Sustain me according to your promise, that I may live,
and let me not be disappointed in my hope.
-Psalm 119:116 (Book of Common Prayer)
Every time I work myself into a self-indulgent state of gloom, God surprises me with a ray of hope.
Glimmers of hope were far from my mind the morning I wandered into a seminar on “The Global Energy Challenge” at an annual American Jewish Committee convention I was attending as an interfaith leader. Though I was weighed down by the stubborn forces resisting any significant “greening” of the world’s energy production, hope broke through nonetheless. A bright young Israeli-American entrepreneur presented a game-changing electric automobile plan that had already been adopted by Israel and was being considered by Denmark along with a half-dozen other countries.1 The speaker’s ambitious goal: converting the infrastructure of whole countries to support high-powered electric autos and trucks within a decade. This would end each country’s dependence on foreign oil, reduce carbon emissions, and help retard global climate change. Here was a hopeful development I’d never heard of!
My states of gloom are shortsighted, based as they are on headlines that most often ignore creative innovators and pioneers, people shaping a better future. Print and electronic media highlight well the ignorance, folly, and sin of this world’s self-serving denial of manifest problems, but they seldom report the redeeming and reparative work that God is inspiring through brave and creative people. Worse, the self-indulgence of despair takes energy away from the real call of Jesus, which is to look keenly and expectantly for signs of hope—signs of the inrushing energies of God’s kingdom. Self-imposed despair can even block the never-end hope that flows from God, in whom hope has its origin.
Hope springs from the Divine itself.
“Hope springs eternal,” the common saying goes. 2 Though Alexander Pope, the 18th century originator of the phrase, says that it “springs eternal in the human breast,” I’ve come to believe that hope springs recurrently in us because it springs ultimately from the heart of God. Faced with the ignorance and rebellion of humanity, God hopes for the best, too.
At least that’s the way the Bible tells the tale. The vibrant God of Torah and the Prophets responds passionately to the ways humans frustrate or further the divine desire for the well-being of humanity, earth, and all the creatures. God’s hopes and desires are dashed again and again in the failure of the primal parents in Eden, the arrogance of the tower of Babel, the repeated infidelity of Israel, and the quarrelsome divisions of the early church. We’re even told that on one infamous occasion God gave up hope, “sorry that he had made man” (Gen, 6:6, ESV), and decided to have done with the whole planetary enterprise. But then God’s eye fell on Noah and his family; hope sprang again in The Eternal breast, and humanity’s future was secured once more.
These stories are written in this way “for our learning” (Rom. 15:4, KJV). Whatever the ultimate truth of God’s own inner life, the anthropomorphic picture of God’s feelings in scripture is set forth as a model for the movements of our own hearts. At the very heart of Reality there is an ever-springing energy that faces down discouragement, an energy that translates into human terms as “hope.” The God of always-springing hope has our backs when we are tempted toward hopelessness, and is both the ground and goal of our deepest hopes.
Hope: An Ingredient in Survival
Is this why the wellsprings of hope in us can sometimes be renewed by something seemingly small? I’ve seen a man’s wavering hope in God’s goodness restored by the light of a spectacular sunrise falling on a snow-capped mountain peak. I knew a woman whose hopes for the resolution of a difficult situation were renewed by an unexpected and uncannily timed rainbow. A parishioner once told me that my unexpected pat on his back one Christmas Eve turned him away from despair toward hope, most especially because he knew I was ignorant of his desperate feelings.
What invites hope to spring forth is some imagined good in the future, however vague. Powerful, symbol-laden images like the light-drenched mountain peak and the rainbow touch deep memories of joy and goodness; a hand on the shoulder of a discouraged person evokes memories of love and support. The remembrance of past good leaps into an imagined future promising enough to take that next step, out of gloom, into positive action.
Surely such a process, so necessary for our survival, is hardwired in us, rooted in the imago Dei, the imprint of God’s own character at the roots of our nature. When we give up hope, our spirits begin to turn toward half-life and, ultimately, death.
Our Hopes—or God’s?
Our “imagined futures,” however, can easily become a hindrance to hope. Limited by self-regarding preferences and prejudices, our hopes can become the fodder for new disappointment if we are too attached to them. God has a wider vision of possibilities than we do, and we are wise to place more hope in the providential activity of God than we do in our own limited expectations.
Take the story of Jonah — a telling example of how our short-term, ego-bound hopes and God’s own long-range, extravagant hopes sometimes clash. Called to deliver God’s word of judgment and promise to one of Israel’s enemies, Jonah’s heart-felt hopes are for Nineveh’s destruction. The city’s rulers had forged terrifying new battle tactics, forced evictions, and culture-destroying policies as part of their imperial strategy. Jonah flees to the ends of the earth, as we discover, to forestall any possibility that the Ninevites will repent. “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 3). In spite of the prophet’s reluctance, the sinners in this biblical parable repent with alacrity and intensity.
Jonah is so distressed about the dashing of his hopes for vengeance that he declares himself ready to die rather than share God’s own hope that even the worst sinners might turn and be saved. As the story closes, Jonah sits stubbornly outside the gates of repentant Nineveh, ready to die rather than share God’s love for children gone tragically astray.
Jonah’s stance is what Catholic tradition calls a “sin against hope.” This traditional Christian concept struck me as a wise safeguard for the soul when a friend, who had been raised Roman Catholic, told me of his temptation to despair over some situation. “Then I remembered that to fall into despair would be a sin against the virtue of hope.”
Seeing despair as a sin — as a ‘thou shalt not’ — provides guardrails for the heart. So guarded, we can be schooled by our disappointments toward more realistic hopes. And we can be taught by the gospel to hope for what God hopes for — our gradual growth, whatever the circumstances, into the faith and love, compassion and justice, hopefulness and patience that can make us God’s partners in the world’s ongoing creation and redemption. We can develop a practiced attentiveness to the ways God opens up new possibilities from unexpected, or previously unknown, sources.
“How will something new come into my life?” the Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Crafton recently wrote, lamenting her own discouragement at the cruelty stalking so much of the world today. “All stories, from folk tales to Bible tales (and so many Bible tales are both) are stories of new things coming to be.”3 Hope feeds on the possibility of something new emerging that will change outcomes for the better, like my discovery of a savvy entrepreneur pioneering an electric car revolution.
“Fear not, little flock,” Jesus told his discouraged followers one day when their misplaced hopes must have been dashed to the ground. “It is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32, KJV). So, day by day, the challenge is whether I will take Jesus at his word or not.
I’m not suggesting we suppress every surge of discouragement or ignore a brooding layer of despair. The issue is how we respond to the feelings of this moment in our lives. I can hold tightly to the utopian daydreams of my limited hopes and the gloomy nightmares of my deepest fears, or I can practice a “holy agnosticism” of letting God weave God’s own possible future out of the materials humanity offers each day, by our actions, for God’s use.
So, while I make an intentional practice of staying informed about the challenges facing my family, community, and world, I can also try to refrain from future-casting, especially about the dire possibilities this unfolding century seems to portend. The psalmist tells me not to fret myself because of the ungodly, (see Ps. 37:1), and Jesus bids me not to worry about tomorrow but to pray with persistence for good to come. (See Luke 18:1-8; Matt. 6:34) It’s my job to believe I will see the “goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13) and to be on the lookout for the signs of hope that arise out of God’s continual work in the world. Some days, quite frankly, it’s a struggle, but whatever the challenge, I can pray for the energies of the kingdom to come with their world-redeeming power.
To do otherwise would be a sin against hope.
1 ‘Better Place’ founder Shai Agassi was named one of Time magazine’s 100 people who most affect the world in 2000. See the article in Time here.
2 Epistle I, Section 3 in Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994). p. 48. Originally published in England in 1734, one of most influential essays of the Enlightenment.
3 Barbara Crafton, “Why Is All This Happening” in The Daily Emo from Geranium Farm.org, July 30, 2011.
