You’ve Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, part 4

Matthew 25: 34-43; Amos 5: 21-24
June 27, 2010
The word “hope” appears a bit more than 200 times in scripture. Interestingly enough, almost 10 percent of those occurrences come in the book of Job. Think about that for a moment. The story of Job – beaten down, picked on, abandoned by God – is full of hope. Perhaps it’s simply because when everything else has been taken from you all you’ve got left is hope.
When Harvey Milk uttered the phrase that I’ve borrowed as the title for this month’s series of sermons he also said this: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.”
You’ve gotta give ‘em hope! You’ve gotta give ‘em hope!
Perhaps that is, in and of itself, the best and simplest articulation for my own hope for the world. I hope for a world of hope, a world filled with people full of hope, a world overflowing with hope. For it is the absence of hope that leads to the desperate acts of violence that tear asunder the fabric of society, that rip apart families, that leave us lost in the midnight hours of mourning and grief, is a desert of despair parched and desperately thirsty for living waters, for justice waters to roll down upon us.
The brilliance, and the continued resonance, of Milk’s formulation lies in its imperative voice: “you – you have got to give them hope.” In other words, it is up to each and every one of us to give each one hope. We are in this thing together. Hope does not arise in individuals in isolation, but is rather a gift that we give to each other. You have got to give them hope.
More than forty years ago, in the majestic Confession of 1967, the Presbyterian Church articulated powerfully some of the specific content of the hope that we Christians have to offer to the world. Less than 20 years later, in A Brief Statement of Faith, the church again spoke a prophetic word of hope to the world. The power of those documents, just like the power of the gospels themselves, comes in the counter-intuitive fact that the hope we have to offer is not something that the world generally wants to receive.
Most of us, when we think of the specific things we hope for, would like to be offered, oh, perhaps a winning lottery ticket, or, at least, a good job, as the means to the ends for which we hope. For example, I hope that our kids will go to the colleges of their choice, so having a pair of good jobs is an excellent means to that end. I hope that, someday, we’ll be able to do some things to our house, so a winning lottery ticket would be a nice means to that end. I hope that we’ll retire some day and enjoy that season of life. Jobs and the lottery may be in order for that hope to be realized. For these hopes I’ll need to reconcile the balance sheet of the home economics.
But in its powerful wisdom, the Confession of 67 offers something else. In its introduction, the Confession says, “God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ and the mission of reconciliation to which he has called his church are the heart of the gospel in any age. Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ.”
It spoke directly to several specific areas of contemporary life that cry out for reconciliation, including: racism, militarism, and poverty. A Brief Statement of Faith, though far less a systematic theological statement than a liturgical confession, lifts up an additional area: environmental concern or creation care, as it’s become known in church circles of late.
The Confession of 67 warned that “Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize others, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.”
It urged the church “to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This search,” the Confession continues,” requires that the nations pursue fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security […].”
The Confession proclaims “that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.” It went on to say that any “church that is indifferent to poverty, or evades responsibility in economic affairs, or is open to one social class only, or expects gratitude for its beneficence makes a mockery of reconciliation and offer no acceptable worship to God.”
A few years further on, the church noted plainly in A Brief Statement of Faith that “we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care.”
These statements retain all of their original power. The world is still torn by extreme poverty and seemingly endless war. Church and society still practice exclusion and domination. And we continue to threaten death to our own planet. In short, we remain caught in what our Presbyterian sisters and brothers in 1967 called “the moral confusion of our time.”
Consider the situations that the Presbyterian Church’s great confessional statements of the past half century name: Identity-based exclusion, extreme poverty, violence, environmental destruction. Now imagine the people whose lives are captured in those situations.
Imagine a young man in, say, Malawi. He happens to be gay, and he’s just met a man in whose presence he simply lights up. Enthralled in those first blissful days of a crush, he simply wants to stroll hand-in-hand with his boyfriend along the beautiful shores of Lake Malawi.
Imagine a family in, say, Baghdad. It’s a beautiful summer evening and they just want to have a picnic along the banks of the Tigris River.
Imagine a young woman in Eritrea, kneeling beside the Red Sea, in tears because she cannot feed her child.
Imagine a fisherman in Niger, no longer able to provide for his family because the once rich waters of the Niger Delta have been befouled by oil spills that dwarf the spill along our own Gulf Coast – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill once a year for the past 40 years.
All of that sounds so far from home. But imagine a man being denied access to the Northern Virginia hospital room of his beloved – and legally married husband who fell ill on a dinner cruise on the Potomac – because they are gay and their marriage is not recognized in the Commonwealth.
Imagine a family in Greenville, Mississippi, who lost their home along the banks of the great river having lost their jobs in the great recession and joined the more than 20 percent of Mississippian who live below the poverty line in America.
Imagine a young African-American man watching the sun set over the Pacific and feeling that the light has gone out of his life as yet another friend has fallen victim to gun violence.
Imagine a pastor in a little town in Appalachia wondering how she’ll explain to the children of her congregation what has happened to the mountain that used to cast its shade across the church yard on Sunday mornings, and why the creek that used to run clean behind the church is now black and foul.
It does not take any great imagination to picture these folks. Indeed, we probably know some of them, and the others we’ve seen on the news. All of this is all too real.
So where is the hope in this? What is the good news?
The wisdom and power of Matthew 25 lies in incarnation. Participating in the planning for GA with other overture advocates I’ve heard over and over the ugly yet useful phrase, “personning the issue.” Matthew 25 not only insists that hunger, imprisonment, poverty, homelessness are not abstractions, not “issues,” but are, instead, people – people caught in seemingly hopeless situations, but the passage also insists that each of these people is the son – or daughter – of God. Each of them -- each of these people we just imagined together – each of them is Jesus.
What we do – what you and I do – to give them hope in these hopeless situations is what we do for Jesus.
Next month in Minneapolis, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will consider adding to our Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, a statement of faith written by the church in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid. If affirmed, it would become the first confession from the global South embraced by our church as an authentic expression of Reformed faith with constitutional authority in the church.
Belhar concludes with this affirmation. We believe, it states,
• that God has revealed himself as the one who wishes to bring about justice and true peace among people;
• that God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged
• that God calls the church to follow him in this; for God brings justice to the oppressed and gives bread to the hungry;
• that God frees the prisoner and restores sight to the blind;
• that God supports the downtrodden, protects the stranger, helps orphans and widows and blocks the path of the ungodly;
• that for God pure and undefiled religion is to visit the orphans and the widows in their suffering;
• that God wishes to teach the church to do what is good and to seek the right;
• that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others.
These are words of hope and conviction. To be sure, they are just words, but they can shape lives if we so choose.
You will have noticed, to be sure, that as I imagined people in various situations I imagined them at the water’s edge. Most of us do live close to water, for all the obvious reasons. And, we are, ourselves, mostly water.
My friend David LaMotte has a song – ostensibly for kids – that concludes like this:
"And the water gonna roll from the mountain to the stream
And the water gonna roll from the river to the sea
We will roll on together until everyone can see
That the mighty tidal wave is made of little bitty drops like me"
When we say, with Amos, let justice roll down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream, we are talking about ourselves and we are affirming that our lives touch ever other life, just like all water rolls to the sea which touches every shore.
That is our hope. That our lives will touch and be touched by other lives. That we are all part of an ever-flowing stream. That we will roll down together, a mighty tidal wave of hope.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, pt. 3

June 20, 2010
Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 10:38-42
The late Richard Halverson, who served as chaplain to the United States Senate, is said to have observed that, in its infancy, the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then it moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. Finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.
The question, it seems to me, is “what’s next?” What is next for the church, and, in particular, for us? How do we, as a community, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) express what’s next?
In the past two weeks we’ve talked about our personal hopes and our hopes for the broader church. This morning I want to think together about our hopes for this church. I almost said, “our church,” but, of course, it is not ours. This is the church of Jesus Christ at Clarendon. The church, like the world, belongs to God.
But this is our time in this church, and we are responsible for shaping the hopes of this community in this season.
I’ve been part of a number of churches over the years, and each has had its own vision, its own hopes, and each has shaped the way I think about church.
Almost fifteen years or so ago we were members of a church in Lexington, Kentucky, back when I was in seminary. It was a big church – almost a thousand members – and its numbers did provide critical mass for some remarkable ministry. But its size had little impact on my hopes for the church. Bigness has its place, but it brings along its own baggage and issues, which are not now nor will they ever be our issues.
A church the size of Maxwell Street, for example, is not nearly so likely to have a clear, sharp and shared sense of its core identity and purpose. I do not think it is an accident that almost all of the churches in the More Light network are far smaller than Maxwell Street. It is easier to be of one mind on difficult, yet decisive concerns, when you are talking about 60 or 70 souls as opposed to 950-1,000.
But while Maxwell Street may have been all over the map on some crucial concerns, it was clearly and deeply committed to active ministries of feeding, of welcoming refugees, of working with migrant workers, of helping the homeless, of hosting the families of prisoners in the federal penitentiary that sits on the edge of town. The church put its money and its members’ bodies where its mouth was. The community practiced what it preached.
When I think about my hope for Clarendon, I recall a small moment from our time at Maxwell Street. A woman with a young child came to town to visit her father, who was a prisoner at the federal pen. She discovered upon arriving that there’s no place to stay near the prison, and the cab fare back and forth from the hotel was taxing her slim resources. On top of that, her young child got sick and needed to see a doctor. To make matters even worse, she did not speak much English. Remarkably enough, she found herself in a cab driven by someone who did speak her native tongue, and when she broke down in tears in his cab he asked what was wrong. She shared her story, and he said simply, “I can’t help you, but I can take you someplace where they will.” He brought her to Maxwell Street because he knew – the hungry? Homeless? Prisoners? The sick? Helping them was the core of Maxwell Street’s identity. Helping them is what Maxwell Street did very well.
That is my hope for us: that we would be so well known in the community that people would be sent here for what we can do very well.
We know who we are. The core of our identity is that we are a community that practices hospitality and offers welcome to everyone. We proclaim the love and justice of the gospel, with particular attention to those who have been systematically marginalized by church and society. We take seriously Paul’s pronouncement that in Christ there is no east or west, Jew or Gentile, male or female. We take it so seriously that we know that in Christ there is also no first world or third world, no American or Taliban, no gay or straight, for we are all children of the same loving God in whose image we were all created good.
That is what we believe. That is who we are. The question now, for me, is simple: how shall we be it such that even the cab drivers and the coffee-shop owners and the neighbors know that this truly is a house of prayer for all people, a center of compassionate service for all people, a place of action for peace and justice for all people, a third millennial church for all people?
When session met last week, Travis led us in our opening devotion, and he took us through this story of Mary and Martha. As we talked together about the passage we reflected that, as a congregation, we have done a great deal of good and necessary “Martha” work over the past four or five years. We have almost completely restored this wonderful old building. We’ve painted almost all of the interior, and recovered almost all of our floors. We’ve upgraded lighting, and added air conditioning to most of the space. We created dedicated adult education space and a room for music. We have upgraded considerable meeting space for our own use and use by community groups and mission partners. We’ve restored the house that we own next door. We’ve remade Wilson Hall downstairs into a place where we want to gather. And just last week, session acted on one of the few remaining big-ticket items on our capital improvements list and so by the time winter roles around again we will be snug and secure in a building with new windows.
Of course, when you have a building whose “young” section is 50 years old, there will always be a list of “Martha” projects to tackle. But we have taken care of most of what we set out to do five years ago.
Now the question is, “how shall we do the “Mary” work?”
To be sure we have been engaged in the “Mary” side of the equation all along. We have embodied an open table as we’ve helped to feed thousands of Arlington families through our work at AFAC. Following Jesus’ example of empowering all of the faithful according to their gifts for ministry, we have been leaders in the movement to remove the barriers to ordination faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians. We have lived into our baptismal promises in nurturing our children. Hearing Jesus’ proclamation that the peacemakers are blessed, we have worked for peace.
But even though we have done all of this and more, it is probably true that, as a congregation, we have spent more time, energy and money on preserving and restoring this sacred space than on other ministry and mission. The Martha work has been crucial and timely, but we are entering a new season with new hopes.
Is it a realistic hope to become a community widely known for its spiritually grounded work in the world, for its hospitality to everyone, for its work on behalf of the marginalized? What would that look like? How shall we be who we are? What gifts do you bring to the effort? How shall we use all of the gifts that we bring?
I do not know the answers to those questions, but I do know this: if we answer these questions well – with the best of who we are – then we will be again a community of men and women centering our lives of following Jesus.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope, pt. 2

June 13, 2010
Mark 6:30-44
Last weekend at the June meeting of National Capital Presbytery, Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond, took us through a reading of this well known story from Mark’s gospel. She credited the Quaker educator Parker Palmer with the insights she shared, and I’m crediting both of them for any insight that might shine through this morning as we reconsider this Eucharistic tale.
It was a graceful coincidence that Frances chose this text, as I was pondering the feeding stories and “table texts” of the gospels as one frame for our consideration of hope, and, in particular, for thinking about our hopes for the church.
If I had to say in one sentence what I hope for the church, broadly speaking, it would be this: I hope the church can be faithful to its sacraments. By faithful, I mean, in particular, that the church be ethically responsible to our sacraments.
The core of the sacramental theology is the same as the core of this story from Mark: there is enough to go around. There is enough water in the font to baptize all who want to be baptized. There is enough bread at the table to feed all who come. There is enough in the cup to send no one away thirsty. There is enough. Plain and simple: there is enough.
I hope that the church will come to recognize this simple truth and live fully into it.
Consider the story from Mark. This passage opens with the phrase, “the apostles.” It’s the only time Mark uses this title for Jesus’ disciples, which is noteworthy because just prior to this story in Mark they have been sent out to spread the good news and the narrative is interrupted by the account of the death of John the Baptist. Their situation is getting serious, and, as the story suggests, they are growing weary of the stress.
I was feeling their pain in the midst of Pride Week – a lot of us have been busy sharing the good news, and in some places that can still be a dangerous activity. I was privileged last week to be part of a small audience listening in on a conversation between Bishop Gene Robinson and Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo. Bishop Chris, as he is known, began speaking out on behalf of GLBT citizens of Uganda about ten years ago. He has lost his job and his pension and been forced to relocate his family repeatedly in response to death threats – all for spreading the good news that God so loves the world, the we belong to God, that all of us are created equal in God’s image and in God’s eyes, that God’s love and grace know no limits. There is more than enough of them to go around.
Grace always disturbs the status quo, because the status quo is always premised on an economy of scarcity. If God’s love is limited, then I’d better get mine. If God’s love is limited, some people can’t have it.
But that is not the economy of the kingdom of God. It is not the economy of the gospels, and the feeding stories underscore this with striking, imaginative clarity.
So the apostles, the disciples, the bishops are moving from town to town seemingly on the run for their lives perhaps from dangerous mobs or unruly crowds. But Jesus sees the crowds and he is deeply moved by their plight. The Greek word – SPLAGCHNIZESTHAI – translated as compassion comes connotes gut-wrenching, we might say his heart was broken for them. They are caught up in scarcity – in the desert the text tells us – without someone to show them the abundance that surrounds them. They need most of all a teacher.
But the hour was getting late.
Doesn’t it feel that way sometimes? The hour is getting late. We are running out of time. We will never get through the to-do list – the thank you card, the call to a colleague, the kid’s school play, not to mention the chores – and get on to the really important stuff. So we better get those bothersome people out of the way.
That’s what the disciples want to do. Send them away to find something to eat. Send them out on their own to compete as individuals in the marketplace.
But Jesus will have none of this. “You give them something to eat,” he insists. “You give them something to eat.”
Huh? Say what, now? You want us to give them something? You might not have noticed, but we’re tired and hungry, too. We may not even have enough to feed ourselves. We do not have the money in this congregation to have that kind of ministry. We are just a small church.
But Jesus will have none of it. “You give them something to eat.” In other words, stop waiting around for a miracle … and participate in the one that is happening all around you.
It’s almost as if he says, “here, let me show you how this works. See what resources you already have. Hm, five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. That should do it. Now watch.”
First, organize the people into small groups – into communities where real communion is possible. Put them together in a space where relationships can grow. Put them down on the green grass – the green grass, in the middle of the desert. See? Get it? Green grass? In the desert? Work with me.
And then, foreshadowing the practice of eucharist – a word that means simply “give thanks” – practicing gratitude, then, Jesus gives thanks to God for the gift of bread. He takes, blesses and breaks the bread and sets it before his disciples.
It is as if the disciples, the people of the way, the first instance of the church, are set before the people as an example. See, we had this bread and these fish, and if we share it among ourselves there is enough.
Perhaps the groups of 50 and 100 will begin to look among themselves to see what gifts they bring to the table. Jesus clearly believes in the gifts of his followers, after all, he told them to see what they had after he told them to feed the people. He knew they had gifts even if they didn’t, even while they’re still panicking at the prospect of 5,000 hungry people with no 7-11 in sight.
He trusted abundance, not only among his own community but in the milling crowds as well. He also understood that in crowds there is scarcity, but in community abundance. Create community and you will create abundance.
But, if we act as if scarcity is real then we create real scarcity. We could look at the global economy and at the role that our consumer society plays in it, and we should do that regularly. But this morning, instead, just look at the church itself.
We act, for example, as if God doles out gifts for ministry like Scrooge giving coals to Bob Cratchet. Thus we build fences around ordination and imagine that some are unfit, as if God could not work through any one of us. Remember the disciples in this story: even they – as bumbling as Mark depicts them – even they came up with the resources to feed 5,000. Yet we act as if energy, imagination and love are gifts that only heterosexuals can have for ministry.
But that is not true. This is true: in baptism you are claimed as God’s own for the sake of the world – for ministry.
We proclaim in baptism that we belong to God in life and in death, be then we act as if our only sources of security come from the national security apparatus and we bless the nation’s wars or, what is even worse, we sit idly by, quiescent and impotent as if God’s love has no real power to change the course of history.
But that is not true. This is true: the steadfast love of God endures forever, and the powers and principalities can never separate us from that love. That truth is the foundation of nonviolence, and we are called to show it to the world.
We proclaim at table that this is a foretaste of the kingdom of God, that beloved community of nonviolence to which all are invited, but then we build fences around the table as if there were high walls and a moat around the kingdom, and only those who say the right phrases in the right ways to the right people or priests merit God’s love and welcome.
But that is not true. It is not true.
This is true: God loves you just the way you are. There is a place for you at the table of our Lord.
My hope for the church is this: that we might be a community that penetrates the illusion of scarcity to inhabit the reality of abundance. The ability to do so is the measure of our lives, and in such lives lies the hope of the world.
“And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered 5,000.”
Amen.

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope

May 30, 2010
Romans 1:1-5
“Hope does not disappoint.” So says Paul, who surely knew a bit about hopeless situations, being, after all, the guy who sang his way out of prison.
When I look back over just the 50 years of my own life thus far I am impressed by two completely contradictory impulses that dwell in tension in my own soul: the clear conviction that the way things are is not the way they have always been, one the one hand, and despair at ever seeing things change, on the other.
I suspect that I’m not alone dwelling in this tension, this contradiction. I wrote the first draft of this meditation while sitting in the coffee shop of the Barnes & Nobles while waiting for my car to be serviced. Think about that for a moment: I needed access to the texts for the week so I got on line on my 3-pound laptop which has more computing power than the Apollo spacecrafts that went to the moon – also in my lifetime, come to think of it. My hybrid vehicle – which syncs automatically to my cell phone so I can talk on the phone without touching anything but the steering wheel – was getting an oil change.
Meanwhile, tons of oil was – and still is – spilling into the Gulf of Mexico because corporate giants wanted to save a bit of money so they cut a few corners and created the largest environmental catastrophe in our history, and the federal government is paralyzed by its cozy relationships with those very corporate giants such that the president is loathe to act decisively and the oil just keeps flowing.
Of course, that same president is a man who would have found it difficult and dangerous to register to vote in the state of my birth at the time of my birth, and one of my fellow native-Alabamans, one who played a central role in the changes there, now serves in the Congress of that same paralyzed government. On the other hand, others of those who played central roles in those momentous changes were murdered as a result, and the country is still deeply divided by race – even though, back to the Barnes & Nobles – I can without thought sit in a public accommodation and look up to see an African-American woman being served at the counter in a room populated at the moment by people speaking several different languages and hailing from at least – at a glance – a half dozen different ethnic heritages, none of whom would have likely lived in Virginia, or anywhere else in the United States, prior to the landmark 1965 immigration reform act, and several of whom would have been legally discriminated against in the Commonwealth prior to the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
On the other hand, the Republican Party in another southern state just nominated a candidate for the United States Senate who says, in 2010, that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was a mistake.
I left the Barnes & Nobles to head to a meeting planning the NoVA Pride Interfaith Worship service. Imagine trying that 50 years ago! Or 25 years ago. Or even 15 years ago, back when don’t ask-don’t tell was inscribed into law. Oh, and the news on the morning I began writing contained the announcement that the Obama Administration had reached a compromise agreement with Congress on a gradual repeal of that odious law.
Of course, that law pertains to men and women serving in the nation’s armed forces – forces engaged in ill-advised and seemingly endless wars of choice that have droned on so long that the entire nation seems to have forgotten that they are still going on – even though 5,500 Americans have died, including 50 last month alone. When I look at those figures I am reminded that the first two names on the wall of the Vietnam memorial are men who died in an ill-advised American war of choice the year of my birth.
Later in the week I participated in a pair of conference calls with other overture advocates preparing for this summer’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) where we will press the assembly to open ordination to everyone and to change the directory of worship to make the language of marriage ceremonies inclusive of same-gender couples. Imagine trying that 50 years ago. Talk about the short trip to being defrocked!
So, I have to ask myself, when one surveys the incredible technological and social changes of the past 50 years, how can it be that I still feel an often overwhelming sense of despair at the possibility of change? How can I feel so hopeless sometimes?
It is all too easy to shrug one’s shoulders and say, “the more things change the more things stay the same.” It is easy to slip into a knowing, sophisticated cynicism. In fact, it is often considered “hip” to do so, and it is certainly fun sometimes.
It is, however, not faithful.
Cynicism is not a faithful response to the present moment and it is destructive of hope for the future – no matter how desperate the present moment feels.
After all, as Vaclav Havel put it, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Havel knew a thing or two out seemingly hopeless situations, but he also knew that freedom and democracy made sense even in – especially in – a society imprisoned by totalitarianism.
Martin Luther King knew a bit about the soul-killing oppression of segregation, but he also knew that freedom and equality make sense.
We know a bit about the pain of our own denomination’s homophobic rules, but we know that the love of God knows no bounds and that radical hospitality and welcome make sense.
Some of us know the self-defeating suffering of addictions, but we know that sobriety makes sense so we take the steps to wholeness. Others of us know the depressing reality of unemployment, but we know that a job makes sense so we keep on keeping on in the search for work. We all know, from time to time, the great weight of grief, but we know that life itself makes sense so we walk into another day trusting that God will turn our mourning into dancing.
This is the nature and substance of hope: whether we are considering the broad social realm, the sphere of the church, or our own lives, we stride forth confident that the love and justice and compassion of God will be with us no matter how the future “turns out.”
So, this fine June morning, what is the content of your own hope?