Reading through the commentaries to the Sabbath School Lesson posted on Spectrum’s home page, I was struck with how often hope is viewed both as a problem and as a matter of pride for Adventists, and how seldom prayer and passion are depicted as buoys for the human spirit.

On the one hand, we as Adventists struggle to keep hope alive in the face of history’s relentless inertia. As T. S. Elliot aptly portrays the fate of history through his protagonist, Thomas Beckett, in the play Murder in the Cathedral: "The Wheel turns and is forever still." The cycle of birth and death, happiness and sorrow, victory and loss seems unstoppable. Although George W. Bush’s policies on civil liberties and separation of church and state seem to fall into Adventist end-time scenarios, the recent humiliation of the Catholic Church does not. As time continues, we find ourselves not only more and more gun-shy about making end-time predictions, but we also catch ourselves repeating our explanations of the apparent delay of Christ’s Second Coming—the usual sign of old age.

On the other hand, as evidenced in this week’s lesson study, hope is depicted as a matter of pride. The emphasis here is on the special calling of Adventists to the "one hope." The author of this week’s lesson emphasizes more than once that we as Adventists are called to one hope, not many hopes. As Christians, we can hope for many things: answers to prayers, success in our marriages, victory over sin, deliverance from our enemies, peace, and guidance, to name a few. But when it comes to the one hope that is the call of Adventists, the author of the lesson emphasizes that "Paul was not a pluralist." He was not "someone who believed there were different paths to salvation or that one belief system was just as valid as another. On the contrary, Paul displayed a firm commitment to what he understood as the only path to salvation, a view that would be seen in many contemporary societies as narrow."

For the author of the lesson, as for many other Adventists, the hope of which the Scriptures speak and the doctrines and practices of the Adventist Church are indistinguishable. Our calling as Adventists is to "one hope," and that hope is a matter of "being faithful representatives of God who wishes to lead all to the truths that have given us so much hope." In straight talk, the one hope is our insider’s language for being Adventists. It goes along with "being in the truth," "having this precious message," "being called out of darkness into light," and so forth. Oddly, hope is a calling, even a duty we work toward, rather than an assurance that sustains us in the face of unbearable loss.

In his recently published book, Believing, Behaving, Belonging, a sample of which can be read on Spectrum’s Web site, Richard Rice offers what I view as a profound understanding of how the church can in fact be a repository of hope in the world. According to Rice, the phenomenal growth of the early church resulted not just because converts were convinced to change their beliefs or behaviors, but also because they discovered a new way of belonging. Rice points out that when we understand what belonging involves, we see why it is more fundamental than believing or behaving.

If we start with belonging, then believing and behaving naturally fall into place. But if we start with believing or behaving, it is often hard to get belonging into the picture. There are people who believe what the church teaches, but don’t feel a part of the community.…By the same token, people can adopt many aspects of a Christian lifestyle without being part of the Christian community.…However, if believing and behaving don’t always lead to belonging, the reverse is not true. Belonging naturally involves believing and behaving. (119)

On Rice’s view, the Adventist calling is in fact something that buoys hope, for it emerges not from knowing the right answers to life’s persistent questions (to quote Guy Noire of A Prairie Home Companion), or from always behaving impeccably without fault or blame. Rather, hope is an integral element of sharing in the "rich blessings of Christian fellowship." At the heart of the Gospel Commission is the Great Commandment of unconditional love.

Biblical hope is not a belief that is held on the basis of tentative evidence, but the assurance of God’s care and love in the face of the apparent supremacy of evil. Such care and love is the prayer and passion of every living person. It is this experience of the unconditional love of God expressed through Jesus’ death for sinners that is the one hope of all humanity. God may have true followers in many different faiths and practices, but there is no way into the Kingdom except through the unconditional love of God expressed by the sacrificial life and death of Christ Jesus.

It is at this point that Rice’s understanding of the Gospel Commission in terms of the alliteration of believing, behaving, and belonging troubles me. If belonging is a call, and not a birthright of creation, confirmed by redemption, then the possibility of not belonging poses the gravest of all threats to a person’s well-being. Human beings are necessarily social beings who require a sense of belonging. The threat of being cut off from contact with others is a far more powerful means of controlling conformity than are formal rules, laws, and punishments.

As a result, as anthropologists have repeatedly shown, it is a general rule of human and social organization that tight-knit communities exert greater control over their members than do larger more diverse and fuzzy-bounded communities. The fact of emphasizing belonging over believing or behaving, or family metaphors over those of the corporate boardroom offers no guarantee that the church will be a place where people can find hope in the midst of their suffering. The experience of not belonging either by shunning or censure, or by being denied appreciation or even the respect of dialogue over one’s differences, is one of the greatest pains a human being can experience.

The hope of which Scripture speaks is based on the unconditional love of God, expressed perfectly through Jesus’ life and death for others, and more or less adequately through our love for each other. It is the experience of love that buoys all creation and makes all creation groan with longing for its full and complete restoration. The point of the Scriptures quoted in this week’s lesson is not that God demands one set of beliefs or practices, as implied by the lesson’s author. Nor is it even that belonging to the fellowship of other Adventists will sustain us in this world of hardships and losses, for inevitably we as humans will let each other down. The hope of all creation is the same. God loves us unconditionally and finds pleasure in our uniqueness. We belong whether we know it or not, whether or not we feel it. We can be lost only by choosing not to belong, and even that is a strange act that requires us to go against what we most long to possess—a sense of our own incalculable worth.

This, then, is the heart of Christian hope: that God reaches out in love to all, even enemies and strangers. Where we experience this love, we find God and hope. Paul’s point in Ephesians 4 is not that hope is limited to Christians, much less Seventh-day Adventists. The problem with the Gentiles is not that they lack access to God, but that the understanding they do possess is darkened because of ignorance and hardness of heart that in turn produces callousness and every form of greed, licentiousness, and unclean practice (vss. 17–19). How much more, then, is the Christian who has experienced firsthand the forgiveness and love of Christ called to live a life of grace toward others (vs. 20). That is the teaching of today’s lesson. The mark of our calling is that we love as Christ has loved (John 17:20–23).

Belonging to the body of Christ is not predicated on uniformity of belief or behavior. The very analogy of a body comprised of many organs speaks against this. If the organs of the body were individuals, they would appear so different to each other in terms both of their appearance and function that it is hard to imagine any social intercourse taking place among them. Yet the very life of the body is dependent upon the diversity of its members. The one demand placed upon all of the organs is that they function for themselves in a way that brings health to all of the other organs, not as an imposed duty, but as the very condition of their own unique identity and function.

When the church is truly this kind of body, hope will flourish in the world. This is my prayer and my passion.

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