Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:3-9)

 

 

     It's something we've probably all seen at one time or another – usually in a movie or on a TV show about the Old West in the United States. It's the infamous “Wanted” poster. It's usually hung in either the Post Office or the Sheriff's Office. It's what we would call today the “mug shot” of some heinous criminal – a murderer or a bank robber or a cattle rustler – and the poster usually makes it point briefly: “Wanted: Dead Or Alive!” It seems that from the perspective of the authorities, “dead or alive” doesn't really matter. Either way will do. And, given the rough and tumble nature of frontier justice, I suspect that most of the citzenry would rather see the poster captioned with the words: “Wanted: Dead NOT  Alive!” It was the way of the West, after all. Frontier justice; vigilante action. Death? Life? Living? Dead? It didn't really matter. Let's just take care of the problem. That tended to be the attitude.

 

     I started thinking about the old Wanted posters when I read this passage from 1 Peter, and came across the verse that says “In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead ...” “A living hope.” The words intrigued me. At the very least they raised a few questions for me. Can there be any other kind of hope, I wondered? Doesn't “hope” in a sense have to be living, since hope impacts our lives? Something that's dead can't really impact our lives, so how could we have anything other than “a living hope?” And yet, the fact that the phrase even gets used seems to suggest that Peter at least must have thought there was an alternative. So, hope doesn't have to be “living.” It must be possible to have a dead hope – sort of like a dead faith, which the letter of James tells us is possible. And maybe the more basic question that occurred to me was – what, exactly, is “hope”? What do we mean when we use that word? Let's talk first about the difference between a living hope and a dead hope.

 

     What would a dead hope actually look like? At first, I have to admit that I had some trouble getting my head around the concept of a dead hope. It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it. I mean – hope is a good thing! Hope keeps us going when the temptation might be there to give up. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is indeed a type of dead hope; a hope that doesn't give life, but that rather deadens us and dulls us. George Orwell understood this kind of dead hope rather well. I'm thinking here of his famous novel “1984.” Written in 1948 (Orwell just reversed the last two numbers of the year to give the novel its then futuristic sound), “1984” was a description of a nightmare society – one in which lies had become the truth; where language was used to manipulate and control rather than to explain and clarify; where war was a permanent way of life; where people now existed merely to serve the system. Life in such a society was, indeed, a nightmare, and the sad thing, quite frankly, is that some of Orwell's vision sounds rather familiar to us today, doesn't it. Shall we continue on with the familiarity? Orwell understood that the people living machine-like existences in such a society would have to be given the illusion of hope, just to keep them under control, and so – voila! - the lottery! The lottery promised a huge windfall to some lucky person in that society. People's hopes and dreams for the future revolved around the lottery, the hope that they could win big, and that their winnings could lift them out of their miserable existence. We have lotteries galore in the modern world! Late last year in the United States, the Mega-Millions lottery offered a prize of $586 million! The number of possible winning combinations were 259 million. The odds of anyone winning were astronomical. But people bought tickets – in huge numbers. Stephen Goldbart and Joan DiFuria reflected on what some call “lottery-itis” in an article in Psychology Today that 

 

 in times of economic stress, playing the lottery is a way of coping with  financial anxieties and uncertainty. We may seek a magic pill to make us feel better. Ah yes, buy a lottery ticket. Feel again like you did when you were a child, having hope that a better day will come, that some big thing will happen that will make everything right, set the course on track.

 

     A recent survey by the Bank of Montreal suggested that 34% of Canadians hope they win the lottery, and 14% of Canadians believe that winning the lottery is the only way they can finance their retirements. Folks, that's sad – and it represents a dead hope. It's not a living hope; it doesn't give life. It's a sign of being afraid of life, of having no hope. Planning to win the lottery isn't hope – it's at best wishful thinking and at worst delusional. It's hoping in something that gives no real hope. It's pointless. But 14% of Canadians think winning the lottery might be their only hope once they turn 65. George Orwell would be proud of his soothsaying abilities!

 

     But if there's a dead hope, then there must also be a living hope. What would that be? What is the “living hope” that Peter writes about? A living hope, it seems to me would be that which frees us from fear and releases us from the need to engage merely in wishful or delusional thinking and that fills us with confidence as we face the future. For a child of God, “living hope” is a sign of the relationship we have with God. The Psalms taken together portray an almost symbiotic relationship. Psalm 42:5 tells us to “put [our] hope in God,” and Psalm 62:5 tells us that “our hope comes from [God.]” God gives us hope that we then direct back at God. Hope becomes the sign of our faith and our trust in God. It's a “living faith” because it enables us to face our circumstances (whatever they might be) with the assurance that something better is coming. Paul says in Romans that “hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” We as children of God believe that God has a plan that's somehow coming to fruition even as we gather here today. We don't know all the details, but we believe. Our relationship with God and all that we've come to know about God through Jesus have convinced us. We don't know the details, and we don't have to, because we have faith, and the Book of Hebrews tells us that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” It isn't wishful thinking. It's not a forlorn hope that just maybe we'll survive in retirement by winning the lottery in spite of the odds against it. “Living hope” is “confidence.” It is believing in what we hope for. It's what Jesus called for. “Trust in God; trust also in Me,” He said in John 14:1. He's inviting His disciples into hope with those words. Trust, confidence, assurance, belief. These things are what make hope “living” rather than dead.

 

     So, what is hope? I'll be thinking about that question more next week. But if you remember back to Easter Sunday, you might recall that I suggested that the biggest challenge facing the church today is a loss of hope – or at least the loss of a “living hope.” Too often, the church settles for surviving as best it can for as long as it can – and when we do that, we do it at the expense of truly living the gospel with passion and with joy. The passion and the joy that we as the church and as disciples of Jesus should possess should fill us with hope – real hope, living hope, hope that gives life to ourselves and to others who encounter us. It's the hope of Easter. It's the hope of resurrection. It's the hope that no matter how tough things might seem to be, hope is always there, pushing us outward into the world with a message that can raise even the deadest of spirits who are trapped in mere wishful and wistful hope for something that will never happen; it's a message for those who – even worse - who've given up on hope altogether. We offer the world not what we wish for, but what we believe; what we know to be true. We offer the world Jesus – risen from the dead, and with us still today and forever.