We’re immersed in Advent as we enter the mid-point of the season and the light of our hope slowly grows brighter. Some words from Moltmann this morning from Theology of Hope p.164-165:

God is not somewhere in the Beyond, but he is coming and as the coming One he is present. He promises a new world of all-embracing life, of righteousness and truth, and with this promise he constantly calls this world into question- not because to the eye of hope it is as nothing, but because to the eye of hope it is not yet what it has the prospect of being. When the world and the human nature bound up with it are called in question in this way, then they become ‘historic’, for they are staked upon, and submitted to the crisis of, the promised future. Where the new begins, the old becomes manifest. Where the new is promised, the old becomes transient and surpassable. Where the new is hoped for and expected, the old can be left behind. Thus ‘history’ arises in the light of its end, in the things which happen because of, and become perceptible through, the promise that lights up the way ahead. Eschatology does not disappear in the quicksands of history, but it keeps history moving by its criticism and hope; it is itself something like a sort of quicksand of history from afar.

 

Such beautiful imagery in here- the picture of the world being “staked upon” the coming promised future of God,  the perception of movement in the form of quicksand, and the most lovely Advent image of  the “promise that lights up the way ahead.” I’ll not comment further and just let the picture stand.

Today, we ourselves belong to both groups of people (people of anxiety and people of hope). We read the newspapers, and are filled with anxiety. We read the Bible, and hope for God. Like everyone else, we are afraid of the dangers ahead of us in this world. Like the people in the Bible, we believe that God’s deliverance is near. This is an age of anxiety. That is true. But it is an age of hope too. We believe in God and hope for (God’s) coming, but we are not optimists–we are afraid for our world. We are afraid of the things that imperil its future: we can imagine the social catastrophes in Russia–we can calculate the ecological disaster in our own countries–we know more than we can believe. But we are not pessimists, for we have faith in God and believe that (God) will never let his creation go. People who hope for God are not optimists. They don’t need the power of positive thinking. People who hope for God are not pessimists. They don’t need the logic of negative dialectic. People who trust in God know that God is waiting for them, that God is hoping for them, that they are invited to God’s future, so that they are holding in their hands the most marvelous invitation they have ever had in their lives.  (p.131-132)

I often run across people and friends who feel that faith is a form of blindness, either ignorant or intentional. We either do not know enough about the world to see how it really is, or we are so afraid of what we have seen that we choose to put blinders on and convince ourselves we see something else. I confess to being overwhelmingly annoyed by these assumptions. Certainly, people believe in God (and a million other things) for these kinds of reasons from time to time. We’re all working our way toward understanding. But to say the task of faith is blind optimism and the task of fear or doubt or even atheism is staunch pessimism is far too simplistic.

We are always both people of fear and anxiety, if we indeed have our eyes open. We see the dangers of the world (even if Moltmann’s references are outdated…).  We know the future could bring hard times. But we also see the hope in God’s promise, and dare to hope. However, this tension between anxiety and hope does not require us to pick sides. We do not have to wear team jerseys declaring our allegiance to optimism or pessimism, changing teams based on the outcome of Monday morning’s headline. People of faith are simply people who trust in God. It’s not blind trust. It’s not trust that means no bad things will happen. It’s not trust that we will get to have life just the way we want it. It’s trust in a relationship—a friendship–that remains intact no matter what. Faith is not contingent upon what happens, but upon who holds us. We trust that whatever the future holds, God is with us, God is before us and behind us. Faith is trust that when all is said and done, what will be left is not optimism or pessimism, anxiety or hope, but the fullness of God realized.

When we talk about Christ’s resurrection from the dead we are not talking about a fact. We are talking about a process. We are talking in one and the same breath about the foundation, the future, and the practical exercise of God’s liberation of men and women, and his redemption of the world. So what we can know historically about Christ’s resurrection must not be abstracted from the question of what we can hope from it, and what we have to do in its name.”

 

One of the (many) problems with modern theology is that it tends to get tied up in factual questions, spending all energy proving or disproving something while overlooking the reason why the event means something in the first place.  I have no problem discussing my view of the factual reality of the resurrection (it happened–really and truly) but I do think Moltmann puts us on the right path by talking not about fact but about process.  What God put into play that Easter morning was a story of redemption that went further than we had imagined before. It brings hope to the past, present and future of history.  As communities of faith gather around Eastertide stories of Jesus showing himself to the disciples, we can get off track and talk about what kind of body he had, or we can talk about what we can hope from the story of Christ’s resurrected body, and what we are now called to do in response.  Seems to me a much more interesting and productive question.

Over the last month or so, my 6 year old has come up with a new little rhythm in his prayers. All of them- before meals, before bed, when we see an accident on the highway.  He says, “Dear God, I hope…”  Last night it was, “Dear God, I hope that no more people die in Japan, and I hope nobody in Africa gets bit by those mosquitoes that make them sick, and I hope I have really good dreams tonight.”

Something about the simple, declarative essence of his “I hope” statements has really struck me. I love that, in true 6 year old optimist fashion, he can throw out some gargantuan requests like they’re completely possible. Like it just takes us bringing our hope to God for malaria to be a thing of the past. Last night when I heard him pray that, I wondered if he was, in some way, right.  If we actually did bring our declarative hopes out like that and hang them like flags of promise, I wonder if malaria wouldn’t seem that far-fetched a problem to fix.  Maybe our hopes stay so small and inward that we need to get them to a place the wind can sway them in a way that actually moves us all in the same direction. Maybe we need to declare them, like blaring trumpets, both to God and to ourselves:  Dear God, I  hope!

Those of us with friends in nonprofit sectors will find much of this old news.  My friend Brad will tell you that if you want people to give to your cause, you have to make it personal, and you have to show them that they are making a very concrete difference.  This is not always a bad thing.  For instance, I’ve found a number of teaching moments with my children thanks to the magnet photograph we have on our refrigerator of the children we sponsor through ServLife International.  I find less compelling reasons for grown adults who could easily pick up a book or in a matter of seconds pull up a host of  Internet articles about global poverty.  The argument that we have to help adults feel good in order to get them to act brings to mind something akin to dressing up broccoli with cheese tops and zooming it into their mouths with airplane noises.

I suppose I could get over that easily enough.  As Kristof argues, we probably could fix much of this problem by simply revisiting the marketing issue with at least the same amount of energy we use when selling toothpaste.  I’m sure some PR firm somewhere is more than happy to dress up like a stalk of broccoli for the right price (even if that price is looking charitable, God help us).  The more compelling question to me is–Why do we have such a lack of empathy when true crisis confronts us?

A group of us at Journey are currently reading through Jurgen Moltmann’s A Theology of Hope every Tuesday night, so I am once again pondering the great and central role that hope plays in our lives.  For Moltmann, eschatological hope is the very essence of being Christian.  It is that which allows us to live into the dynamic future of God, always open to new possibilities.  As I read this article, I couldn’t help but wonder if our sudden attack of empathy-loss when confronted with the staggering number of children that die of malnutrition every day is not an issue of “feel good” but rather a lack of eschatological hope.  We do not feel paralyzed because we cannot find a way to put human faces on the numbers, but because we can no longer imagine making a difference.  We give up, because we become convinced that it is a lost cause.

I remember a number of years ago when reading Ronald Sider’s book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger he mentions a number of popular Christian excuses.  The one I found most puzzling was the tactic of quoting Mark 14:7, “The poor you will have with you always.”  Apparently, some believe that  Jesus  relinquished us from the responsibility of working toward eradicating poverty, since Jesus already said we wouldn’t be successful.  The early church hardly interpreted it this way, as the first few hundred  years of Christianity boasts stories of such radical giving  that even pagan historians of the time were compelled by them.  And in the broader context of Scripture, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who could argue the case that God’s command to care for the poor is not primary.   And yet, something about us- at least as Americans, if not simply as humans- zones in on the loophole and finds it acceptable to gloss over the very real call of Jesus to make a significant difference in this world.  It is a lost cause, we say.  Jesus even said so.

But if these are lost causes–these issues of global poverty and malnutrition and infant mortality and malaria outbreaks and prenatal care for women and proper education-if these are lost causes,  how can we claim to have faith in a God who promises to wipe every tear away?  How can we hold any sort of belief in a Kingdom where God will be all in all?

If we find our eyes glossing over and our hearts turning numb when we hear the very real statistics of those in the Two-Thirds World, it is not because we lack “feelgood,” lest we let ourselves off the hook far too easily.  It is because we lack faith in the God we worship, and we have lost all transformative hope in the promise God has surely given us.