Sometimes Hope Seems Hopeless

Do you ever read the headlines or turn on the cable network news and wonder if there is any hope for us? For our nation? For our world? If so, you’re not alone!

I named that hopelessness in my Easter season reflections on the MinistryMatters website. The series connects the resurrection stories with sermons Harry Emerson Fosdick preached during WWII. When I wrote the series I had no way of knowing that during this Easter season the President would take our nation into an unnecessary and illegal war.

Here’s a portion of what I said in “Starting With Trouble and Ending With Hope.“

Fosdick asked the probing question, “Who today escapes the problem of wanting hope, but on every side seeing our optimism proved illusion and the oasis we dreamed of only mirages?”

As I look across fifty years of ministry, many of the biblical convictions that guided us and the social visions for which we labored are being undermined and assaulted today. We thought we were making progress in dealing with racism, sexism, poverty, and injustice. We established policies and technologies to combat climate change. We trusted the post-WWII institutions that were built for global cooperation and peace. But as I write, our efforts toward “diversity, equality and inclusion” are being systematically rejected and thrown aside. The global relationships and structures Fosdick envisioned as he looked toward the end of WWII are being torn apart. Our efforts to protect the environment are being labeled a “fraud.”

Fosdick’s words seem sadly up to date: “I am ashamed of some Americans today, growing cynical about the possibility of a more decently ordered world and turning back to isolationism or American military imperialism, not daring to try for a really co-operative world organized for peace.” His question still haunts us: “Who are we, with our history and traditions, to lose heart about a better world order, and like hermit crabs crawl back into the outgrown shells of obsolete ancestral social systems and international policies?”

I doubt Fosdick or any of our parents in the Greatest Generation would have imagined the ways the Trump/MAGA regime uses the language and imagery of Christian faith as a spiritual veneer to cover over actions that are the direct contradiction of anything Jesus taught. We might have hoped for so much better!

How Hope Finds Us

This is not the first time faithful people have felt hopeless. In fact, that’s exactly how some of Jesus’ followers felt on the evening of that first Easter Day. The gospel reading for the 3rd Sunday of (not after) Easter is the painfully honest and surprisingly hopeful story of the way hope found two hopeless disciples on the way to Emmaus. (Luke 24:13-35)

The Risen Christ found Cleopas and his unnamed companion on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Sunday evening. Walking toward the setting sun, their tear-clouded eyes didn’t recognize the stranger who joined them unobtrusively.

Jesus listened to their troubled account, including one of the saddest phrases in the Bible, “We had hoped…” Everything they had believed about who Jesus was, all they had imagined about the future, every hope of the Kingdom of God coming among them were laid to rest in the lifeless, blood-soaked body in Joseph’s tomb. They were even more troubled when they peered into the tomb and found nothing there.

Jesus found Cleopas and his companion in their hopeless grief, but he didn’t leave them there! Their troubling despair was transformed into living hope at what they assumed was the end of their journey. The unidentified guest at their dinner table “took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Their “eyes were opened.”  The bread and wine became outward and physical signs of an inward and spiritual grace. With “strangely warmed” hearts, they rose from the table, ran back to Jerusalem, and told the other disciples about the way Jesus walked with them and was revealed in the breaking of the bread.

The great news of the resurrection is that the Risen Christ still finds us on the road from the past, walks with us through the present, and gives us fresh hope for the future.

Fosdick declared, “Hope is not the superficial by-product of favorable circumstances; it springs from a [person]’s character, from what he [or she] is, and cares about, and believes in, and underneath all else from the deep conviction that God is not dead, and has not spoken his last word on any subject.”  

In Finding Your Bearings: How Words That Guided Jesus Through Crisis Can Guide Us, I called hope “the confident expectation that God is at work in the present to complete in the future the soul-saving, life-redeeming, creation-healing work God began in the past … Resurrection never ends.”  (p. 101)

Finding Signs of Hope

Enter Pope Leo XIV.

He came on the scene quietly, unobtrusively, the way Jesus showed up on the Emmaus Road. Who would have guessed that a priest from Chicago who served as a missionary South America would be elected to lead the Roman Catholic Church? Who would have predicted that in a time when trust in all institutions (including the Church) is at an an all-time low, a scholarly, soft-spoken Pope would become the trustworthy voice of Christ for this dark, depressing time?

By clearly declaring what Jesus taught, interpreted through the long tradition of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo has lifted the hope of this world actually becoming more like the Kingdom which Jesus revealed and for which he died. By contrast, politicians who attack him reveal their lack of understanding of the gospel, their ignorance of Catholic social teaching, and their lack of vision for non-violent solutions in a tragically violent world.

No one expected the resurrection. Easter came by surprise. And the Risen Christ continues to surprise us by showing up with unexpected signs of hope in a white-robed Pope.

In the traditional collect for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, we pray: “O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.”

So, may the Spirit of Christ open our eyes to see the surprising signs of his redeeming work in our lives and our world today.

Christ is (still) risen, indeed!

Grace and peace,

Jim