I love public speaking, but that certainly hasn’t always been the case. The most difficult speech I ever gave was in my high school speech class. We were assigned to speak for 3-5 minutes about a valuable character quality, and I had chosen “hope”.  I began the day a little nervous, but too busy with other classes to worry too much about a speech near the end of the day.  Everything went pretty well until the period before my speech class – Calculus. We had an exam, and my brain kind of shut down on me. Usually – before and since – I’m really good at calculus exams. For some reason that day, I stumbled near the beginning of the exam, panicked, and never recovered. I walked out of the room in utter shock, knowing I had just gotten a 0, Z-E-R-O, on an exam because while I had done a lot of calculations, I hadn’t been able to answer a single one of the problems. And also knowing that I had less than 5 minutes to pull it together and be prepared to give a speech on “hope”.

I don’t actually remember any of the details of that speech, except that most of what I learned about hope that day had nothing to do with what I said. It’s all very well to spout pithy sayings when you’re not in the midst of a personal crisis (even one as minor, in retrospect, as a bad exam grade).  I certainly had plenty of hope before my exam: hope in my own mathematical prowess and exam-taking skills, predominantly. And I experienced the death of those hopes, because I’m not as perfect as my own self-idolatry would lead me to believe. In their place, I started to learn the truth of Romans 8:24-25, “…Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Ultimately, I also gained a new hope, not in my own abilities but in the mercy of my calculus teacher who allowed me an extra 15 minutes on my exam the next day to bring my grade up to a B.

Daniel introduced this week’s sermon with John 12:24, where Jesus, anticipating the culmination of his earthly ministry through his death and resurrection, says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” In Genesis 4, Adam and Eve were experiencing, for the very first time, the heartbreak of physical death. Beyond this, they experienced the death of hope. Rather than fulfilling God’s promise by bringing an end to the curse, Cain’s murder of Abel took the curse to a new level. His actions showed him to be truly the “seed of the serpent” rather than the promised “seed of the woman”.  Adam and Eve based their hope on Cain, as a result of an incomplete and flawed understanding of God’s promised redemption. That false hope had to die in order for the seed of God’s promise to bear fruit in God’s way and in His timing.

Are there hopes and dreams in your life that need to die? Are there areas where you’ve been holding on to your own idea of what God’s blessing looks like, rather than accepting the far greater blessing that God has in store for you? God’s grace rarely takes the form we expect. As Daniel pointed out in an earlier sermon, being driven out of Eden and prevented from eating from the Tree of Life was not only punishment but also part of God’s grace to Adam and Eve. In a sense the Christian life is a constant cycle of death and resurrection, of dying to sin and self and inadequate hopes and being reborn in Jesus to a new life of righteousness and true, eternal hope. Colossians 3:3-4 – “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

~ Joanna Hinks