Scripture gives us a lot of options. In the first letter to the Corinthians we read that “faith hope and love…” are essential, but ‘the greatest of these is love.’ The letter to the Hebrews makes an argument for the importance of faith. And here in Romans, hope is given its moment in the spotlight.

Hope as the product of our sufferings – the end result of a life full of challenge and complication. Hope – a most difficult attitude to maintain these days.

The author of the letter to the Romans  – like each of the authors of what we know call the new testament – is not trying. To convince us to have faith. They assume we are faithful – or, at least know what it means to have faith in something.

They offer their experience and the stories of the great ancestors – Abraham, Sarah and their extended family – as fuel for the fire of our own faith. The idea seems to be that by the endurance of the people in the past, we might be encouraged. They suffered and survived – so can we. An admirable sentiment.

Faith can certainly offer us comfort in challenging times – providing a foundation for our journey toward an uncertain future. Love may indeed ‘bear all things, believe all things hope all things endure all things…’ but to say with confidence that our hope does not disappoint us may be a bridge too far.

Hope is the weapon in our arsenal that may be blunted by continued use.

We use hope like some sort of life line. Hope is an automatic option when things are going badly. ‘I hope everyone is alright…I hope the fighting stops…I hope that those in charge can find a solution…’ We use hope as a curtain to block out reality. As an excuse to ignore things that we think are too big for us to manage.

But hope is better than that.

As we sit here this morning, most of us are ‘hopeful.’ There are horrible things going on. The United States of America has never seemed less united. Canada has a new government, but no new solutions to a host of our problems. Fires rage in the west – war continues in the middle east, in Ukraine – in central Africa…and most of us are hopeful that solutions will be found before things get out of hand. We are hopeful in the vague, uncertain manner of those who acknowledge that these global scale catastrophes are beyond our influence – that we are just small pieces on a giant game board, working our way toward something we can’t see. We are hopeful that the in-built rules of the game will express themselves over the long haul, and that all will be well.

And for most of us here, all will be well.

But the biblical view of hope is not contained by such limited boundaries as the ones we draw around ourselves and those we love. A biblical hope is universal and comprehensive and covers all the problems that we can see…and all that we haven’t imagined yet. This hope is founded in the admission that, while we can’t always influence the outcome of a global conflict or an environmental disaster, each of us and all of us are connected – through our shared humanity, and our mutual dependance on the bounty and diversity of creation – to the mysterious movement of time and space that carries us through our present problems into a future with different problems. And along the way, we live. We love. We create. We adapt. We find ways to find a way.

It’s possible that the most important exploration of that kind of hope is offered in the gospels – in the slow, sad passage of time between the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, and his improbable, incredible resurrection. This would seem to have been a weekend bereft of love, faith and hope – especially hope. And while we are told that Jesus’ friends gathered in fear – in locked rooms – in clouded Greif – still, they gathered together.

There was something stronger than the death of their friend that compelled them to stay together.

Roman brutality should have shattered their faith, but it could not extinguish their hope. So long as there are people who share a desire for something better – for a fairer, more equitable, more joyful and just society, there is hope. For as long as there are those who remember the story of Jesus – a story that lurches from the despair of the tomb to the delight of the resurrection – there is hope.

Even as the greed and arrogance of humanity tries to draw the curtain of doom down on itself – with the foolishness of war and the prideful arrogance of tyranny – as long as we are able to act in love and show grace, or in any small way suggest that the light has not gone our of the world – even here, even now, hope remains.

And that hope will not disappoint us.