My friends, we have come to the end of our summer series – the dénouement, if you will, of this trilogy of sermons on the theological virtues. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Three weeks ago, we said something about the Christian faith, and this past week, something about the Christian hope: today, we come to the greatest of these, which is charity.

I have received some flak from knowing and attentive parishioners over my choice of the traditional language for St Paul’s theological triad, for the use of the word “charity,” as the King James Version saith. In more contemporary translations, the word is given as “love.” There is a certain method to the madness. I said last week that hope is a slippery word, cheapened by easy use. How much more cheapened, how much more slippery, is the word love?

As promised, this is a sermon about hope, the second in the list of the three theological virtues articulated by St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.[1] Hope is such a slippery word, though, isn’t it, cheapened by easy use? How many emails have you received, which begin something like this: “I hope this email finds you well.” Though the sentiment may be genuine, the sender may also be buttering you up for whatever request is sure to follow that opening courtesy.

So what is it then that we mean by hope, or to be more specific what we mean by Christian hope? In the Book of Common Prayer, that under-used red volume in the pew rack in from of you, the very last thing in the table of contents is the Catechism, or an outline of the faith, which takes the form of an extended dialogue. The final question, the last item in the Catechism, is the one that concerns us this morning: What is the Christian hope?

I attended a middle school that sits at the base of a small New England mountain. We had a ropes course up on the mountain, and every year, before classes began, each grade took a few hours to do some team-building exercises up on the ropes course. My least favorite part of these events was something called the trust fall. This entailed a single middle schooler clambering up to a platform, attached to a tree about four feet off the ground, crossing his arms across his chest, and – once the appropriate code words had been said – tipping backward, eyes closed, into what he hoped to God would be the waiting arms of his classmates.