A young student was taking a test at school.  And one of the questions she had to answer was this:  “Upon what do hibernating animals subsist during the winter?”  The little girl thought for a moment and then wrote:  “All winter long, hibernating animals subsist on the hope of a coming spring!”  (ill unlmtd, 292)  Hope is powerful medicine, isn't it?  And as humans we know that hope is mainly what we subsist on.  Hope is vital to living a life that has purpose, direction, and health.
 
But what happens when hope itself fails us?  When our hopes are dashed against the rocks of our life?   When hope breaks our heart?
 
Most of us don't need to look far for stories of hearts broken by hope.   I spent the past two days with my Aunt Louise and her granddaughters and their families.  My Aunt Louise has had her heart broken many times.  She lost her first husband to a heart attack before her older son became a teenager.   She lost her second husband to cancer.  Then, both sons to heart attacks.
 
I know I don't need to tell you how it feels when hope breaks your heart.  Because you have felt it in small ways and large ways.  You prepared well for a test, and failed.  You were psyched for the big game, and somebody fumbled the ball, and the other team made the winning touchdown.   You applied for the job that would finally get you the recognition and the income that you deserve.  Someone you couldn't even stand to be around, got the job instead.  You hoped that someone special would notice you, would feel the same strong attraction for you that you felt for him or her.   But they didn't.    I remember one time as a kid, hoping that under the Christmas tree there would be a microscope.  That was my dream, and one package seemed to be just the right size and weight.  But it was just a knick knack.
 
It doesn't have to have been a big hope to break your heart, but the bigger the hope, the bigger the pain.  “Pablo Molenes hoped against hope in his little village of Macua for a chance to get in to El Norte, the land of promise for poor Mexicans.  A simple dream fired his desire:   a steady job, a decent car to drive, and a place of his own to live in.  His stubborn heart kept him believing that it was possible.

“In the year 1991, he put his total fortune, sixty dollars, into the hands of body smugglers who strapped him to the axle of a station wagon and drove him across the border.  He arrived in Los Angeles.  He was proud.  Took no food stamps.  Accepted no welfare.  Violated no laws.  He found a yard job that paid him in cash, slept on the floor in his sister's apartment, and after living in this luxury for six months, he was sure that his brightest dream had come true.
 
“Then the earth quaked.  The apartment house he lived in collapsed.  Pablo's sister was killed.  He took to the park and hung out there, too stunned to go to work.  Police officers questioned him and reported him to the immigration service.  The service sent him back to Macua.  Pablo no longer hopes to go back to the land of the earthquake.”  (Smedes, Standing on the Promises, 57-58)
What we discover when hope breaks our heart, is that many of our hopes have been false hopes—or misdirected hopes. Lewis Smedes says there are at least five kinds of false hope.  One of those comes through lying promises.   This is like the con artist who calls up elderly people on the telephone and says that he has a way to make their future secure, and they just need to take their bank account, empty it out and give him the money, he'll take care of the rest.  Stated so baldly, it hardly seems like anyone could possibly fall for it, but these guys are really smooth.   And many people have placed their hopes in things that turn out to be empty promises.
A second way that hope becomes false is when we use hope as an escape from responsibility.   This is the kind of thing that happens when someone fritters away his or her investments, and then buys a lottery ticket in hopes that a bit of magic will happen to lift the person out of the self-created mess.  Smedes describes these as people who “flounder into a sinkhole of avoidable trouble and sweetly set their hopes on an odd-job god who they expect will drop whatever he is doing and rush to their rescue.”  (51) But hope is not an escape from responsibility.

Then a very common sort of false hope comes to be when we pin our hope on things that cannot give us what we hope for.    At the heart of every hope is the very basic hope for happiness and contentment.    Many false prophets of hope promise us that if we buy their product, happiness will be the result.  A woman has a face lift because she thinks this will make her look younger and if she looks younger she will find happiness.   A teenager buys the brand of toothpaste or mouthwash prescribed by the TV ads, in hopes that brighter teeth and clean breath will be an aphrodisiac.    A young couple having problems in their marriage hope that having a baby will bring them closer.    together. But the product doesn't deliver the contentment that was hoped for.   It was never meant to.
Another kind of false hope is hope that bad things will happen to someone else.    For instance, hope that a classmate will get worse grades than you, so that you look better.  Or hopes that your competitor in business will have a financial setback so that you can corner the market.  Anytime we hope for bad things to happen to someone else, we are turning hope inside out and making it into something evil and spiteful.

The fifth kind of false hope is the one we probably cling to the hardest and which is also the one that the disciples were experiencing before Jesus died.  This is the hope that we can avoid pain.   Many of us, I think, come into the Christian faith thinking that being a Christian puts us in an exempt category.  Exempt from bad things happening (because we're “good” people), exempt from failure (because God is on our side).  Those false hopes are exposed when we discover that we are not exempt.  We get sick, we fail, we suffer.  Our best friends and lovers die.
 
Jesus’ disciples had clung to a hope that was very much like our hope to avoid pain.  They had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, but what they meant by this was that Jesus would be a super hero on the level of a superman or batman or some other kind of fantasy.   And that they would be swept along with him on the wings of angels.   He's the Son of God, the Messiah, for crying out loud.  Those Roman goons can't get him!   He won't die!  But their hopes were falsely based.   They were based on a fantasy.
God does not take us on a detour around trouble or pain.  God takes us through the pain, through the trouble to the other side. Psalm 46 it says that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Not around it, not avoiding it, but through it.
When hope breaks our heart, our false hopes are exposed, and we are forced to face them as false.  This is one of the things that was so difficult for the disciples between the time Jesus died and the time that they realized he was alive. The reality of his death had sunk in deep and stayed there.   Notice what the two on their way to Emmaus  said about Jesus.   We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.  We had hoped. . . . Their hope was past tense, because Jesus had died.  If he was the Messiah, their kind of messiah, he wouldn't have died.   However bright their hopes had been, they were false.
The same is true for us: when our hopes die, we are forced to admit that these false hopes have not delivered the goods.
 
At that point, in order to move forward in our life, we have to face the reality that we have been aiming our hope in the wrong direction.    We are a little like the fellow who was driving along the freeway when his car phone rang.  On the other end, his wife was speaking urgently, “Herman, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on Highway 280.  Please be careful!”  “Hey,” said Herman, it's not just one car.  There are hundreds of them.”  (story file, 15.6.3)
 
If we will face the reality that our hopes have been false ones, then we are in the prime position for real hope to enter our life.

Stuart Briscoe says, When I talk to sick people, I see how much hope means to them.  At first they hope nothing is wrong.  When they discover that all is not well, they hope it is not serious.  When that hope perishes, they hope something can be done, but if they are told eventually there is ‘no hope,’ I, as a Christian, can remind them that there is hope even if death cannot be avoided.”  (from Communicators commentary on Romans)

Before the crucifixion, the disciples thought that their hope was in God.  But when Jesus died, they discovered that they had been hoping in their own agenda.  They had not  been believing in Jesus, but in a messiah of their own making.  They needed to open their hearts to the real Jesus and to his agenda.  Jesus would indeed redeem Israel, as they had hoped, but not in the way that they hoped.   He would redeem Israel, and the whole world, by going to the cross and taking the world's sin with him.  He would set Israel free, not from Rome, but from bondage to sin and to death.   He is the Messiah, the Son of God, but on his own terms, not theirs.

With the false hopes exposed, they are open to understanding what's really going on.  They are able to trade their fantasy for reality.  In fact, while these two are so glum and hopeless, Jesus is standing with them.  The real live Jesus who had been raised from the dead.    But it is not until they have exposed these false hopes, that they are able to see him.  Because the false hopes are in the way.  But once the false hopes have been cleared away, they are able to recognize Jesus when he breaks the bread and blesses it.   And, finally, they are able to begin to get to know him as he really is; finally they are able to have genuine hope that will change their lives.

And that's what is so great about hope.  Just when you think things are at their worst, when your world is drowning in trouble, like Noah's ark, hope bobs up above all that floodwater.   And it makes all the difference.

Some years ago, a teacher was assigned to visit kids in a large city hospital.  One day she got the assignment to visit a boy in the burn unit and to bring him a lesson on nouns and adverbs so that he could keep up with his class.  But no one had prepared this teacher for what she would find:  a young boy so horribly burned and in great pain.  Though she felt like leaving, she just couldn't, so she stammered through her lesson on nouns and adverbs.  The next morning a nurse on the burn unit said, “What did you do to that boy?”  Before she could finish her apology, the nurse interrupted her:  “You don't understand. We've been very worried about him, but ever since you were here yesterday, his whole attitude has changed.  He's fighting back, responding to treatment. . .It's as though he's decided to live.”  The boy later explained that he had completely given up hope until he saw that teacher.  It all changed when he came to a simple realization.  With joyful tears he expressed it this way:  “They wouldn't send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?”   (Illustrations Unlimited, 292-293)