Hope is to the soul what oxygen is to the body – Advent Hope, Part 2

This week I once again welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor of 30 years who now works in international fair trade.

While I was serving in the coal regions (as I mentioned in the previous post), I graduated from seminary, and after seminary I sought opportunities to continue my education. I participated in a program after seminary called Preaching Today, which is an educational program run by the folks at Christianity Today to help young pastors better hone their skills in preaching to a changing culture. At the time (late 1990s), I received a cassette tape in the mail every month that had several sermons on it from leading pastors around the country and the world, and a recorded seminar on the art of preaching. As I listened, Preaching Today really helped me grow as a preacher.

While I was serving churches in Pennsylvania’s declining anthracite coal region, thinking about all of the matter of hope and how important it was for my ministry, I heard an Easter sermon on one of those cassettes. I can’t remember the name of the preacher—I wish I could—but I do remember the sermon was about the hope of the resurrection. The preacher said something that really resonated with me, giving words to what I was experiencing with my people facing hopelessness. He said, “Hope is to the human soul what oxygen is to the human body.”

Think about that. Your human body can be in great shape and can have a lot of things going for it, but if it lacks oxygen for even a relatively short period of time, that’s very, very dangerous and can even be fatal. Perhaps you’ve heard stories of otherwise very healthy people suffocating or drowning because they lose oxygen, or they can’t get oxygen.

Just as oxygen is absolutely vital to our physical bodies, so is hope to our souls. In this video, notice how the young man makes mention of his mother not being able to breathe when terrible news came to their family.

That’s that feeling in our soul when we lose hope. Hope is like oxygen to our souls. I remember, too, in the middle of my time in the coal regions trying to bring hope to lots of hopeless people and I shouldn’t mischaracterize that.

In the churches that I served in the coal regions, I had the privilege of serving two of them. There were many fine people who had found that they could put their hope not in an industry or not in economics, but had put their hope in the Lord Jesus Christ and were trying to live in light of that hope. I had the privilege of helping them to do that as their pastor; it was a wonderful experience as we tried to share that hope with others.

In the middle of my time there, a new district superintendent in the E.C. Church, became the leader of the geographical area in which my church was located. I remember vividly the day he came and met with me. We sat down in the basement of one of the churches I was serving and he said, “What is it that you are trying to do here at Christ Church in Lavelle?” I remember loving to hear that question because I was able to tell him the same thing that I am writing in this post about how we were trying to bring the hope of Jesus to a very depressed area of the country.

I responded to the district superintendent, “I’m excited to share the hope of the Lord Jesus Christ with the people,” and I showed him a recent weekly bulletin. On those bulletins, we printed a tagline that said our goal was to share the hope of Christ with a needy world.

He seemed unimpressed by that.

He said to me, “Well, yes, Kirk, but what are you doing to get more people to come to your church? What are you doing to reach out to kids so that more people will come? You know, your budget is very tight here. What are you doing to make sure you have enough money to see things through to the end? This is a very old building here. What are you doing to keep this building up?”

He didn’t seem to want to talk about hope.

He wanted to talk about a lot of other practical things about the church. I remember being disconcerted by that, but unafraid to continue to preach the message of hope. That wouldn’t be the first time or the last time that I would have a disagreement with denominational leadership about what gospel ministry is all about.

As ministers of the gospel, we are to share hope.

Then something else happened that gave words to my understanding of hope.

In the year 2000, I read a book. It wasn’t a new book. It was an old book, a classic book of theology written in 1964 by a German theologian named Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope.

In that book, Moltmann writes that from first to last, not only in its conclusion, Christianity is hope. It is forward-looking. Christianity is forward-moving, and therefore always revolutionizing and transforming the present. Moltmann points out that the God that we find in the Bible is the God of hope. In Romans chapter 15, verse 13, the Apostle Paul writes that God has the future in view. God encounters us in the promises he makes to us about the future and therefore we await in an active hope.

Moltmann gave words to what I was trying to say in my pastoral ministry in the coal regions. Christianity isn’t just a thing we do. It’s not just a religion. It’s not something we’re a member of. It’s not just a belief system. It isn’t even a faith. It’s a hope.

Christianity is the thing we’ve put our trust in for life, for eternity, for how to live this life and how to really know what it means to have life. Christianity is that hope, and we find it in the promises that God has given to us. I’m grateful to Dr. Moltmann for that insight.

Dr. Moltmann actually passed away this year, well into his 90s, a legend in Christian theology, and a great help to me in understanding this matter of hope. I want to tell you, too, that this matter of hope isn’t just something that I preached about and thus was limited to my pastoral ministry.

Hope is a personal thing. I had to live in that hope as well as preach about it. There have been numerous times in my life where my hope was challenged, and it became thin and maybe even weak sometimes. In the next post I’ll tell you about one of those experiences.

Photo by I Wayan Dirgayusa on Unsplash