Just after the I-40 Arkansas river bridge in eastern Oklahoma was knocked out by a barge, a chilling picture was published in The Dallas Morning News of the skid marks made when people realized too late that the bridge was gone.  The pavement ends before the skids marks do.  None of us ever wants to know what that moment felt like for those people when they first realized there was no hope of getting stopped in time. 

Yet, in an eerie sort of way, those skid marks looked vaguely familiar.  At least they looked a lot like skid marks I’d made and seen others make when we got to places where we realized we’d gone too far.  We’d failed too much.  Worse, sometimes, they were skid marks made when someone had driven to the very edge knowing full well they were pushing their luck.  By the time the brakes were applied, it was too late.  We all know all too well what that moment feels like, don’t we?  When we’ve set in motion more than we can control to a good ending and there is no hope of getting stopped in time.  Anyone who has ever dreamed of a life beyond what sin has made of the one they’re now living recognizes those skid marks.  It’s to that hopeless edge the scripture brings us this morning. 

But, before it does, it first takes us all the way back up the road to a time when God made Abraham a promise.  A promise that he’d be, “‘the father of many nations.’”  A promise that was bigger than Abraham could believe based on what he could see in the mirror or sleeping across from him every night.  His one-century-old body and his wife’s inability to conceive had left him hopelessly childless.  But, swimming upstream against the current of prevailing evidence, “Hoping against hope . . . being fully convinced that God was able to do what he promised,” Abraham decided to just trust God for what, from a purely human perspective, just didn’t add up. 

Those who have adopted know his frustration.  After more broken dreams than you can count, there comes that moment of surrender when you finally accept that being a parent will happen only if God gives you a family another way.  Now that he has, you can’t imagine ever having had one any other way.  It’s when the math doesn’t add up, when the road runs out before our dreams do, that the door to faith in what only God can do stands open before us, waiting for us to walk through it, even if it means hoping against hope. 

We have read just a small portion of a letter Paul wrote to the church in Rome some two centuries ago.  In it, he describes how frail and incapable we are but also how capable and committed God is.  Either because of sinful choices we’ve made or choices others have made for us, we live with the consequences of our sinful human condition.  But, by the grace of God, we have access to hope beyond our sin.  In our lives, two kinds of hope are always at war with each other. 

One is the kind of hope we can piece together out of our own resources.  At some point, if not already, what we can put together won’t add up to enough and we’ll find ourselves skidding to the edge of hopelessness.  It is in that moment that the possibilities of what only God can do become our only hope.  Salvation, which at least means coming back into the purposes and life God had for us all along, belongs to people who balance the hope of what they can do against the hope that only God can give and choose what only God can give.  People aren’t saved because they finally get it right.  They are saved because they are leaning more on the hope of what God can do more than what hope they can put together alone. 

A young lady called some years ago.  I knew her to a wonderful young lady with a bright future.  But, away at school and from the familiar and the very structured environment in which she was raised, she got lost looking for love in all the wrong places.  She realized too late where she was headed.  The pavement ran out before the skid marks did.  Now, she was pregnant.  Beyond the immediate fear, the tears I heard over the phone were about her grief at facing her life’s dream, and her parents’ for her, vaporizing before her eyes.  She was certain that her life was all but over.  What would you tell her? 

Well, this is what I told her.  Though we have to live with the consequences of all the choices we make, no choice we ever make undoes God’s choice to give us hope.  Though she had other options, she chose to see what God could do with what she couldn’t make add up with what was left of her first family dream.  Just a few weeks ago, a picture came via email of this mother and her beautiful little girl, now about ten.  She and her daughter are living proof of what happens when, hoping against hope, you choose to wait and see what God can do by weaving even our worst choices into his ultimate purpose to give us a life of hope.

People who are saved are not perfect people.  As Paul said it, salvation didn’t come through God’s laws or our ability to keep them.  God’s law only showed us how much we needed what only God could do after we had failed so miserably to keep it.  People who are saved are not people who have never broken God’s law.  They are people who have skidded to the edge and over only to discover themselves falling into streams of mercy, never ceasing.  People of faith are always hoping against hope and discovering a life through faith in what only God can do they could never make add up on their own.  A life in which “we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”  Abraham modeled that for us. 

What distinguished Abraham as a man of God was not so much his morality.  In fact, he didn’t really have a chance to keep God’s laws because he lived at least four centuries before God’s law had been put in writing, codifying the difference between right and wrong.  He didn’t live to see Jesus and his resurrection.  Yet, by faith, he looked ahead and, hoping against hope, decided to trust that “God was able to do what he promised.”  Through his faith, God made him the father of a spiritual family, a family into which people are still being born.  What made Abraham a model of faith for us, and in a sense, the father of our faith, was his willingness to hope in God for what he could not yet see. 

Now, having gone back up the road to Abraham, let’s come back to the edge of hopelessness on which our lives teeter at every moment and what God intends those moments to mean.  When we trust God for what we cannot make happen, then we become a part of the same family that Abraham birthed centuries ago when he hoped against hope.  And, just like Abraham, we model for others what faith looks like. 

A friend and his family are members of First Baptist, Arlington.  Because of a disciplinary problem at school, his sixteen-year-old son and a friend were recently sentenced to twenty-five hours of community service at Mission Arlington where Tillie Bergen is the director.  After they’d been there only a little while, son calls dad and says, “Miss Tillie says we have to go home.”  Dad goes to pick up son.  Before they leave for home they conference with Miss Tillie.  It turns out that the boys were goofing off and making it difficult for others to get their job done.  Miss Tillie looked at the young man and asked, in front of dad, “Are you a Christian?”  The young man, taken aback just a little, said, “Yes.”  Then, Tillie moved in for the kill by asking, “Did others see Jesus in you today?”

When my friend told me this story that question just kept bouncing around in my head.  “Have others seen Jesus in me today?”  What is it that makes my life distinctively Christian in a culture that is less and less Christian?  And, the finger of my conscience kept pointing me back to Abraham.  It was his hope, based on a faith that God would do what he promised.

The apostle Paul once wrote to the Corinthian church that we who believe, “are the aroma of Christ” in this world, through whom he spreads “the fragrance that comes from knowing him (2 Corinthians 2:14-15).”  Every now and then I’ll get home from church on Sunday smelling like some lady’s perfume.  I’ve hugged someone at the door, and she’s (I think it’s she) rubbed off on me.  We tend to exude the aroma of those with whom we most closely associate.  If our best friends are fear and hopelessness, if we associate with them more than anyone else, then all our attempts at moral purity will make little or no difference in an increasingly pluralistic culture.  What marks us as uniquely Christian, in a culture that has little or no moral compass, is our Christ-centered hope.  A hope that looks beyond what we can see and believes in more than we can make add up.  A hope that is uniquely ours because we know what it is like to skid to the edge, go over and discover at the bottom of despair that God’s plan for us has just begun.  When we feast on fear, we will exude its aroma to all those who get close.  When we feast on Christ, we will exude hope.  And, just like we know that Abraham was God’s man because of his hope, others will know that we are God’s people because of our hope.

Somewhere, someday, the bridge from where we are now to our dream for tomorrow is going to be knocked out by someone else’s choices for us.  Or, driving recklessly, we’ll find ourselves skidding to the edge of our worst choices only to find the pavement running out before our skid marks do.  Either way, in that moment, we get to choose.  We can live forever as people of despair and bitterness that life is not what he had dreamed or, hoping against hope, we will discover the life that only God could make happen. 

For you, for me, which will it be?