WHERE WE FIND HOPE

 

All Hallows by the Tower, London

What gives you hope?  It's when I'm in church that I feel the most hopeful. Hope is the opposite of existential dread.  Hope is the opposite of fear.  When we are hopeful, we do not fear that life has no meaning or purpose.  Christian hope promises nothing more nor less than resurrection and life to those who must exist in the shadow of death.  Where each of us lives.

We think of the thousands of bodies in the rubble of Ankara, Turkey or the thousands of lives lost in Ukraine, young Russian recruits as well as Ukrainian families.  The list of losses is always too long.  

Ash Wednesday is upon us, when Christians wear ashes on their foreheads as a sign of repentance. "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."  God tells us this in Genesis 3:19.  

The sacramental symbolism of ashes touches us on a fundamental level, the level where our inner fragility and poverty lies.  The smudged cruciform reminds us of the resurrection as well.  From ashes on a Wednesday through lilies on a Sunday six weeks later. The answer to anyone's foolish question, "Do you know who I am?" is the simple comeuppance: "You are but dust."   

The words human and humility come from the Latin word humus which means earth.  One who is humble is "down to earth."  We are earthen vessels into which God has breathed life.  When the breath goes, the dust remains.  

So where then is the hope?  

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann says that there is a reason the inscription above the entrance to Dante's Hell says "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."  Hopelessness is Hell.  It is why our grief for the suicidal is so strong.  How can they not know there is hope?  

In church we hear the words, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."  Because people I love have died before me, I want to believe in eternal life.  It's a promise I want to hold close and do. But the resurrection of Christ is not a consoling opium, Moltmann says, soothing us with only the gift of life in the hereafter.  It is the energy for the rebirth of this life.  Hope in Christ doesn't just point to another world.  It is focused on the redemption of this one. It is not a consolation for suffering so much as a contradiction of suffering.  It is something you and I know so well:  the andness of life.  

So those sifting through tons of debris keep looking.  They find people alive.  They find bodies to return to families for burial.  The Ukrainians do not lose hope.  They seek and receive help from countries who value them and their democracy.  We did not lose hope in the face of Covid. The mother of Tyre Nichols, fatally beaten by the five Memphis cops (lest we forget) seeks meaning for her son's death; she does not give up.  This happens over and over.  The children of Parkland, Florida became activists after their school shooting. We seek hope, we find hope, we are given hope. For Christians and non-Christians as well, through the Spirit's efforts we bring newness and life to our world.

The future remains open, our futures.  Let the hope we have been given make us brave, like so many others, to embrace it.  

                                                          Nina Naomi