Isaiah 45.22-25; Romans 15.1-6; Luke 4.16-24

There are some things that really don’t make sense.

Why, for instance, when we want to turn off our computers do we click our mouse on a button that says “start”?

Why do people who don’t have watches always look at their wrists when someone asks them the time?

Why do Dads buy toys for their children and then play with them themselves?

Why do people order a whopper burger and a large fries or a massive sticky pudding and then drink diet coke?

Why does St Paul tell the Romans to have hope when their life was pretty terrible?

There is a definite split between the Christians in Rome - those from Jewish backgrounds on one side against those of Gentile origins. There had been a number of expulsions by the Romans of the Jewish people from Rome, and it is quite probable that one of these expulsions during the reign of Claudius, was caused by the rise of Christianity.

Not long after Paul wrote Romans, Christians were being accused of all sorts of things by the Romans including incest and cannibalism. They were even, in the reign of Nero, labelled by some as “the enemies of the human race.” The early Christians suffered opposition, beatings, torture, a lack of job prospects and so on.

So, they were not living in a situation where hope would have been either easy or the obvious reaction. So, what does Paul mean by asking them to hope?

Here are some of the things that we might hope for:

“I hope it won’t rain today ‘cos we’d planned a long walk. It was so lovely yesterday.”

“I hope England wins the World Cup.”

“I really hope that Auntie Sue gets better.”

The thing about each one of those statements is that our hope is conditional. We can’t know that it won’t rain tomorrow until we live through that day. We can’t know that England will have practised hard enough or be talented enough to beat their opponents or whether the opposition will have a better match, though we can guess that South Africa might win. We can’t know whether Auntie Sue will recover but we can express our desire that she will.

Hope in Paul’s terms is something different. Hope for Paul is more about certainty than about uncertainty.
Paul’s hope is a certainty because it relies on the promises of God not on the vagaries of the weather or on human skills.

Paul’s hope is a certainty because it relies on the character of God not on the imperfections of the sinful humanity.

Paul’s hope is a certainty because it relies on the activity of God and not on the weakness of people.

And he knows about God through his own experience and through the pages of Scripture. For Paul, of course, Scripture meant the Hebrew Bible, what we know as the Old Testament. But I think we can apply his approach to our own Scriptures which includes the New Testament as well, and his Letter to the Romans from which we heard today.

I want us to think about verse 4 of chapter 15 for a bit. It says: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

Two things stand out here: first that Paul saw Scripture as being written for our instruction; and second that the scriptures bring encouragement, which leads to hope.

As we think about the letter to the Romans, let us remember that it was written not as a systematic theology but as a letter responding to a particular situation in a particular time.

We can crudely divide the letter into three parts, with an introduction and an ending.

The first part looks at how Christianity arises out of Judaism, at why God sent Christ and how the Good News of Jesus works in practice.

Part two addresses the Jewish rejection of the Gospel, and how this does not mean that ultimately God’s promises will remain unfulfilled.

The third section looks at living out the Gospel i.e. its practical implications in Church, society and the home.

The verse that we are thinking about today comes from this final section, and, if we look closely at its context, we can see that it is set in a passage about how Christians who disagree with one another might learn to live in harmony. In this passage, Paul is not looking to Scripture as a source of doctrine but rather of inspiration and encouragement.

All Christians needs encouragement. God did not design us to go it alone. We’re not always very good at encouraging one another but it is quite a prominent theme in the New Testament. And not only can our encouragement come from each other but also from our Bibles.

And yet, so many of us struggle to read our Bibles outside church services. But the Bible is the beginning of the story which we are now living out. The Bible gives us encouragement because it tells us about God. It tells us about God’s character - how God is good, how God keeps his promises, how God is faithful to his people.

Our Bibles tell us also what God thinks about the human race - that each person has been created by God as unique and special, that God cares for us deeply, that God loves us. And the Bible outlines for us what God’s plan for creation is from beginning to end and beyond to eternity.

All these things are encouragements to us. But how much of that story do we know? If I had come into church this morning with a DVD and shown you five minutes from the middle of a film, it is very unlikely that you would know what was going on.

You might in five minutes gain a rough idea of who the characters were or the type of film - gangster, movie, western, romance, comedy and so on. But it would be very unlikely that you would be able to work out the complete story from just looking at five minutes of film.

And, yet, that’s what many of us do when we read the Bible. We hear certain parts in church on a Sunday morning; we might have favourite bits we read when we are in need of comfort; but many people never read the whole story.

And it’s not just a story of a load of people who lived a long time ago - the Bible story is our story, the story that we are continuing to write today, next week, next year. Of course, it’s our story because it’s God’s story and we are caught up in that drama, because God has chosen to make us part of that.

God’s story is a story of hope. However bleak and hard life might seem at times, the ultimate story of the Gospel is one of resurrection and hope and eternal life. The Bible reminds us of that. It reminds us of God’s faithfulness and God’s future for creation. It encourages us towards that hope. Let’s reminds ourselves of that verse: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”

A hope based not on the uncertainty of the weather or other people or politics or the economy but on God. A hope centred on God’s promises, God’s character, God’s faithfulness and God’s activity. A hope centred on the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and the God, who through the power of the Holy Spirit, can work in and through us to give us that deep sense of hope and joy that makes no sense in worldly terms, but that reminds us always that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom”.

(with thanks to the Bible Society for some of the ideas in this sermon which came from their Bible Sunday 2007 material)