There can be little doubt that we live in an age of fear, despair, and cynicism. Beneath the bravado of the “Make America Great” movement led by an unscrupulous demagogue, the convenient denial of the suffering and evil in much of the world, and the fleeting happiness of contemporary Epicureans who are always looking out for their own security and pleasure—beneath all of that smolders a deep fear that all is not well and that the worst is yet to come. Much of the anger, frustration, and scapegoating so prevalent in our nation is rooted in this underlying dis-ease. We know something is wrong, but like blind people under attack, we are swinging at everything around us with no deep analysis or wisdom as to what our real problems are. It’s easier to blame and persecute the different, vulnerable, and discounted than it is to face with honesty and integrity the deep darkness within our world and within us.
Joanna Rogers Macy observes, “Unacknowledged despair for the world and its future erupts in violence which is either turned outward against society in aggression and vandalism or inward in acts of self-destruction, as the rising rates of drug abuse and suicide attest.” The twenty-first century threatens to be the beginning of a long winter of discontent and despair. Very few people in the public arena can convince us that there is reason for celebration or even hope. And this lack of vision—this want of hope is perhaps the most terrible affliction for collective humanity to face. Helen Keller was once asked if there was, in her estimation, anything worse that being blind. She responded, “Yes, having no vision.” Where is the vision today in our world? In our society? In our church?
The challenges are certainly there: hunger, poverty, child abuse, the ecological endangerment of the cosmos, the rise of racism and hate groups which brings to mind the horrors of the Nazi era, children and teenagers aching for love and purpose, almost all of us desperately needing the authentic experience of community. The challenges are certainly there, and perhaps that is where we should start. Instead of running from them, pretending they don’t exist, and hiding our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, perhaps the best place to start is to look reality in the eye so that we can get about the business of standing our ground against fear, despair, and cynicism. Perhaps hope—real hope, biblical hope, God’s hope—is not even possible until we enter the darkness and face the demons as they are. The first step may indeed be to admit what mess we are really in and, embracing the wisdom of the Twelve Steps, to confess our powerlessness. It is in the night that hope is born, not in the bright day when there is no reason to hope because all is well. As the poet, Tagore said, “Hope is like the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” If the Bible is any measure of truth, then hope will come to us only as we have the courage to admit and see the night.
And what happens when we do that? What happens when we see hunger and poverty, racism and violence, ecological abuse and the breakdown of community, children and teens without a clue as to the direction of their lives because they live in a society where greed has robbed them of their chance or even the vision of nobility? What happens when we see the night for what it is?
Augustine, the father of the Western Church, may be very helpful at this point. Augustine said that hope—real hope, biblical hope, hope as God would kindle in the human heart—has two sisters–anger and courage. You see, hope is about change. Hope is about a future that is qualitatively different from the past and the present. Hope is about a tomorrow that is not just a logical extension and consequence of today. Hope is about a discontent with things as they are because we can envision with God a healing and redemptive alternative. And for all those reasons, hope has two sisters: anger and courage.
We should be angry that we live in a world where tens of thousands of children die every day from hunger and malnutrition. We should be angry that we live in a nation where one in four children goes to bed hungry. We should be angry that scientists tell us we have a little over a decade to make radical changes at every level if our children and grandchildren will inherit a planet that will support life that is humane and desirable. And we should be angry that this ecological catastrophe is caused by our greed and neglect which we still refuse to admit and to act upon in ways that may mitigate the coming nightmares. We should be angry that more of our lives are controlled by the greed and arrogance of big shots in business and government for whom quarterly profits are the only things that matter. And we should be angry that once again vulnerable people are being persecuted for “crimes of being”—for simply being who they are and who God created them to be. If we can envision an alternative to all this madness—if we can dream of a better world—if as Christians we believe God is not through with this world yet but desires its healing and redemption, then we should be angry. And we should use that anger to take courageous action to allow for the birth of that alternative. Some years ago I read about grandmothers who decided that they were going to do something about the drug epidemic in their inner city neighborhood. Going out in groups they confronted the drug dealers and shamed them from the neighborhood one block at a time until that part of the city was free of these purveyors of addiction and misery. These aged women did what the city government and police could not do. What we are talking about is hope with backbone—hope that sees the world as it is—that comprehends the darkness but which says, “It doesn’t have to be that way. The world can be a better place than we have made it.”
Now do I have to tell you that such hope takes courage? We must have the courage to do something with our anger. That’s why Augustine said that the second sister of hope is courage. We must be like Abraham in our passage for today. Paul says that Abraham “hoped against hope” as he walked with God into the birthing of the alternative called faith/trust. Hope against hope: in other words, hope against all that is—against all that one can logically expect from the situation and circumstances of the day. Here was Abraham, an old man good as dead with a wife who has already gone through menopause being called by God to go to another land and to begin a new nation/a real alternative through the children he and Sarah were to have. Now for Abraham and Sarah to say “Yes” to God and to begin that journey was to hope against hope. And Paul says that is the type of hope we need in our world—the courage to move forward, believing that God’s commitment to us, our world, and our future is more real and powerful than all the demons of the night which terrorize and enslave us.
To hope against hope takes courage. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says, “We have always known that the way to get along is to go along.” And who among us wants to be the one who runs risks, dares newness and acts on God’s dream? Who, indeed? But is not this precisely what it will take to move us from the fear, despair, and cynicism of our day into the dawn of a tomorrow worthy of our humanity? Like Abraham and Sarah we must run risks, dare newness, and act on God’s dream. The stakes are too high for us, our children, and their children for anything less than hope with backbone—hope with her two sisters, anger and courage.
And if we fear that we don’t have what it takes to generate such hope, let us not forget that it is not so much we who hope for a better world as it is God who hopes through us. And the One who raised Jesus from the dead is more than able to bring such hopes to fruition as we join in this great Divine conspiracy. We who live on this side of the cross and empty tomb have no reason to surrender ourselves to fear, despair, and cynicism , for Word of God, the New Creation will be. Indeed, in Christ it has already begun.
