Romans 15:7-13
December 7, 2025
Welcome one another, therefore, just as
Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ
has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order
that he might confirm the promises given to the ancestors and that the
gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will confess
you among the gentiles
and sing praises to your name”;
and again he says,
“Rejoice, O gentiles,
with his people”;
and again,
“Praise the Lord, all you
gentiles,
and let all the peoples praise him”;
and again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse shall
come,
the one who rises to rule the gentiles;
in him the gentiles shall hope.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy
and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy
Spirit.
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Let’s
do a quick review to see who was paying attention in Sunday School. Fill in the blank.
“Faith, hope, and love abide – these three. And the greatest of these is love .” [I Corinthians 13]
“
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things unseen.” [Hebrews 11]
“For in hope we
were saved. Now hope that
is seen is not hope
. For who hopes
for what is seen? But if we hope for
what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” [Romans 8:24-25]
Right.
Of those three, hope is the middle
child, the one that is always there in the background but who generally gets
the least attention. Not that hope is
totally ignored. Here’s the state flag
of Rhode Island. And here are regular
guests on the old Prarie Home Companion: the Hopeful Gospel Quartet. But we don’t really pay a lot of attention to
hope as a concept or as a virtue, and I think there’s a good reason for that.
We speak
of hope glibly when things are going well. Hope comes into serious play, though, when
things are going badly. There are points
where we actively start to look for hope and sources of hope, at first within
ourselves and then beyond ourselves in sort of a sliding scale.
I hope there’s something good in my email.
I hope there’s nothing bad in my email.
I hope my email stops telling me there’s an
error.
I hope I can figure this out.
I hope my email hasn’t been hacked.
I hope none of this affects my other accounts
or programs.
I hope
my entire computer isn’t infected with malware.
I hope somebody answers the assistance
number; I’ve been waiting for an hour.
I
hope this nightmare ends before Christmas.
I know that sounds trivial, but tell me you haven’t
been there.
Now transfer that to a
larger background, and translate it into the experience of Israel. In fact, you can sort of track this
progression throughout the words of the prophets over a period of centuries.
I hope that the national leaders begin to
acknowledge the Lord’s ways.
I hope that their malfeasance doesn’t weaken
our society.
I hope that our enemies don’t take advantage
of our division.
I hope that the invaders can be driven away.
I hope we survive this occupation.
I hope God hasn’t given up on us.
Don’t bother. It’s hopeless.
That last thought comes
from the prophet Jeremiah in the book of Lamentations, where he says to God,
“Why have you forgotten us completely?
Why
have you forsaken us these many days?
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we
may be restored;
renew
our days as of old –
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and
are angry at us beyond measure.” [Lamentations 5:20-22]
Yet there is a step
beyond hopelessness. There is one more
word, one where somebody says, “I hope to have some hope again someday.”
The prophet Isaiah spoke that word to his people. He looked at the destruction that he had
seen. No less than Jeremiah, he had
beheld the horrors that went with the overthrow of a kingdom and the demolition
of the Temple where his people met the glory of God, cutting them off from the
source of their very being, taking away their identity as his people,
undercutting their belief in God’s power, seemingly to belie his profession of
love toward them and to emphasize that he didn’t care what happened, if he even
existed. Isaiah knew that, too.
Then he spoke, saying,
“A shoot shall come out of the stump of
Jesse,
and a branch shall grow
out of his roots.” [Isaiah 11:1]
That’s Jesse, the father
of David. Hope was there. After all that had gone on, you cannot keep
God from beginning again. Hope is built
into the very nature of things, and cannot be kept down any more than you can
keep a stump from putting out a new shoot.
There’s a Rose of Sharon bush out back, next to the kitchen door. I don’t know how many times I have cut it
back or even phacked at its roots, and every spring, it starts up again. Kudzu, honeysuckle, forsythia, bamboo – take your
choice – they find their way back, no matter what you try.
God had a purpose for the people of Israel and Judah to prepare
the way for the coming of his Son into the world, and that would not be
hindered. God has a purpose for the
coming of his Son into human hearts among people of all nations, and for his
Spirit to live in all of human life regardless of tribal or national or
personal histories. Neither will that be
hindered. Even when tragedies come along
that steal hope away, and that level everything back to the ground, hope will
grow again, watered by faith, and rooted and grounded in love – not our love
for God, which can come and go, but God’s love for us and for his whole world,
which is steadfast.
Name the disaster.
Name the source of despair. Name
the tragedy. There is hope when we hear
these questions asked honestly and not just avoided or brushed off.
“Who will separate us from the love of
Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or
peril or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day
long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than
victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to
come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” [Romans
8:35-39]
