We listen to Scripture week after week. Why?
We know pretty much what it says. What’s the point of going back over and over the same ground? Sometimes the familiarity may be comforting, sometimes it’s irritating, maybe more often we simple zone out and it washes over us.
Paul this week gives us one good reason why we keep returning to these ancient texts: “that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4-9). Rereading letters from someone who was dear to us can keep them alive for us, so rereading Scripture can sustain us. Paul knows very well that the Christian life requires endurance. It’s not in any way a free pass that makes everything easy and our problems vanish.
The Scriptures encourage and support us. But not in the sense of enabling us to grit our teeth and persevere come what may. “Whatever was written was that we might have hope”, Paul tells us. We don’t just endure, we have hope. We have hope in the most difficult of circumstances. Whether it may be in dying a martyr or facing the death of a child, we have hope. We have hope in circumstances where it is crazy, ridiculous, absurd to hope.
That hope is based on the proclamation of Scripture that the world is not as we see and experience it, that there is something more, something deeper, something different, beyond our day to day awareness. Our world is actually built on the love of God. No one in the great canon of Scripture expresses that more vividly than Isaiah. Today we hear of a fantasy world of peace and harmony (Isaiah 11:1-10). But this is not a fantasy world, it is the reality that underpins our world, our lives. We endure, we hope, because we believe that is the true nature of our world. In ways far beyond our understanding we believe that God is bringing all this to fulfillment. And it starts with the birth of a baby.