I pray that God may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation…so that you may know the hope to which he has called you.
– Ephesians 1:18
What is hope? Hope is many things. It is the audacious belief that things will improve, sometimes despite much evidence to the contrary. Hope is a willingness to trust God to lead us through a storm, to dissipate our despair and hard-heartedness, and bring about righteousness and equity. Hope is a source of inspiration, creating energy for justice and change out of seemingly nothing at all. Hope is surrender, as we let go of our ideas of what we think can or should or must happen, and trust God to work in our hearts, through our actions, and in the world.
Hope is an act of courage and faith. It is often irrational and can come from a stubborn refusal to accept the brokenness of the world as normative. Hope does not allow us to resign ourselves to the idea that this is “the way that it is.” Hope is what keeps us from giving up.
Hope is what takes the raw material of grief and loss and fashions it into a vessel for new life. Hope keeps us from meeting violence and ego with our own tribal versions of them. Hope is what breaks the cycle of oppression and hatred and allows forgiveness to change the world.
Hope is all these things, and more. Yet in moments when it’s particularly difficult to find hope, when the language of bright-siding seems empty and false, I come back to this reality of hope—hope is not just something I get to have because of my faith. Whatever hope is, at its core, hope is a mission statement for how I’m supposed to live in this broken world.
In other words: hope is my job.
Hope is my vocation, my calling, not because I’m a priest but because I am a Christian. Hope is my calling as a person of faith.
God gives us hope, to inspire us, to sustain us, and to renew us. But God also gives us hope to give us a job, to keep our souls out of the deeper trouble that reactivity and despair can get us into. Most days, we can’t fix the world, but we can still bring hope. Hope isn’t just a gift. It’s our responsibility to nurture it, to kindle it, to hold on to it so that the Holy Spirit can find her way into impossible situations and, on her own time, transfigure them into conduits for healing and grace.
This Sunday, we’ll celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday and welcome Rob Solomon, Vice President of Campus Enrichment and Engagement at Case Western Reserve University, as our preacher and Dean’s Forum guest. We gather at a moment of great pain and unrest, and we’ll remember in song “days when hope unborn had died.”
It’s a memory of grief, but the song continues with the renewal of the very hope that was thought to be lost. That, friends, is our work. It is our job as people of faith and followers of Jesus to hold on to the promise of hope, to kindle it, so that God can continue to work in us and through us to bring about a world that is known, not by violence or power, but by righteousness, equity, and peace.
Faithfully,
