… we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people— the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven … (Colossians 1:4)

Hope.  A bit hard to define, isn’t it?  Is it primarily a feeling that things will work out in the future?  Isn’t it pretty similar to faith – and how does it differ?  Is the “hope of the gospel” the same thing as the “hope my team wins the championship”?

Hopefully, hope will come into clearer focus for us over these next weeks, as we consider together Christ, The Hope of Glory.  We’re spending these weeks leading up to Christmas in just one chapter of Scripture, Colossians 1, concentrating on verses 15-29.  Last week we looked at the supremacy of Christ: he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn from the dead, the one in whom all things hold together, the one who is supreme in everything.  This week, we’ll look at the work of Christ, diving into the what and how of all that Christ has accomplished for his people, and what it means for us to live in the hope we have in him.

The word hope appears three times in Colossians 1.  This morning, we’re going to step out of our assigned passage to look at the first use of hope in the chapter (verse 4).  Paul writes to the believers in Colossae that the glad news of their faith, their love and their hope has reached him.  We’ve likely heard before of this “trinity” of virtues, faith, hope and love: “faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

In Colossians 1, Paul makes an interesting move: he writes of “the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven.”  Faith is central, love is the greatest, but hope is the ground from which they spring.

In our modern “psychologized” world, we tend to think of faith, hope and love primarily as feelings, as emotional states.  Paul wasn’t writing to “psychologized” people; for him – and it must become true for us as well – faith, hope and love were virtues, practices, ways of living.  They are more like verbs than nouns or adjectives.  Faith, hope and love are things we do, ways we live, not only feelings we have.  

Hope is the way we live now according to the future that is ours in Christ.  Without hope, what is the point of faith and love?  Hope begins with the intuition that the way I am, and the way the world is, are not the way they ought to be.  The desire for justice, the love of beauty and the despair over its loss, the hunger to seek and perhaps find truth are all expressions of hope.  When the seed of the Gospel is sown into the ground of hope, faith and love begin to germinate and grow.

Christ is the future.  Hope is the capacity to see everything that is going on – politics, wars, ecological distress, economic injustice, demographic decline and all the rest – and to also see what some politicians, generals, economists, experts and leaders can’t or won’t see: that God is at work, bringing God’s future into our present.  The rulers and authorities of our age miss the work of God because it typically looks like a mustard seed, like good grain growing in the midst of weeds, like the one true pearl in a crowded bazaar of costume jewelry.  Like a death on a cross.

Hope sees, and because of what it sees, hope goes into action, nourishing faith, nurturing love, welcoming God’s future by living aligned with that future now.

Lord Jesus, in this Advent season, bless your people with your hope, the hope of the gospel that transforms the way we live.  Deliver us from both hopelessness and from hoping in the wrong things.  Grant us to see and to nurture the tiny green shoots of your work among and around us.  Ground us in hope, that we might mature in faith and deepen in love, all to the praise of your glory.  Amen.