This weeks sermon prep has been a disaster!  This good idea of balancing 'hope and fear' has proved difficult to work with and it's been hard find anything useful to say that would last more than two sentences, not because there isn't loads you could say but because I can't make it work.  However, in my reading I found this little sentence in some writing by Jurgen Moltmann:

Enthusiasts and Baptists in the sixteenth century looked for the dawn of the eschaton by actively seeking to transform their oppressive present.

Jurgen Moltmann, entry for Hope in A Dictionary of Christian Theology, London SCM Press, p. 272

You need to appreciate that 'Enthusiasts' were those who saw themsleves as having some sort of special indwelling of God's spirit (I know nothing about them, but maybe they were the Pentecostals of their age?) not just people who were 'keen' or 'eager'.

Sixteenth century Baptists risked persecution, arrest, execution and ridicule to practice their faith.  What Moltmann is saying is, I think, not that they hoped (wanted) life would be better for themselves, though undoubtedly they did, but that they lived the hope (eschatology) they had.  Life must have been incredibly frightening for those early Baptists but their hope shaped their day to day living.

This is a 'now and not yet' theology in which communities of faith can be an anticipation (advance glimpse) of the eschaton as they anticipate (await) its fulfilment.

Ultimately then, it is our hope that sustains through our fear.

But if I said just what I've written it'd be an awfully short sermon!!! 

I hope what I say makes sense and that people glimspe the hope that we try to live and which inspires our living.