Psalm 100
Romans 5:1-8

All of us are born with fingerprints and yet there are no two matching sets of fingerprints.  After we live our lives and die, we leave behind life prints.  No two life prints are the same.  The depth and contour of our life prints depend on the depth of character and virtue we develop.
           
Paul writes about this in his letter to the church at Rome. He links character, suffering, endurance, and hope together. Suffering, Paul says, produces endurance -- or perseverance -- or we might even say a kind of inspired stubbornness. It is out of this crucible of stiff-necked stick-to-itiveness that character evolves. Consider how each of these qualities and each part of the body can work together for faithfulness. Issues which assault our heads, our understanding, test the mettle of our character. Questions that pierce our hearts, our emotions, penetrate to the very roots of our reasons for hopefulness. Putting our hands to work in service to our faith entails suffering. Placing one stubborn foot in front of another, continuing on despite obstacles and opinions, takes endurance.  
           
Yet many remain coltishly skittish about incorporating "virtues" into any discussion of a valuable and worthwhile life.  We tend to think of virtues as the concerns of quaint religious sects or sequestered elderly widows - certainly not for busy, active men and women of faith going toe-to-toe with the everyday world. But a mature faith cannot happen until in both an individual and communal sense we first risk encountering the truth - the truth about ourselves, the truth about others, the truth about God. Examined in that light, how do we measure up to Paul's understanding of a truly virtuous person?
           
Do we have hope? Hope is probably the most quintessentially Christian of these four virtues. We hope because we are part of a community of hope, strengthened by God’s presence. Christian hope is rooted in a belief that there is purposeful movement in history towards a future filled with meaning. Without this sense of hope we become little more than momentary globs of protoplasm on a mindless, lifeless shell of existence.
           
 Do we suffer for the benefit of others and for the ongoing service to God?  This is not suffering through another boring meeting, or our daily gym work-out. Nor is suffering even physical or emotional deprivation. Christian suffering is not about learning to take on additional burdens or problems so much as it is about voluntarily taking up burdens or problems of others that we take up because of our love for God and our love for them, learning to give up the right to indulge in certain human weaknesses. When we agree to participate in suffering in this way we forfeit the urge to "get even," take revenge, harbor malicious thoughts or speak vicious words. Shouldering our own cross means returning intentional wounding with love and forgiveness. It is a choice we make.  It is not a hardship imposed on us. 
           
Paul listed the virtues of suffering, endurance, character, and hope that the person who stands in this right relationship with God has the opportunity to practice.  Paul urged his fellow believers to "rejoice"-- but this time the call is to rejoice in "our sufferings." These "sufferings" or "troubles" included not just the persecution and hardship the early church was already experiencing, but also the extended suffering and troubles the faithful might expect as a result of remaining faithful to God in the midst of trying and difficult circumstances of injustice, discrimination, and hatred.  The cause for celebration is not because one is suffering but because of what the suffering produces.
           
Steven Hawking is a well-known astrophysicist at Cambridge University. He has advanced Einstein's work on relativity and is credited with the mathematical calculations suggesting the existence of black holes in space. But Dr. Hawking is also afflicted with a rare degenerative neuromuscular disorder (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease. He has been confined to a wheelchair for years. He communicates by a computer that responds to the tiniest movement of his fingertips. Yet his personality shines through the messy details of his existence. Before he became ill, life held little interest for him. It was an exercise in sheer boredom. He drank too much and did little work. When he learned he had ALS and was only given a few years to live, his life underwent a radical change.
           
Claiming to be happier after he was afflicted than before, Hawking said, "When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one has. Suddenly each day became precious and meaningful." (Omni, February 1979, 46.) 
           
Consider the story of an elderly gentleman who astounded everyone by his cheerfulness in the face of physical ailments, family troubles and deferred pleasures. When asked the secret of his cheerful disposition, he replied: "Well, you see, it is like this. The Bible says often, 'And it shall come to pass,' never, 'It came to stay.'" 
           
The trilogy of offspring that suffering produces is endurance, character and hope. It is interesting to note that while Greek literature forms no connection between endurance or perseverance and hope, Paul feels the association between them is so strong that, at different times, he argues for the primacy of each. In Romans 5:4 and again in 15:4, the quality of endurance (patience or perseverance) gives rise to hope. Elsewhere, however, Paul just as boldly argues that it is hope which in turn produces endurance or steadfastness (see 1 Thessalonians 1:3; Romans 8:25).
           
Do we have endurance? Endurance might also be called the virtue of fortitude. Or even more simply, guts. Far from a passive, roll-over, be-stepped-on, "hang in there," patient attitude towards adversity, endurance is courage.   
           
We probably are more likely to develop the characteristic of procrastination than endurance. Here's Leo Rosten telling of a letter he once got from Groucho Marx: "Dear Junior: Please excuse me for not answering your letter sooner. But I have been so busy not answering letters lately that I have not been able to get around to not answering yours in time. Love, Groucho." (Quoted by Martin E. Marty in Context.)
           
In order to follow Paul's progression correctly -- from suffering to endurance to character to hope -- it should be made clear that the "endurance" Paul speaks of is a far more active experience than the sometimes-translated "patience" would suggest. While "patience" seems to denote passivity, perseverance reveals the activity involved in such an experience.  Jon Carroll speaks about this in his comments about success and failure. 
           
“My granddaughter started kindergarten, and, as is conventional, I wished her success. I was lying. What I actually wish for her is failure. I believe in the power of failure.
           
“Success is boring,” Carroll continues. “Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematical victory. First-time success is usually a fluke. First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things.”
           
“Failure is how we learn.” Carroll notes an example saying, “I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as "she who has broken many pots." If you've spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking. I once had a late dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.” (Jon Carroll, “This I Believe,” National Public Radio, October 9, 2006)
           
"Enduring" does not suggest quietly "waiting it out." Biblical endurance requires "wading right in” rather than waiting it out. An endurance race tests the ability of the competitor to keep on going, despite exhaustion, obstacles and genuine suffering.  The line from a Country song might illustrate what this endurance is like, “If you’re going through hell keep on going.  You’ll be out before the devil even knows you’re there.” (2006)
           
This endurance, Paul claims, produces what one translation calls "character." The Greek word used here appears only three other times in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 2:9; 9:13; Philippians 2:22), where it is rendered more closely to its literal meaning. The term is used to describe something put to the test and meriting approval when the test is passed. This is character.
           
In his opening convocation address as new dean at Atlanta's Candler School of Theology, R. Kevin LaGree told about receiving a letter from a friend, the wife of a United Methodist minister. She felt led to convey to him "something I've long wanted to say to 'someone' in our seminaries," and wrote: “I'm convinced that the message the seminary imprints on the mind and heart of each seminarian should be, "What you learn is important; what skills you perfect are important; what theology you preach is important; but the most important thing is what kind of person you are. If you are not a person of integrity, none of the other will matter at all." (See R. Kevin LaGree's "The Pair So Long Disjoined," 5 September 1991, 3.)
           
Do we have a recognizable character? There are plenty of unique "characters," both inside and outside the church. Often these are individuals so concerned with being recognized by some quirky habits or trademark attitudes that they spend most of their energy trying to polish up that essentially artificial image. That is not character - but caricature.
           

Paul puts character at the end of his list because it is what results when the believer succeeds in integrating these other virtues of suffering, endurance and hope into a consistently faithful whole.  Character is what Paul saw in the life print of Jesus and it is that type of character Paul wants fellow believers to emulate and develop.    
           
How can we develop these virtues that seem so valuable but so illusive?  Certainly one way is to learn from the saints. Saints are ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives as a result of developing one or more of these virtues, hope, suffering, endurance, and character, that Paul lists in Romans. There are ordinary saints who model for us the way life should be lived and we seek to emulate their lives in our own.  Some of this emulating is unconscious and some of it is truly intentional.   
           
There are those through the centuries who have been identified as saints.  We could choose a patron saint with whom to identify, learn all we can about that person’s life and explore ways to live our lives in a similar way that the saint lived.  Another way to select a saint is to choose one whose Feast Day is your birthday.  Since more than 2,000 saints have made it into the official canonical calendar at one time or another, there are more than enough saints to fill every day of the year.  So you could choose a saint whose Feast Day is your birthday.
           

Character is what creates the unique life print of our lives. A well-developed character is identified by the ruts and contours that are traced onto its surface. Ever wonder why a smooth, conscience-free con-artist is called a "slick character"? It is because he has no character, no guiding virtues etched onto his spirit.          I have a picture of a bumper sticker in my office with the words, “Live so the Preacher won’t have to lie at your funeral.”  Stated more positively is the Native American saying, “When you were born, you cried, and the whole world rejoiced. Live such a life that when you die, the whole world cries, and you rejoice.” Instead of smoothing out the contours of our characters, we need conscientiously to commit ourselves to deepening the grooves with love, grace, forgiveness, and joy. Our lives should be deeply scratched by the gouged clefts and valleys of our love shaped, justice formed characters. It takes a lifetime of experiences to create such a rutted and rocky masterpiece. A life print is not something we are born with, but it is most certainly something we die with.  We are going to die with the same fingerprints we were born with but our life prints are a different matter.  We determine what our life prints look like  
           

About fifteen years ago Ysenda Maxtone Graham was given a 10,000 pound advance to travel around England and study the state of Anglican churches today. In her final report, which she entitled The Church Hesitant (1993), she made a salient distinction between "niceness" and "goodness."
           
She noted that the great saints were often horrible which was some source of consolation to selfish and prickly Anglicans. Jesus himself was not exactly nice: he snapped at his apostles and made them squirm. But he was goodness itself. Graham says that in her experience, whether people are good or not has nothing to do with whether they are Christians. Some people just are good. Some churchgoers just are horrible. If someone offers to carry my suitcase, she said she would rather they did it out of innate kindness than out of a commandment-obeying habit.
           
In her Church of England year, Graham came across a great deal of goodness and a great deal of niceness. They need to be distinguished. Sometimes the goodness is hidden behind off-putting elements such as coldness and bad temper. “My heroes,” Graham concluded, “generally have something unattractive about them.” (Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Church Hesitant [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993]: 25.)
           
Paul's message to the Roman church is also the message to the Glenview church.  His message claims that it is through hope, suffering, endurance, and character that we synergize God's love in us. It is God's love "poured into our lives" (Romans 5:5) that is both the starting gate and the finish line of a virtuous life. And it is the desire to make that love available to all the world that keeps deepening the grooves of faith so that we end up with clear, strong life prints -- of the lives we have lived.  We are making life prints.  What are their contours and shapes?  How are hope, suffering, and endurance shaping our character and forming our life prints?
When your life is over, what will your life print look like?