Transcript
Hear now the word of God as it is read from the letter to the Galatians, the fifth chapter beginning at the second verse. Now I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen from grace. For
through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ, Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love. This is the word of the Lord, let us pray. Let the good news come now, O Lord, not only in word, but in power. In the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, we pray. Amen. A few years back, the Philadelphia Phillies had a sensational
relief pitcher named Tug McGraw. If my memory serves me correctly, he won the Cy Young Award that season for being the best pitcher in the National League. A reporter asked him, following a game, how he dealt with the pressures of his work. Night after night, he would be called upon to enter the game in a clutch situation. It might be the bottom of the ninth inning, the bases loaded, no outs. He was expected to save the
game. How in the world do you handle that kind of pressure, the reporter asked. It's easy, Tug McGraw replied. I merely keep the game in the perspective of my snowball philosophy of life. Noticing the perplexed expression on the face of the reporter, Tug McGraw went on to explain, You see, I believe that in a billion years or so, the sun will burn out. And when that happens, the earth will drift off into outer space and become
a giant snowball. On that day, who will care or even remember that Tug McGraw won or lost a baseball game? In one sense, that is a healthy perspective to have on the activities of our lives. It reminds us that many of the tasks we undertake are not nearly as important as we believe them to be. Our understanding of final examinations and term papers, for example, might look different if viewed in that perspective. In another sense, however,
such a vision of the end of the world is disastrous for human life. For it represents a philosophy in which our existence is ultimately meaningless. Many today believe that a more likely scenario is that the world will end not as a snowball in a billion years or so, but as a fireball of atomic conflagration in their own lifetime. Commentators on the youth culture of today tell us that it is precisely this fear which is responsible for
the attitude that says, If you must sail on the Titanic, you should go first class. And thus, the incredible hedonism of our culture, the unwillingness of so many to postpone the gratification of any desire for the sake of a greater future good. The unavoidable truth is that how we view the future determines how we live the present. If we adopt the cynical philosophy of a Tug McGraw, we are indeed liberated from taking our lives too seriously.
But we are also robbed of any reason to take our life seriously at all. If we live in fear of imminent destruction through an atomic cataclysm, then we are freed from the responsibility of living now in the light of the future, a future that may never be. But we are also cheated out of the joys that can come to us only if we have a future. Either way, we are condemned to living without hope. For the
Christian, however, living in hope is the corollary of living in faith. Faith without hope is, in New Testament terms at least, a logical contradiction. Christian faith is, by definition, a faith with a future, a faith with an ultimate future. Whether the world ends as a snowball or a fireball or in some other way is absolutely irrelevant. By faith, we dare to live by the conviction that the purposes of God for the creation will be realized in
us and for us. The Pauline phrase, the righteousness of God is theological shorthand for the covenant faithfulness of God to the creation. The world, Paul believed, exists not only in relation to God, but it exists under the promises of God. When he tells the readers of his letter to the Galatians that through the Spirit by faith we wait for the hope of righteousness, the Apostle is referring precisely to that future fulfillment of God's covenant promise. In
the righteousness of God, the world will end one day in the realization of righteousness rather than in the realization of our fears of destruction. Because faith is occasioned and sustained by the presence and power of the Spirit in human life, the Spirit is the ground of our hope. Authentic spirituality then manifests itself in a life not of cynicism, in a life not of fear, but in a life of hope. One measure of our spirituality is the
degree to which we live, hopefully, in a world that itself increasingly offers us no reason to hope. In hope, we wait for righteousness. We wait because the fulfillment of God's covenant promise is primarily the responsibility of God. The question is, what are we to do while we're waiting? Many look upon waiting as a passive activity, a time for twiddling our thumbs, or worse, sitting on our hands. But not so for Paul. Waiting, in his view, is
a time for doing what matters in the light of hope, a time of faith working through love. You see, the faith that waits is also the faith that works. Pierre Etienne was a Protestant theological student in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. In 1944, he and his classmates decided to join the French resistance movement. Their task was to hide allied pilots who had been shot down over France. They would take them into the seminary
and register them as students of divinity. And if you don't see the humor in that, you have no sense of humor. Then they would arrange for a boat to take these pilots back across the Channel to England. Pastor Etienne says, we knew we were not going to win the war with that kind of underground activity. No, no. The war would be won on that great day when the armies of the allies came with irresistible force, landed
on our shores, and drove out the enemy. Then why did we risk our lives doing these little things for the allied cause? Because we wanted to be working for that cause when the great day came. That applies directly to the Christian life. Because we wait in hope by faith for that great day when the purposes of God for the creation will be realized, when the promises of God will be fulfilled for us and in us, we
work in love by faith. That is keeping faith with those purposes and those promises. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Let us pray. Amen. Even in our cynicism and in our fear, O God, we hope for many things. We hope to pass Greek and Hebrew. We hope that the end of the semester will come soon. Many are hoping for that call which they have dreamed of for
so long and worked so hard to prepare themselves for. We hope for peace in our time, for peace around the world, for the liberation of all people. We hope for so many things, trivial and incredible. And we ask now that you will give us that horizon hope. The hope that is born of your spirit at work in our hearts. The hope that what we have tasted of your love is but a guarantee or a down payment
on that fulfillment of your promises and the realization of your purpose. That we, no matter how discouraging the times and the situations, may ever be a truly hopeful people. Lift up our eyes from the immediate to the ultimate. And grant us such an experience of your spirit. That we may not only wait by faith in hope, but keep faith with your purposes and your promises as our faith works itself out day by day, year by year,
in love. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.