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| Photo by Judy Maurer, edited. |
I've been seeing and hearing a lot about the theme of hope recently. Sometimes the message is "hang on to hope!" Sometimes it's more like "I've given up hope." It's made me think about how hope relates to reality and to faith.
The USA has been through some rough times in its nearly 250 years as a country, but in my lifetime, this may be the scariest. In previous crises, the danger may have been high (my first memory of national danger was the Cuban Missile Crisis) but at least there seemed to be competent people in charge. Now the people in those top posts seem to have a lot more fun generating crises than managing them. And some of them presume to bless this scene in the name of the Prince of Peace.
In fairness, neither corruption nor crises are anything new. The genocide in the Gaza Strip and in Al-Fashir, Sudan, are just the latest examples of what God already knew in this scene after Noah and the animals disembarked from the ark:
Genesis 8:20-21 (My emphasis) Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez really brought this biblical realism home to me last summer, as I described in this post, The long defeat, part one. She was listening to a sermon by Len Vander Zee. As she tells it,
Len was quoting Celeborn and Galadriel in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, saying: “together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” Tolkien expanded on this in a letter to a friend: “I am a Christian….so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains…… some glimpse of final victory.”
In 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about the contrast between hope and reality in his own experience, shortly before charging his audience with the ministry of reconciliation:
2 Corinthians 4:8-12, 16-18 We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you.
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So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.
Death continues to roam the globe, among guilty and innocent alike, shredding credibility from those preaching too glib a picture of hope. I remember a blunt statement by T. Canby Jones: (paraphrasing from memory): Genuine Christian pacifism requires coming to terms with one's own death.
So: does hope have anything to do with today's reality? Yes, I believe it does. If we hope for good outcomes, and work toward them, we're not required to seek a guarantee that everything will change for the better. Hope doesn't require denying reality or concealing failure. Somehow I'm sure that in God's economy, no act of kindness goes to waste, but we may not see the fruits ourselves.
I love this quotation from Evelyn Underhill, via the Daily Quaker Message for October 24, "Love cannot be stopped."
One of the holy miracles of love is that once it is really started on its path, it cannot stop: it spreads and spreads in ever-widening circles till it embraces the whole world in God. We begin by loving those nearest to us, end by loving those who seem farthest. And as our love expands, so our whole personality will grow, slowly but truly. Every fresh soul we touch in love is going to teach us something fresh about God.”
I quoted Paul saying "...what cannot be seen is eternal." I think this is where hope and faith are related. In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer says, "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." My own hope is for God to see a reason to modify that reflection in that Noah's Ark story, because it will turn out that humans might cease being inclined toward evil. I have no idea when and how enough of us will head Paul's call to become ministers of reconciliation, and enough hearts will be changed, so that cruelty is banished from human community. The apparent lack of realism in this vision doesn't mean that I shouldn't hope in that direction; it's just that I recognize that there will almost certainly be many cruelties and many deaths between now and its fulfillment, and I shouldn't pretend otherwise or gloss it all over with Christian clichés.
Maybe what I'm really asking for is the borderline between earth and heaven to begin melting, as in Revelation.
In the meantime, I gain hope just by reading the list of heroes of faith in the beginning of the eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews. Today I saw something new to me in one of those heroes... Hebrews 11:11: And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. Sarah and Abraham had faith that literally bore fruit as God had promised. I believe Jesus' promise to me that he is trustworthy; therefore I take him at his word and trust him.
The traditional interpretation is that the only sure hope is for eternity, but I am impatient, and I believe that the more we hope, the more we'll get "some glimpse of final victory" even in this present age.
Related:
Another view of hope at Got Questions.
Stephanie Phillips, The Noise of Certainty and the Voice of Hope.
Philip Gulley, If America Were Great (1). "Do you know what it means to be a Christian? I don’t need to tell you this because you already know. But I’m worked up, so I’m going to say it anyway." ...
Sarah Thomas Baldwin asks, "Are you in the wilderness?"
Nancy Thomas, Poems of the Incarnation (1).
The great Homesick James in 1970, "Dust My Broom."
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