than that, St. Paul is implying that through his death and in our union with him in death, we have access to the resources to put to death those self-destructive aspects of our humanity. But more than that, we have been raised with Christ and so, spiritually speaking, we are already in heaven, at least to some extent. When are you going to be best placed—when am I going to be best placed—to live God's way on earth? Will it not be, ironically, when we're in heaven? And yet, of course, what St. Paul is saying right now is that we already are in heaven spiritually speaking; we have access to all the resources of our king, Jesus, who sits at the right hand of the father.

Interestingly, St. Paul says, "This is hidden and will only be revealed on the last day when Jesus appears". And my suspicion is that allows us both the space to be self-compassionate when we don't love enough and also to challenge ourselves to love enough.

Putting to Death the Old Nature

Well, what does St. Paul suggest? He says, "Put to death therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry". Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming; you used to walk in these ways in the life you once lived, but now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator. Here there is no longer Jew or Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.

St. Paul suggests that we put to death our old sinful nature. When I was a young teenager, my father worked at the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education in Rockhampton; he was a lecturer and an administrator there of a department. Dad did a research project, and so when I was on school holidays, I would join him in this research project. We'd get up early and we'd drive out about, I don't know, 40ks north or south, depending on which day, of Rockhampton, and every time we found an animal that had been killed, dad would fill out a questionnaire because what he was trying to do was to work out why animals were being killed and how maybe we could prevent that.

I remember one day, we were leaving north of Rockhampton and it's very vivid in my memory—I remember the car that was involved because it was a horse that he'd hit and the whole of the cabin, which was this Holden Kingswood station wagon—I remember exactly how it looked, which model it was—the whole cabin where the driver was had been crushed in because, of course, horses have very tall legs. There was a lot of blood and by the time we got there, the animal had been destroyed. St. Paul says we are to put to death our sinful nature decisively, and it's meant to be a settled attitude for the rest of our lives; we're not to cage it like a wild animal, we're not to cherish or fondle it, we're to put it to death.

Defining the Vices

What sort of things does he suggest?

• Sexual immorality: That's got to do with sexual intercourse outside marriage.

• Impurity: That's kind of like the uncleanness or the dirtiness that you feel or even the contamination of our character that results.

• Lust: Uncontrolled sexual urges.

• Evil desires: Those things which precede lust, perhaps temptation—not necessarily sinful in and of itself; it's a kind of catalog, isn't it, a journey towards sin, and the implication seems to be to nip it in the bud early on and don't let it go all the way.

• Greed: An insatiable desire to have more; interestingly, he compares it to idolatry. James K.A. Smith, the American evangelical commentator, says that he believes the shopping mall is the 21st-century temple, at least in American culture and I suspect in Western culture in general.

For these things, the wrath of God is coming; these are vices that will eventually kill us if we don't put them to death first ourselves. He goes on: Anger is a smoldering or seething hatred; rage is when it breaks out into words or actions; malice is the evil intent that motivates it; slander is the speech that puts malice into words; filthy language is the foul associations; lying is when the truth becomes untidy, inconvenient, or embarrassing—perhaps even untrustworthy promises. One commentator made an interesting reflection; he said, "Fear and anxiety are distracted by lust, and insecurity and pride feeds anger". I could feel both those things—they resonated with me.

Clothing the New Self

But St. Paul says there's another way, isn't there? He speaks of being clothed or clothing ourselves with a quite a different sort of set of values. Verse 12: "Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another; if you have any grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord has forgiven you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them together in perfect unity".

St. Paul is into a completely different metaphor now; he's talking about putting on some new clothes. Many of us have been watching the cricket over the last, I don't know, two months or so and we've watched people put on new clothes, haven't we? They've been in their training clothes—the English were in maroon, the Australians were probably in gold or green, I can't remember—and sometimes they'd put on their whites when they were fielding, and when they were batting, they'd put on pads and helmets and gloves and they'd take up a bat.

What are the new clothes that St. Paul suggests we put on?

• Compassion: A deep sensitivity for the needs and sorrows of others.

• Kindness: Compassion in words and actions, a generosity.

• Humility: A willingness to forgo our own rights.

• Gentleness: Using our power well; it's like a powerful wild horse tamed.

• Patience: Often translated "longsuffering," but I love the literal translation which is being "big-hearted"—bearing with one another's odd or difficult behavior. I remember one of my children at one stage in their teenage years demanded that I bear with them their odd or difficult behavior.

• Forgiveness: Forgiving as the Lord forgives us. It's a hard thing to do to forgive someone, especially when they don't acknowledge the wrong that they've done to us and don't seek reconciliation; but we can forgive someone even if they're not willing to reconcile, though we may need to draw appropriate boundaries so that we're not hurt again.

• Love: Here the metaphor is a brooch or a belt or a clasp or an outer garment that holds all the other garments together. All these things are an expression of love, aren't they? Love is the unifying principle that gathers all these things together.

A Story of Hope and Resilience

Let me tell you a story. He's in his late 40s and I arrive and I ask him if he'd like a visit and he says, "Yes, I like people". He'd got an invitation in the mail for a test and he thought, "Well, free thing from the government, why not?". The test reveals that there was blood in his stool; a colonoscopy reveals that there was a tumor in his bowel. Chemotherapy was unsuccessful, and so the surgeon—a Christian woman—chooses to do surgery. His wife of one year, about the same age, late 40s, is waiting outside; the surgery takes much longer than expected and is much more complicated than the surgeon originally thought. The cancer has spread to the fatty tissue around the bowel. It's a very successful operation; she's pretty much convinced that she's got it all as much as one can be—stage three cancer.

Both the husband and the wife are primary school teachers, both are Christians, and both have served in Africa. As I listen to the man tell the story, I'm struck by his hopefulness; his positivity—everything he says seems to exude it. He's positive and thankful for what the medical staff have done for him; he's positive and hopeful with regard to his recovery and expects to be back at work in early February.

What drives this hopefulness? His wife tells me twice in the conversation that they have sought to do their marriage in a godly way. When someone tells you something twice, you know it's important to them. I asked the woman if she finds her husband's positivity a challenge; they both affirm that it's a good question, but she affirms that she feels he's very good at listening to her, giving her space to be anxious and sad, legitimating her feelings. I asked them what scripture they've been reflecting on lately, and we read Matthew chapter 11: "Come to me all you who are labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest". We leave one another to meditate on that complexity and how it might speak into their situation and ours.

Conclusion and Daily Practice

What is the secret of this man's hopefulness? My suspicion is he reminds himself that he has been raised with Christ, that he seeks to live a life characterized by putting to death the old self-destructive behaviors and putting on love, and thirdly that he has the presence of mind to be both self-compassionate and challenging.

What about us? How does hope and transformation play out in our own lives? My suspicion is that we could remind ourselves on a regular basis that we have been raised with Christ. In the back of my diary, I have a number of the lists that Paul has in the New Testament and I choose two each day—today will be compassion and kindness and two of the negative ones, sexual immorality and impurity. I place the positive ones at the front of my mind and the negative ones I'm just kind of aware of in the back of my mind. It's a 2 * 2 * 7 week: simple definitions of each thing, praying and reflecting.

I leave you with a question for over coffee: Is Christian transformation merely an act of the human will?.

Let's pray: Thank you, Father God, that we have been raised with Christ. Thank you for the hope this gives us and the love that you have for us. Thank you that we have the resources of heaven to live your way on earth. Amen.

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