Hope at Christmas
Romans 5:1-6

Christmas Contradictions
Christmas is a season full of contradictions, isn’t it.

Some of them are particularly Australian ones, like the fact that most of us in a few hours’ time are going to be sitting around eating roast turkey and plum pudding and listening to songs on the radio about snow and reindeer, in the middle of a heat-wave, at the peak of the bushfire season.

But it’s not just an Australian thing. There is something glaringly, painfully contradictory build into Christmas, wherever you celebrate it. We talk about ‘peace and goodwill’ in the middle of a war in Iraq and race riots on our own beaches. We sing about ‘joy to the world’ while millions suffer and even in our own society there is an epidemic of depression and anxiety.

You might remember the song by U2 on their second last album - the one that came out several Christmases ago - "Heaven on Earth, we need it now. I'm sick of all this hanging around. Sick of sorrow, sick of pain; sick of hearing again and again that there's gonna be peace on earth… Tell the ones who hear no sound, whose sons are living in the ground: Peace on Earth - no whos or whys. No-one cries like a mother cries For peace on earth. She never got to say goodbye, to see the colour in his eyes; now he's in the dirt: that's peace on earth… Jesus there's this song you wrote: the words are sticking in my throat: Peace on earth. Hear it every Christmas time, but hope and history won't rhyme. So what's it worth? This peace on earth…"

It’s not your average Christmas carol, is it - it’s not your average rock song either. It takes that contradiction that we’ve been talking about a moment ago, and it pushes it to the limit, and it says, “what are you going to do about it?”.

So what are we going to do about it? How do we deal with that unbearable contrast between the things we celebrate and sing about at Christmas and the way the world is? Do we just ignore it? Do we put it into the category of wishful thinking? Is it just a kind of escapism, like thinking cold thoughts about snow and ice and polar bears so you don’t notice the heatwave outside? Is that the best way to understand it?

Hope in Romans
At its heart, it’s a question about hope, and about the place that hope occupies in the message of Christmas and the message of Christianity. And what I want to do this morning is to go back to the New Testament to give us four brief reminders about the nature of that hope and the difference that it makes when you have it. The place I want to go to in the New Testament is the book of Romans, that letter that we’ve been looking at over the last few months on Sunday mornings, and to four passages from Romans to do with hope. You’ll find them printed out on the outline.

* Jesus’ birth means hope for Gentiles
Four statement about hope in Romans, and the first is this: Jesus’ birth means hope for Gentiles. Paul is in the second last chapter of the letter, he’s summing things up before his final section with his travel plans and greetings and so on, and he talks about the reason why Jesus came. He says - chapter 15 verse 8, that Jesus came to fulfil all the promises of God to Israel in the Old Testament, to be the suffering, redeeming Servant that God had promised, in order that not only Israel but the gentiles too, the non-Israelites, the pagans, might glorify God for his mercy. And he goes on to string together a whole list of verses from the old testament about that, culminating in that quote from Isaiah that’s printed on the outline. It’s a quote from Isaiah 11, from the passage about the ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’, the Messiah that the Spirit of the LORD will rest on, and Paul quotes from that passage and he writes: And again, Isaiah says, “The Root of Jesse will spring up, one who will arise to rule over the nations; the Gentiles will hope in him.”

In Paul’s mind, and in Isaiah in the Old Testament too, the Gentiles were the people that walked in darkness. They were the ones who were ‘without God and without hope’. But now the birth of Jesus not only seals and confirms the promises of God to Israel; it also passes on those same hopes to the nations of the world, to the Gentiles who put their hope in him. The Christmas story is about a Saviour who is born not just as a national deliverer for Israel but as a saviour for the world. That’s the first thing that Paul has to say about hope in Romans.

* What we hope for is not yet seen
The second thing, moving backward through the letter to chapter 8 - the second thing is that this hope we have through Jesus is a hope for things that are not yet seen. If the Messiah, the Servant of God comes to bring justice and peace and righteousness on earth, then we have the firstfruits of those things - we have the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, refining us and changing us and creating little communities of peace and kindness and justice, but it’s just the firstfruits; it’s just a tiny taste of what we hope for. We are still far from perfect, and the world around us is still a dark, dark place.

But Paul says, that is the nature of hope. The nature of hope is that it waits for things that are not yet seen. So Paul writes in Romans 8: “...we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” What we receive when we come to Jesus is not instant resolution to all the problems of the world and all the problems of our lives. What we receive is the firstfruits - the glimpses of what is to come in the work of the Holy Spirit within us and within the community of jesus’ followers - we receive the firstfruits, and we receive a hope for something far more glorious.

* Hope thrives in the midst of suffering
Which is why, thirdly, Paul says in chapter 5 of Romans, hope thrives in the midst of suffering. The kind of hope that we have in Jesus is not a hope that is contradicted by suffering or destroyed by suffering; it’s a hope that thrives in the midst of suffering. Romans 5 verse 1: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

Do you see what suffering does? It strips us back and it gouges character and depth into us, and it teaches us to mean what we say when we talk about setting our hope on the promises of God. It seems kind of back-to-front what Paul writes here, but it’s true. IN the cultures and the centuries where Christians have lived in comfort and prosperity, Christians have generally been very weak when it comes to character and perseverance and hope. But when life is hard, that is when you start to learn what it means to live by hope, and to rejoice in hope. Hope thrives in the midst of suffering.

* Hope has its reasons
And finally, fourthly, real hope - according to the New Testament - real hope is not without its reasons. It’s hope against hope - it stands against all the blackness of circumstances and the present and experience - but it does so not in escapism or in wishful thinking but in solid, well-grounded confidence.

What does that look like in practice, and what is the basis of that sort of confidence? One paragraph back, at the end of chapter 4 of Romans, Paul shows us, using the example of Abraham from the Old testament.

Romans 4 verse 18: ‘Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead — since he was about a hundred years old — and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22 This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.” 23 The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness — for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.’

Who do we believe in when we believe with that sort of hope? We believe in “him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead”. That’s the ultimate reason for our hope. There are the other secondary reasons as well, of course, like the ‘first fruits’ Paul speaks of that we have already experienced. But the bedrock, the foundation is in Jesus, that he was ‘delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.’

Hope at Christmas
And so we have hope at Christmas. It’s not about some sort of naive wishful thinking or escapism, like singing songs about snow to make the heat feel a bit less hot. And it’s not about ‘aspirational thinking’ - it’s not about some way of improving your own life and using faith to become healthier and more prosperous in the year ahead. It’s not those things.

It’s real hope; hope that has a foundation the birth and death and resurrection of Jesus; hope that exists and even thrives in the midst of hardship and suffering; hope that looks forward beyond this world and yet transforms the way that we live within it. That’s the sort of hope that Jesus came to give us; that’s the sort of hope that Christmas is really about.