Hope Against Hope

Romans 5:1-11

June 15, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“We boast in our sufferings, for suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” My wonderful Dutch New Testament professor at Princeton, Chris Beker, used to start his class each year on Romans by reading that passage and then saying in his thickly accented English, “What is this bull_ _ _”

Then he would go on a harangue wondering how any pastor could tell a parent whose child had died or a family who had lost their home in a hurricane or those who had survived Auschwitz that they should boast in their sufferings and welcome them as a character-building exercise.

Wasn’t this just so much easy Christian mumbo jumbo, like that pronounced by TV preachers like Robert Schuller, who had just visited our campus and told us that the message of the cross was that God would “turn our scars into stars?”

And every year, after Dr. Beker’s outburst, the students would sit there, in dumbfounded silence, wondering how they had gotten such a faithless professor or how they were supposed to write about this on the test.

What we all learned eventually was that Chris had a deep belief in these words of Paul, a belief born of his own deep suffering, but a belief so profound that he used to get very annoyed with those, like Schuller, who so simplified what Paul was saying as to make it trite. He hated those preachers who talked about this in a way that denied the reality of the suffering of the world or called those who suffered to give thanks to God for letting them be in pain. “Paul is not a masochist, nor is God,” he would say.

What most of us would not learn until near the end of Dr. Beker’s life was that his theology of suffering and hope came out of his experience as a young man in the Netherlands during World War II. When the Nazis needed laborers in their war factories, they rounded up young men and women in occupied countries, including the Netherlands. Dr. Beker’s family hid him when he was 18, but then he turned himself in to save his father, a pastor in the Reformed Church, from being arrested. He was sent to Berlin where he worked in a factory making U-Boat equipment until he contracted typhus. The illness nearly killed him, and, because someone whose identity he never discovered pulled some strings, he was sent back home to recover. It was poignant to him to remember that Anne Frank died of typhus in a concentration camp, while he, as a Christian, was able to go home to recover. After recovery, he once again had to go into hiding to prevent being captured and sent back to Berlin, surviving near starvation by eating tulip bulbs.

Although this war experience shaped his theology (and contributed to a lifetime of dealing with manic-depression), he never spoke about it, not even to his family, until 1968 when he was severely beaten by someone he called an American “superpatriot” during a demonstration in which Beker and others were protesting the Vietnam War outside Fort Dix in New Jersey. Even then, he told little of the story until he wrote a book a few years before he died entitled Suffering and Hope. Much of my thinking on the subject, and on this passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, is influenced by Chris Beker’s teaching and writing.

Beker was certainly right in his initial response to this passage. Anyone who has suffered knows that one’s first response to suffering is not, “Wow, this is great because now I’m going to learn endurance and build character!” Our usual response to suffering is weariness, anger, frustration, and, in the case of deep suffering, often hopelessness. The weariness and anger may eventually pass, but it is the hopelessness that has the greatest potential to keep us in a place of suffering and separate us from the healing love of God and other people. That is why Paul so stresses throughout this letter to the persecuted Christians in Rome that hope is central to our faith and that hope will never disappoint us. Beker writes that for Christians, the whole point about suffering is not that we suffer (for the human condition is pervaded with suffering and that is news to no one who has survived adolescence), but how we suffer, whether in the midst of suffering there is a horizon of hope in sight beyond suffering. (Suffering and Hope, preface).

The story of Abraham and Sarah offers a glimpse of this conundrum. I understand the pain of what the Bible calls “barrenness,” although the experience for Sarah was much worse as her culture saw a woman’s highest value as bearer of children, and because Abraham had been promised that he would be the father of a great nation. She had watched him take Hagar as a concubine and watched her bear a son for him. Now Sarah was way past menopause, a bitter and hopeless woman as we have seen in how she treated Hagar. Walter Brueggemann comments that Abraham and Sarah “have by this time . . . accepted that hopelessness as ‘normal.’ The promise [of a son] does not meet them in receptive hopefulness but in resistant hopelessness.” (Genesis commentary, Interpretation series, 159). Sarah’s laughter at the words of God’s messengers is not joyous, but bitter and sad.

So God asks Abraham a critical question. “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” This is the central faith question. Abraham is asked if he has faith that God can act in this or any situation of hopelessness. There are never guarantees given to anyone in scripture that God will act to do exactly what we want when we want it in the way we want it. Even Jesus, after all, was denied his request in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup should pass from him. But the guarantee Paul does give later in the letter to the Romans is that God is able to work everything ultimately for good for those who trust, for those who open themselves to the possibility of faith. Faith means doing what Sarah could not do: taking God seriously. God can do something with and for those who trust and are receptive to God’s working in them. It’s much harder to work with and for those who have given in to a resistant hopelessness, for they will miss even what God does do for them.

In the midst of suffering, then, Paul asserts that God always moves toward us. Hope, which comes out of faith, is our movement toward God, our reaching out to receive whatever it is that God reaches out to give us, even if it is not exactly the way we would solve the problem. For many years I could not understand why God did not just fix my infertility as God had fixed Sarah’s. Only when I gave up my control over the solution to this problem was I ready to receive the solution God offered.

Finally, notice that Paul’s language in this passage is plural. If we sit in our individual suffering and hopelessness, we may indeed be lost. Dr. Beker writes that “our personal suffering and hope must be seen in solidarity with every form of suffering in God’s world: personal, systemic, and ecological.” (Suffering and Hope, preface) Paul makes this clear. Christ suffered with and for us, so we are to be in solidarity with all who suffer. As Christ called us to hope for and trust in God’s goodness and the ultimate coming of God’s kingdom in which every tear shall be dried, so we are called to embody that hope, even in the midst of our own suffering. We are called to reach out to those who are meeting suffering with hopelessness and embrace them with our embodied hope, as Christ embraced us. There is the potential for all suffering to be transformational for individuals and communities, that’s what Paul is saying in today’s text, but only if there is solidarity and hope in the midst of it. Solidarity and hope bring us the power of endurance, the patience we need in the midst of any suffering. Solidarity with others who have suffered and holding onto hope that God is still present are the works of the Holy Spirit in and through us. This does not mean trite catch phrases and simple, empty promises, but the profound faith that, in Walter Brueggemann’s words, “the present loss is not the last truth” and God is not finished with this world full of suffering. (from paper for Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies, April 12, 1998). It means receptive hopefulness in the face of resistant hopelessness. All of this is grounded not in some fairy tale hope of living happily ever after, but in the promise of the one who suffered and died on a cross yet rose from the dead and lives to love us.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is a long theological argument that develops as he writes, so that he continues to comment on and complete his thinking as the letter goes on. He returns to the themes of chapter 5 in chapter 8. In that chapter, Paul expands on both suffering and hope. These are indeed the words of life for us. He writes “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us.” He writes “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.” Finally, this man who has suffered all his life with some unknown physical affliction (“the thorn in my flesh”), who has been beaten, thrown into prison, nearly drowned, blinded and thrown out of more towns than most of us have lived in, who, in short, knew what he was talking about when he spoke of suffering, writes, “What, then, are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us…Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors 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.” Amen, and amen.