Larry T. Elliot. Jean Dover Elliot. Karen Watson. David McDonnall. These four join the honor roll of faith for giving their lives in Iraq this week for service to humanity in the name of Christ. The four Southern Baptist missionaries were scouting a potential water purification site, along with McDonnall’s wife, Carrie Nicole, when a passing car sprayed them with automatic weapons and rocket-powered grenades, killing all but Mrs. McDonnall.

The question needs to be asked: Why were they there in that God-forsaken place? Well, because they didn’t believe any place is God-forsaken, for one thing. We have U.S. soldiers there, too, heroically doing their duty, being subjected daily by their superiors to the same frightening terrorist attacks. We pray for them and honor them as well. But the missionaries were there voluntarily; unless of course you consider the call to duty they felt from their ultimate superior—Christ himself. I have been critical of Southern Baptists in recent years (oh, really, George?!), including missions strategies that have moved away from work like that being done by these martyrs. But we are always more critical of our own families than of outsiders, since we know them best and expect the best from them. Yet these were our Baptist family, too. And when our family does right, we all the more ought to lavish them with praise and love—and in this case, sympathy and gratitude.

What I am most grateful for is another example of those whose spiritual imaginations are fueled by the passion of the Christ. We have been looking for two weeks now at the theme “The Passion of the Christians.” Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, opened in the church season of Lent for good reason. This is when we Christians intentionally check our moral compasses to see whether we are following Christ or merely being carried along by the winds of culture. The Elliots, Ms. Watson, and the McDonnalls were bright and capable people who could have done other things besides putting themselves in harm’s way to be the presence of Christ in a seemingly hopeless setting like Mosul, Iraq.

But consider this: if you went looking for the spiritual virtue of hope, where would you be most likely to find it? In hopeful settings or hopeless? The darker things are, the greater the effect of the light, right? If you want to know something of the quality of vigorous hope, you must look for it in the most hopeless settings. I’m afraid North Dallas isn’t the ideal setting, given that most of us are managing quite nicely on our own, thank you very much. Not that we are never lacking hope, but our challenge is to let go of self-reliance and enter into solidarity with those who suffer—by commitment of our time and money. But if you want to see hope at its best, go to where people are giving up left and right, where blank faces and shiftlessness prevail, and look there for eyes that are strangely bright with a vision for what might yet be. They are no doubt animated by the presence of Christ.

When these Christian martyrs went to Iraq, they brought with them no utopian dreams. They were not optimists with positive spirits that believed that if we would all just do a little more good for others, things will turn out better in the end. They didn’t think they would start the revival that would turn Iraq Christian. No, they were guided by a vision of the world to come. They felt the wrongness of that world compared to the rightness of the world to come. They knew they could not do everything, but they also knew they could not do nothing. They did what they could, and in so doing, even in their deaths, they bore witness to the God who makes all things new.

There’s a moving moment in Mel Gibson’s film as Jesus travels the road of travail to Calvary with the cross bearing down on his bloodied body. His mother, Mary, runs to get into some position where she can see him. Jesus falls under the weight of his burden—his burden being our burdens, don’t you know?! As he gets to his feet, he catches his mother’s eye and says, See, I am making all things new. Now, how crazy is that? The man is dying and is powerless to accomplish anything the world will recognize as success. And yet he understands even in that moment that God is at work to remake the world through him. He has his eyes on a bigger prize, and his hope is fixed on God, not on himself.

Hope does not disappoint, Paul says in Romans 5, because the Holy Spirit has poured God’s love into our hearts. God lives in us and works through us. Christ in you, the hope of glory, as Paul puts it in another letter. And Peter tells us that like slaves in his day, who should do what is right even if it meant being beaten for it, we must follow “in his steps,” in the steps of Christ on the lively path of hope that leads to God.

Once again, as we have been noting the past two weeks, the spiritual virtues of faith, hope, and love come to perfection in us as we learn to “forget ourselves on purpose.” When we are checking to see if we are succeeding, to see if we have what it takes to make all things new ourselves, we will always be despairing or deluding ourselves. Hope does not spring up from inside us as if from wells of our own digging; it is God’s gift that surprises us with resurrection power in the very darkest depths tombs of life.

Some of you here this morning suffer from a loss of hopefulness, even as professing Christians. You feel like a failure, maybe. Your past defeats haunt you. Bad decisions stick to you like glue: divorces, bankruptcies, or foolishness of whatever kind. Others of you suffer the loss of future—you see your dreams slipping away, and you are having a hard time adjusting to what feels like settling. Listen, only God can raise your spirits in a lasting way, because only God can raise the dead. Only God can give you a vision of things set straight at last. As Julian of Norwich put it in a line that T. S. Eliot picked up in the Four Quartets: “All is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

But hope is more than a feeling of hopefulness; it is an orientation of life away from yourself and toward God. God wants to fill you with a larger vision of things—to show you that in light of the cross and resurrection of Christ, it is always too soon to worry but never too soon to act. God wants to fill you with the kind of hope that sees life bigger than the concerns that you have made bigger than life. God wants to enlist you into service of the world to come by opening your eyes to this world’s need and how you can meet it. It’s not about whether you will ever meet all the world’s need; it’s about whether you will meet God in a world of need.

Too many people drop off the path of lively hope when they think problems are too great to fix or the cost is too great to bear. But Christians act because every person in need needs a sign of hope that God sees them and cares for them now and forever.

We have some members working to understand and address the problems at Parkland Hospital these days. The remarkable work of those public health care providers is undermined by a broken health care system; by cutbacks in Medicaid payments for indigent care; by public officials who would rather work in secret; by some who seem to think health care to undocumented workers and their families is not a public responsibility, even though we wink at the practice of hiring them “off the books”; and by a public that opposes tax increases no matter the matter. Our friends do not think they will fix everything by their involvement; they act out of hope in the God that makes all things new by means of those who will suffer in love with them and for those who suffer.

In a similar vein, I recently heard Dr. Dighton Packard speak. He is the head of emergency services at Baylor University Medical Center, which is one of the dwindling number of hospitals that maintain a Level I trauma unit. He and the other doctors that do what they do sacrifice control of their schedules and lots of income. But if you ask him why he does it, he will tell you about a calling to serve. Not all doctors feel the same way, sad to say. But worse still, not all Christians do. If we are to be well-shaped Christians, though, well-equipped followers of Jesus the Christ, then we must accept our call to serve and to act in hope, even if that means sacrificing leisure and luxury.

What do you want this church to be known for? Sturdy faith? Deep love? How about lively hope? The kind of hope that stands up for the fallen. Do you want to be a country club for the well-to-do or a haven of hope for the ne’er-do-wells? Mission trips and local missions work ought to be a hallmark of this church, as well as sacrificial giving to mission causes. Habitat builds, church builders’ trips, mercy missions to the Valley and the border. If faith deals mainly with the mind and love with the heart, hope lives off the will—the will to please God and to be obedient to Christ. Do you have the will to follow Christ more fully, even if means sacrifice?

The Christian life is a lively path of hope. It is not waiting passively for a future in heaven; it is getting a vision of that future so fixed inside of you that you cannot stand by passively and wait for it without bearing witness to it. When God puts a dream in your heart, even if that dream is delayed and requires great patience for the time being, you can act upon it now. You can bear witness to what you believe God is doing in your life and in the world by living into that dream now. Just because we are not in heaven yet does not mean we should accept conditions of life now that are unacceptable to God.

If you are looking for a way to strengthen your discipleship, increase the virtue of hope by getting outside of yourself and serving. If you don’t know how, you can enroll in a course called “Serving by God’s Design,” which begins this Wednesday night. There are about 33 local missions opportunities we support that can use your help. Get involved in what God is doing in the world. There is no place God is not at work already; but there are many places where God is waiting for Christians to join the work.

A year ago last week I was in Indianapolis for a meeting of the grantee churches of the Lilly Endowment pastoral residency programs. Our coordinator, David Wood, is also the pastor of an American Baptist church in Maine. His cell phone rang. It was a young woman in his church calling. Becky was standing at the spot in the road where her husband had been hit by a car and killed while riding a snowmobile. The shock was felt all through the church and the town, and hopelessness threatened. Becky and Tracy were a popular couple, full of life and love. The loss was more than they thought they could bear. One year later, though, David told us at the same meeting what hope God had wrought in the wake of that death and grief. Becky and two friends were taking a snowmobile trip on the same tracks that Tracy had followed a year earlier to his death. This time it was a lively path of hope. She was composing a letter to the driver of the car, pledging her forgiveness and offering him her prayers. In the meantime, something had happened in the church. For anything to have happened in that church, David said, was significant, because it had resolutely resisted any change in a generation or more. Tracy’s loss moved the people to act in hope. They pledged so much money in his memory that they completely remodeled the sanctuary, and God has brought new life to the church.

Hope is contagious. So is hopelessness. If the passion of the Christ ignites a passion in Christians, one way we will know is by the hope that bubbles up in the hearts and brims on the faces of disciples that causes them to bear witness in hopeless places. Do you need to add a measure of hope to your faith and love?