Mar 7

Written by: gfackre
3/7/2009 10:28 AM

Hope in the Air

Apologies for letting this blog lapse for some months. Other things intruded. And to have left it at “hell”!

I will return to that subject, but, first, some thoughts on the over-all matter of “hope” in the light of these intervening months…as a run-up to “hell’ and “everlasting life,” the two other phrases from the creed, or “stained glass windows” as we’ve spoken about them here.

Hope in the air? These past months in the US, and around the world, suggest more “hopelessness in the air,” given the financial crises, wars and rumors of wars, global warming, and the list grows longer. Yet what better time for the faithful to speak of the hope they have? And here and there I do hear that Word flung boldly in the air.

For example, in our Cape Cod community a new project was launched with church encouragement, but by two formerly homeless people. It’s called “Homeless but not Hopeless,” a facility in town for that growing population given the loss of jobs and homes in these dire economic times. And the churches continue with fresh vigor their “hospitality program” of providing overnight accommodation for the homeless in their buildings. When the faith community is so involved, I believe it is out of the “assurance of things hoped for” spoken of here earlier. Short of the coming of that final Not Yet, that dream spurs us to action in the Now. However, we have to do with a sober hope, with no illusions about the forces pitted against those small signs of the coming kingdom as in “homeless but not hopeless.”

If we look back over the past half century, it is interesting to see how the church, often too tumblingly, has risen to the occasion by bringing the note of hope to the fore. As Charles Peguy said in another dire time, there are occasions when “Hope, little hope, moves forward between her two big sisters.” Some examples:

After World War II, the planet still suffering from those circumstances, the planners of the second assembly of World Council of Churches decided on the topic, “Christ the Hope of the World.” And what an assembly it was, as both my wife and I can testify having attended it. Reflecting the horrors of the recent past and perils of that present, the Assembly message declared: “Though we were enemies of God, Christ died for us. We crucified him, but God raised him from the dead. He is risen! He has overcome the powers of death. A new life has begun….This is the hope of God’s people in every age, and we commend it afresh to al who will listen….” In the postwar 1950s, the good Word of hope was spoken by the church ecumenical.

Then again in the 1960s, a time of ferment, upheaval, possibilities opened, dreams held up, but also dreams crushed, polarizations, tribulations. But in the middle of it, a “theology of hope” appeared with interpreters such as Moltmann and Pannenberg sounding the note of the Future and what it can mean for the Present. It was no accident that Moltmann mentioned that a picture of Martin King’s “dream speech” was on his wall. How well I also remember that, sitting a few hundred feet from the Lincoln Memorial with Lancaster Seminary faculty and students just arrived by bus to join the other 200,000 hopers.

Other times of tension, torpor and terror since have had their counter-cultural witness from a church that wants to speak the right Word for its day. Is it any accident then that N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope is getting the hearing it deserves this year? And that some who , out of their faith, can speak of “the audacity of hope” and act upon it?

We join that growing Handel chorus, who in the worst of times can sing, “I know that my redeemer lives and he shall stand at the latter day.”

Copyright ©2009 Gabriel Fackre

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