Sight Unseen

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.20.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Romans 8:12-25

Nobody in their right mind buys anything important without taking a good hard look at it first.

When you’re buying a *cough* pre-owned car, you don’t just order it and have it show up at your door. You want to inspect the paint for blemishes. You want to check the wheels for dings and damage and check the tires for wear. You pop open the hood and stare at the engine, stroke your chin, and make a few comments so that you’ll seem like you actually know a thing about engines. Hmmm. Is that dipstick carbon fibre?

Then you have drive it, to get a sense of how comfortable it is and how well it actually runs. How smoothly does it shift? You turn down the stereo and concentrate on it. How well does it brake? You find a spot and hit the brakes hard. How does it perform in a sudden evasive maneuver? You make a hard sudden lane change to find out. How long can you balance it on two wheels? That last one isn’t really necessary, but the salespeople always enjoy it. If it passes all of those tests, after you’re sure you know the car inside and out, then and only then would you consider buying it.

When you’re buying a house, you don’t just show up and write a check. You hire a home inspector. You have professionals pore over the house at every level. You check the foundation for cracks. You check the insulation and the quality of the windows and the water flow around the house. And it’s not just the house you examine. You check out the neighborhood around the house, and the quality of the schools and the resale values over time. It matters. You want to know every last possible detail you can before you hand your soul over to the bank at six-and-a-quarter percent for the next thirty years.

When we can’t physically see the thing, like when we’re buying online, we check double extra carefully. What’s the seller’s reputation? You check that they’re trusted, that they have all the right reviews of their service. What’s the product’s reputation? You check out consumer reviews and industry magazines and listen to the voices of level-headed friends who’ve owned the product.

We want to have a full and complete grasp of the things we buy before we buy them, because we know if we don’t, we’ll be disappointed. We need to have a complete grasp of every last thing we’re going to possess, because trust just isn’t ever a factor when it comes to our lives as consumers. If we have to have a motto, it is caveat emptor, which means “buyer beware.” And so we are wary, always careful and on our guard.

But today, we heard the Apostle Paul tell us a little bit about what it will mean when the promise of Christ is fulfilled. You’ve been hearing a whole bunch of preaching on the Book of Romans these last few weeks, and today, I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear, will be no exception.

As we reach the middle of chapter eight of this highly complex letter, Paul has just finished giving us an explanation the role of the law and the role of faith in our salvation. It’s an argument that he begins in chapter one, and that ends at the end of this chapter. It ain’t an easy read.

When the Apostle Paul starts describing the end results of faith, the results of our struggle to embrace and serve God in this life, what’s interesting is the degree to which he managed to couch the end result of that struggle in terms that aren’t matter of fact. His writing here isn’t about the specifics. The struggle is deeply there, the groaning and the effort of faith, but the reward...well...Paul there gets a little coy.

He speaks about life governed by the Holy Spirit, but that’s in the now and not in the fulfillment of God’s time. He speaks about a glory to be revealed, but then he doesn’t actually reveal it. Paul speaks instead in soaring and rhythmic cadences, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty of what awaits us in glory...we don’t hear details. What we get instead is Paul telling us about hope.

This bugs us. We don’t want hope. We want to see the end product, or at least a highly informational brochure. We want to have evidence of everything that God has intended for us, right there in front of us. We want to see our rightness with the Big Guy played out across everything we do. We want evidence of our successful career, we want to drop three inches from our waistline, we want the Lord to miraculously improve the mileage we’re getting. Having those things right in front of us would be tremendously confidence building. We’d know exactly what we were getting in for.

Unfortunately for us, that’s not how God works. Instead of that absolute, you-can-touch-it-you-can-feel-it certainty, we approach God and the fulfillment of God’s promise with hope. And as the Apostle Paul puts it so bluntly, hope is not certainty. I do not hope that which I know. Hope is about trust, and that means that hope includes an element of doubt, at least some small sprinkle of not-knowing. To have hope is about a yearning for a future reality that you don’t quite yet grasp.

Hope is, in fact, something viewed as essential to the Christian journey. In verse 24 of today’s reading, the New Revised Standard Version translation says that “in hope we were saved.” The NIV says “in this hope we were saved.” The King James says “by hope we were saved.” Somehow, our willingness to accept the unknowability of what God has intended for us...to accept it’s goodness but know that some things will have to be anticipated...that abiding hopefulness is an important part of our salvation.

Hope surfaces at other places in Romans, and it is woven up deeply with the fulfillment of the faithful life.

It’s that hope that we’ve got to embrace whenever we turn ourselves towards the future. For all of our planning and careful mapping out of every possible option before us, the future isn’t something that we can hold in our hands. We can try to take that good, hard look at our futures...but the reality of what lies before us is not known to us and can’t be known to us...until we get there.

That’s doubly true about what God has in store for us. Yes, we can’t touch it. Yes, we can’t feel it. But it’s not a product. It’s not a commodity. It’s not something we go out and buy. We can’t think of it that way, because that way of thinking has nothing to do with God.

Think of it, instead, as a present, a gift given to us by someone who loves us. Nothing ruins the joy of getting a gift like knowing exactly what it is beforehand.

So have hope. Don’t try to spoil the surprise.