People of Hope...

 As people of faith we are all called to be people of hope. Indeed in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul lists hope as one of the three highest virtues “But until then, these three remain – faith, hope and love – and love is the greatest” (1Cor 13:13, First Nations Version). And that is great to say, but what does it mean to be people of hope?

Hope is what keeps us moving forward. Hope is what keeps us working for change. Hope is what allows us to dream. Hope can change the way we see the world. Hope is very powerful, hope is a motivator. Just yesterday I was starting to work on Advent worship by looking for poetry (my plan is to use some piece of poetry each week in Advent). The poem I think I will use on the first Sunday, when we light the candle of Hope, was written by an 11-year old in Texas and is titled I Can Change the World with Hope. But still I wonder, what does it mean to be people of hope? What does it mean to be a hope-filled community?

Having hope is sometimes seen as an unrealistic, pollyanna-ish response to life. I can see that reaction. Sometimes people use hope and trust as words to cover their flights of fancy. Sometimes hope is used as a way to escape from hard realities. Dreams are vitally important, but those dreams have to deal with reality. Hope is a vital part of growth but it has to be grounded. Simply wishing away the hard stuff is not, in my opinion, hope. True hope is ready to get down into the trenches and get dirty.

About 11 years ago I read a book that remains one of my go-to sources for short reflections. It is called It’s Not Too Late: A Field Guide to Hope. In its’ opening pages I read:

...The “field is the seemingly inexorable deterioration of the earth’s environment and the economic well-being of humankind. Like a handbook about desert plants or inner-city tourism, this book might seem to promote a seemingly futile task: looking for a rare thing amid a hostile environment. In fact the opposite is true. Just as plants bloom in the desert and inner cities teem with barely visible wonderments, so hope flourishes in these difficult years.
(It’s Not Too Late by Bob Sitze, Alban Institute ©2010 p. xx-xxi)

Christian hope is based on flowers that bloom in the desert, and an empty tomb, and the Word-Made-Flesh lying in a feed trough. Christian hope centres on the claim that God has not abandoned the world but shares the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, stands against the troubles of the world and, by opposing, ends them – eventually. Christian hope lies in the words of Dame Julian of Norwich “all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing be well”. Christian hope reminds us that the Reign of God is real and growing in our midst.

The world is a tough place. We are still sorting out how things have been totally changed by the pandemic. We still have news reports full of violence and bloodshed. Those words I quoted earlier were written over a decade ago but economic chaos and environmental deterioration are still leading stories (and arguably getting worse). Many communities of faith find themselves wondering what their future as a community will look like with shrinking numbers, aging members, and uncertain finances. What might hope look like for us today?

I think we need to look for hope in the surprising places, places we might not expect (of course if we expected it they wouldn’t be surprising would they?). Hope will not be found, I think, by looking back to what once was. Hope will be found, as it often is in our Scripture story, where God is doing something new and renewing the community. We can not, in my opinion, create hope. That is what God is doing around us. We can become infected with hope as we open ourselves to see, hear, and feel God active in the world around us.

What does it mean to be people, to be a community of hope? It means we acknowledge the messiness of the world around us, the ugliness, the broken-ness and then we look for more. It means we listen for angels singing about a baby on a manger, we dare to visit a tomb in a garden only to find it empty, we allow a mighty wind to drive us from our places of safety out into the world where we share in word and action the love of God. To be hope-filled people and communities means we sing about the world that could be, the world that God is creating and re-creating, even as we work hard to make the world as it is a safer, more loving, more equitable place to live.

Listen, for here is Good News! God is at work around, within, and among us. The germ of hope and promise is floating in the air, ready to infect all of us. As individuals, as a community we could choose to despair at all the broken parts that seem to make up the world. Or we could try to wish them all away. Or we could decide that this world does not really matter and wait for some heavenly reward. Or we could choose to be people of hope, people that look for the flower in the sidewalk crack, the love in a sea of anger or fear, the life where death seems to have won. God calls us to be people of hope. Shall we give it a try?