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[Silence] The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "Where there is hope, there is life." [Silence]

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Pray with me. [Silence] In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Sometimes we find ourselves in places where no matter what we think, or what we say, or what we do, we find we are going to lose. Occasionally we are in those situations where we seem to have no possibility of winning.

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Sometimes there are not even valid or worthwhile choices for us to make. These are what we might call hopeless times. Now, hopelessness promotes negativity. And negativity is very dangerous.

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There's enough negativity around us in our society today to cut it with a knife. It is all very dangerous. For example, Dr. Kurt Richter of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University has recently completed some studies with rats.

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Now, these rats were placed into water in which they could not touch bottom. In other words, where they would drown if no one would rescue them. And he discovered that if there was some possibility of the rats making it out of the water alive, they would continue to swim, trying and trying.

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But if there was no possibility whatever, if every chance was removed, then almost immediately the rats would give up, would sink to the bottom, and would succumb. It was not at all uncommon to have a rat swimming until it was within two minutes of the place of being exhausted and of going beneath the surface of the water.

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And then that rat was shown the possibility of some opportunity to escape. And the rat would swim again, and some of them would swim as long as 60 hours. You see, where hope is, we fight on. Where there is no hope, we surrender and die.

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Now, you have all heard the saying, "Where there is life, there is hope." Any minister will tell you about standing beside a bedside where there is some young person perhaps in a deep coma. And the parents are standing there beside you, and one of the things that they say almost invariably is, "Well, she is still alive, and where there is life, there is hope."

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And that is so. And you've read stories in the newspapers about explosions that have happened far below the surface of the earth in a mine. And the relatives of the miners entombed there gather around the entrance to the mine, and word comes back that there is a tapping noise being heard from down below,

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and someone cries out, "They're still alive, and where there is life, there is hope." And that again is quite true. But I would suggest to you this morning that we can say with equal accuracy that where there is hope, there is life. When you lose hope to one degree or another, you lose some of the life that is in you.

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There is no way to overestimate the power of hope. But all about us, we see what happens to those who have lost hope. We see them mentally and emotionally and physically shriveling up and moving toward death. This has led Jacques Ellul, one of the most profound theological thinkers of our time,

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to say that he believes the primary task of the Church in this part of the 20th century is to preach the gospel of hope. He points out that he agrees with the Apostle Paul when Paul says that the cardinal virtues are faith, hope, and love. Further, he agrees with Paul when Paul says that the greatest of these is love.

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But the fact is that the Church speaks a great deal about faith and about love, but it doesn't say very much about hope. We talk about believing and unbelieving or loving and unloving, but we don't say much about hope.

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And we need that gospel of hope to be heard in this time, because people are dying because they do not hear it. It is, I would suggest, the greatest need of these perilous times through which we live, to speak and to proclaim the good news of hope.

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Paul writes about it in the passage in Romans, which we have been studying together for the last three weeks. He says, "We rejoice in our troubles, knowing that suffering produces fortitude, and fortitude produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love is poured upon us through the Holy Spirit."

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Now, there are obviously three major things in what Paul is suggesting here. Allow me to take just a moment to amplify them for you. First of all, Paul is saying that hope is not dependent on happy or comfortable circumstances. He is saying that hope does not just rise up in the midst of hopeful times.

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Quite to the contrary, he says those who are bruised but remain brave, those whose character has been forged in the fires of living in this kind of day and age, those are the people who come to know hope. Hope is produced not out of satisfaction, but out of struggle.

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The cast down who won't stay down, those are the people who find hope. Many of you have heard the old joke which concludes with the punchline, "There is no way to get there from here." Just so there are a lot of people who look at hopeless situations and say,

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"There's no way to get out of them to something that can be of profit and of gain." But let me give you some examples to the contrary. C.S. Lewis said, "My Christian faith began in dismay." William James, the great psychologist, said that he came to his understanding of faith

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after the winter in which he described himself as being on the verge of suicide every single day. Abraham Lincoln wrote that he saw himself as being without worth, without hope, and without a future. And yet he is the one who more than any single person preserved the union of the states. From the arts, a man like Sergei Rachmaninoff, he wrote on one occasion,

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"To live as I now live is not to live at all." And yet, out of that feeling of hopelessness, he came to a new hope which led him to produce some of the most beautiful melodies of our time. Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest man of the 20th century,

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was so often attacked by depression that he came to call such times the times of the black dog. And yet it was Churchill who held up the flag of hope and rallied a people to stand against those who would destroy freedom. Out of the hell of these people came hope, and we have all been blessed by it.

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Hope has its nativity, you see, not in ease, but in agony. It does not depend on happy days and wonderful nights. Then Paul goes on to say that when he speaks of hope, he is not simply talking about optimism or idealism.

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Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher, has said that optimism is possible only for those who isolate themselves from the obstacles of the world. And I believe that is true. To be optimistic, simply optimistic, idealistic, utopian in your thinking, in times like these, is to be irresponsible.

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We have heard so many well-intentioned, but nonetheless lies about this subject. Science has told us that it is going to create a world of happiness. The social scientists have said that they are going to cause things to work together so that we will have a place of peace in which to live.

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The politicians make promises of this nature to us every time an election rolls around. The technicians promise us that they are going to come up with those things which are going to make life easy and fun to live and no challenges which are despairing. But the fact is that these disciplines have produced virtually nothing.

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And the fact that they have leads to even greater discouragement on the part of those who are hoping these promises will come true. So many of their pledges have ended up being shattered or splattered with human blood. Incidentally, it is because of this easy optimism and idealism, mistaken for genuine hope,

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it is because of this that the Greeks so hated the idea of hope. They saw hope as nothing more than illusions and dreams, and they had contempt for it. You remember how it happened that Zeus was angry with the people on the earth, and according to the myth he sent down a box which contained all kinds of hateful and hurtful things,

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and he put the box into the hands of a woman named Pandora, and he said, "Do not open the box." But her curiosity was such that she opened it, and out of it flew all those stinging, ugly, biting things which, according to their mythology, had brought the pain and hurt of life into being. Do you remember this? At the very end of this chain of black beans that come forth out of this box

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comes hope, a tiny little figure, but the figure in the myth does not leave the box. It stays in Pandora's box. The Greeks are saying by this, to hope that things are going to get better, to have some optimism that these ugly, stinging things in life are going to go away, is foolishness.

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I don't care which of the Greeks you read, Aeschylus or Euripides or Thucydides or Simonides or Pintar, they all say the same thing, and perhaps the grandest speech in this regard, and at the same time the most tragic one, the words that Sophocles puts upon the lips of his heroine Antigone in the play of the same name. Antigone says, "We are of that tribe that asks questions, and we ask them to the bitter end

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until no tiniest chance of hope remains to be strangled by our hands. We are of the tribe that hates your filthy hope, your docile hope, your hope which is a whore." If hope is nothing more than utopianism, if it's nothing more than some illusion, then I stand with Antigone. If hope is nothing more than dreams, castles in the air with no foundations under them,

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then I stand with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which doesn't even have an article on the subject of hope. But Paul sees hope in far more profound terms. He sees hope as the fruit of the hard life. He sees it as the fruit of suffering against which people fight, and as they fight, their characters develop. And out of this experience, the love of God is poured upon them by the Holy Spirit.

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Paul looks upon hope with absolute certainty, as a glad confidence. He sees it as the heart of human existence. It's not easy or difficult to understand. It is not difficult to understand why Paul felt this way. After all, he was a Jew among Jews, and the Jewish tradition is filled with hope. The Old Testament idea of hope is presented over and over to cite but a single reference in Psalm 62.

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"For God alone my soul waits, for my hope is from him." The whole idea of the coming of the Messiah, the messianic goal of the Old Testament, is a concept built upon hope. And in the New Testament, that hope becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ, and that hope is spoken of again and again so that Paul writes to the Romans, "We are saved by hope."

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You see, for Paul, where there is hope, there is life. This is the power of God working in believers. It is not something that they gain, it is not something that they earn, it is not something that they achieve, it is a gift of God.

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And it is not something which just relates to yesterday, not the memory of the things that God did of a hopeful nature in times past. It is instead a present active reality. What Paul is saying is that in the very midst of our troubles and sufferings,

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if we will meet them and fight them and keep our hearts pure out of that struggle, God, not because we've earned it, but God, out of his love for our faithfulness in this, opens to us the doors to his power. And his power flows into us, and that power is hope, and it's the gift of the Holy Spirit.

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Whenever I think of this matter, I think of diamonds. A diamond is, of course, the most precious of precious stones, but it's worth nothing until it is uncovered, until it is unearthed. There is one diamond in the world which is renowned for three different reasons.

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First of all, it is one of the largest diamonds ever found. Second of all, it is the only diamond which has ever been found which is blue in color. And third, this diamond is absolutely unique in that it conducts electricity. Electricity can flow through it.

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And the name of this diamond is, of course, the hope diamond. Hope is incredibly precious, and hope should be colored blue because blue is the color of faithfulness and fidelity. You've heard the expression, "He's true blue. You can depend upon him."

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You can depend upon God, and that power which is conducted by hope is the power of God flowing into the individual life. My friends, if God is harmony, his power is music, and hope is our dancing to that music.

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A few years ago, a group of Christian witnesses visited the Indiana State Penitentiary to bear testimony about their faith, and they were permitted to visit those who were imprisoned on Death Row. Now, just a few days before, a man by the name of Stephen Judy had been executed there,

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and the heaviness of that dreadful act and that dreadful time were still heavy on that place. But they were allowed to go into Death Row. Not only that, but the doors of the cells were opened so that all the prisoners in the row could come out, and they gathered in the corridor between the rows, and they stood in a circle, and they held hands,

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and some of the Christians testified to their faith, and some of the Christians led in prayer. And then they sang "Amazing Grace," and some of the prisoners joined with them in the singing of the song. Now, when this was over, one of the prisoners, a man named James Brewer,

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went back into his cell, accompanied by one of these Christian witnesses, each one going to a different prisoner. And they sat side by side, James Brewer and this other man, reading the scriptures and speaking and praying together. Now, the leader of the Christians came in and he said, "Come on, folks. We're going to have to hurry.

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We have a meeting with the governor, and if we rush, we can just make it." But the man who was talking with and sharing the scriptures and prayer with James Brewer said, "No, give us just a few more minutes, please." And the leader said, "No, I cannot do that. We cannot spend any more time here. We have to go right now."

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And this Christian witness stood up and, looking at the leader of this party, said, "I am Judge Clement. I am the man who sentenced Mr. Brewer to die." And there they were, sitting side by side, the judge and the judged, reading from the scriptures and praying together.

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Now, this to me is the power of hope. Here is the murderer who hopes for forgiveness, and I think it's obvious that he got it by the fruits of his study of scripture and prayer and desire for Christian fellowship. Here are witnesses who hoped for an opportunity to bear testimony to their faith,

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and they are taken right into the place where they can proclaim mercy to those who were without mercy. And here is a judge who sits beside the one he has judged, judged even unto death, hoping that the two of them can be reconciled. And they were beautifully reconciled by the Spirit of God.

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And I venture to say that in all of those there in that death row, in every prisoner, in every Christian witness, and all of the guards that were present, in every one of them there was a hope of heaven. And that hope, too, is one that God never fails to fulfill.

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How do I know this? God has given his guarantee. He says in his word written, "If we suffer and we do not lose heart, if we show fortitude and build character, if we demonstrate faith and love, he will bestow upon us, not because we've earned it, but because he's gracious enough to give it, a magnificent hope."

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And Paul says, "That hope does not disappoint us, for it is the power of God poured into us by the Holy Spirit." Life may be hard for Christians, just as it is for everyone else. But for Christians, there is an inner hope, that hope of which Emily Dickinson wrote. She said, "Hope is the thing that perches in the soul with feathers

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and sings a tune without words and never stops at all." Let us pray. O God, bless, if you will, in great mercy this simple witness in thy name. May it find welcome in the hearts which thy spirit has prepared,

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for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]