On Hope

I've gone from a goal of blogging once a day to blogging once a week to blogging once a month. I'm telling myself that with everything else that I'm doing, this has got to be good enough. A few entries down, you'll find a post that talks about the problem I have with disappointing people.

After a series of big crashes in my life -- of building up the hopes of people and then letting them down -- mostly through allowing myself to over-commit to too many good causes and then systematically failing to live up to the expectations of others -- or perhaps through failing to live up to my own expectation, I'm in the process of learning what it means to be mortal, to be flawed, and to be stuck in the muck of my humanity. (And yes, that sentence is as tortured as my thoughts right now.)

This Sunday I'll be preaching at our small congregation about the concept of hope. What is hope? How does one keep hoping in a world that seems to be full of opportunities to fail? How does one keep hoping in a world world where even the greatest successes seem to only be preludes to a slippery denouement? How does one keep hoping when death, disease, famine and cruelty seem to keep coming back into human society?

I'm not certain. I think though that hope is often found as a proclamation of faith. And so we see the prophet Habbakuk listing a litany of agricultural disasters in the third chapter of that book, but ending with hope in faith:

17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,

18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.

19 The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights.

In addition to faith, I also think that hope is, perhaps, found in forgiveness. We GIVE away our anger. We give away our hatred. We give away our entitlement to retribution FOR we are FORGIVEN. Jesus gives us this example when on the cross. After humanity had turned its back on him. After humanity had cursed him. After humanity had tortured him. He forgave, because he came to givefor us his all -- his comfort, his sanctification, and, ultimately, his hope.

He hoped that we would turn around. He hoped that we would give ourselves away.
And he modeled for us a method for combating our own failures by believing in a plan that we in our current blindness cannot comprehend or understand. Believing in hope itself -- in the both/and -- in the person of the "is" -- in the I am, was, and will be -- in the sovereignty and power of God to transform failure into transcendence.