Hope from Hopelessness

There have been so many times over the past few years that I have remembered, reflected on and carried with me little bits and pieces from a former pastor’s sermons.  Often things that challenged me and none more challenging than: Is God omniscient?  Is God all-knowing?  In basic vernacular–does God know the future?

Though that sounded heretical then and to be honest I do not remember the pastor’s explanations but when I came across an article this week in Sojourners, I heard those sermons. 

My little  5 paragraphs here cannot do justice to the theological ins and outs, but let me say that a deeper understanding of God, who God is and how God is working suggests that God is not some Divine Fortune-teller.  And, the fact that so many think God is leads so many people to walk away in disgust as humans declare war on one another, as poverty and homelessness ravage our cities, as immigrants are held in prisons and denied sanctuary, as guns kill school children.  That is not the God who loves us.  But it sure lets us blame God.

What the challenge calls for is a closer walk with Jesus.  Understanding how we are called to rise up, to work for the Love of God in everything we do. People who do not know God, know only the power of humanity and that we know is faulty.  

God needs our cooperation, our hands, our feet, our hearts to bring about a new creation.  Jesus shows us that, he tells us parables that reinforce the call for us through the characters of the prodigal son and the good samaritan and more–every day people doing God’s work of redemptive love. And the more “little” people who answer that call, the closer it brings about the world that God knows and desires. God is near to us, knowing each and every one of us. But, that is not omniscience.

However, that intimate presence of God in our lives is our reason to hope.  We have prayed that God will soften hearts because we have hope.  God is forever provoking us to hope and through hope we can do more than we ever believe possible–even in our own every day. 

Says Theologian Brandon Ambrosino in his interview with Sojourner:

I think of hope the way Theologian Paul Tillich talks about “the courage to be.” Tillich says that hope is a courage “rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

I’m using the word hope the way that he’s using the word courage. Hope is staring into the abyss and saying, I will go on. There’s a reason I will go on. That’s hope. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann says that when we hope, we bring ourselves into correspondence with the future for which we hope. 

When we hope, we become icons of the otherwise. And when enough of us start to hope for the future, that hope is too heavy for the present ruling structures to support. They collapse and give way. 

Hope is not optimism. Hope is not naive. Hope is not rose-colored glasses. Hope for Christians starts with the brutal murder of Jesus. Hope begins in hopelessness. 

May we know that God is intimately near to us through these days and may our actions be filled with Hope and Grace. Hope from Hopelessness