“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8:28)

“We give thanks to God always for you all…remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labor of love, and patience of hope on our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thess 1:2-3)

“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” (Rom 15:3)

“We boast in our hope of the glory of God; yet not only that, we boast in our afflictions.” (Rom 5:2-3)

The world is in crisis, one after another. The headlines are full of bad news. Inevitably our lives are touched by the crisis events around us. There is no escape as Eve Ensler’s recent book, Insecure At Last, has well documented. The Chinese word for crisis is from the characters of two other words, problem and opportunity. This suggests that in every crisis there is a problem and an opportunity. The Japanese word for crisis kiki translates two ways: ‘danger occasion’ but also ‘danger opportunity’. ‘Crisis’ means ‘judgment’. ‘Crisis’ in Hebrew is ‘mash-be; its scope and its reality?’, a word used for birth stool, a seat upon which a woman in ancient times sat as she gave birth. The Hebrew language recognized that while crises are often frightening, they are also filled with potential. Adversity, our tradition suggests, needs to be turned into opportunity. Crisis can be seen as a turning point. True, a crisis can lead to disaster but it can also lead to greater growth, the so-called phoenix factor, growing from the ashes. Your inability to cope using customary methods is what makes it a crisis. Webster’s dictionary defines it as being a decisive moment, a turning point which will determine the future consequences or status of a situation.

It was Henry Thoreau who said that “the mass of us lead lives of quiet desperation.” We often quote Robert Browning from Rabbi Ben Ezra:

“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made,
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, ‘A whole I planned’
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

The Scripture proclaims that Christ is the hope for a changing world. When we say that we have to discover what world that is. We have to get the dimension right for the world God so loved. We have to see ourselves as the people who live in that world. Continually, God is engaged in breaking into an awareness with the reality of God’s world. Ceaselessly, God is calling us to move out of our private, individual worlds in order to join God in God’s world, there to minister alongside Christ. “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; I shall not be confounded in eternity.” The New World Dictionary defines hope as “ a feeling that what is wanted will happen; desire accompanied by expectation. To want and expect; to trust and rely.”

What exactly is the texture of our hope? What is its foundation, its scope and its reality? How realistic is it for us to entertain the apocalyptic hope in the final theophany that for Paul was so imminent and for us seems so distant? In fact, the concept of hope is for most of us so freighted with the vagaries of luck and fate that we speak rather of expectations. Have you ever considered the significant difference between hoping for a baby and expecting a baby? For the gospel, hope is not something could happen. Hope is knowing that it will happen. Christian hope is grounded in God, what the God of grace has done, is doing and will do for the world God loves. We cannot come to Christ in his resurrection without also owning Christ in his crucifixion. This is when hope begins. It is not dreams coming true. That is wishful thinking without reality. Even in Christ, all our dreams will not come true – thank God. Christ forces us to re-examine, re-evaluate, and re-shape our dreams, even to abandon them, in order to take up new dream rooted in hope from God – a living hope. Hope is not merely optimism. In Victor Havel’s words: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense no matter how it turns out.”

The word hope slips unnoticed into our speech whenever we make a judgment, in virtually every hour, every day. The psalmist writes about it in every chapter of psalms. Alexander Pope expresses the sentiment of every disheartened person who has squeezed through a crisis; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” It doesn’t only spring eternal, it springs universal. Dante taught that not until we reach the outskirts of Hell are we divested of this most precious of all human faculties. “Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.” Hopelessness is Hell. But humanists could not bear to be deprived of hope even then. Jewish mystics taught that also in Hell there is hope: The soul could take leave of Hell every week –to celebrate the Sabbath! In Greek mythology, Pandora, the first mortal woman, received from Zeus, king of the gods, a strong box that she was forbidden to open. But the temptation became too great –and she opened it. Its contents? All human blessings. Reveling in their freedom, all but one escaped and were lost. The one that remained was hope. To lose hope is to lose life. One of the basic principles of logotherapy is the redeeming power of hope. As we all know hopelessness is the most dominant feature of those who commit suicide. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler- Ross showed that even terminally ill patients are generally more hopeful than suicidal people.

Maurice Lamm speaks of the wrong use of hope by identifying three kinds: (a) Dysfunctional hope which obstructs personal therapy and social progress; (b) False hope making many people vulnerable to charlatans and hucksters; (c) Passive hope which is often not hope at all, but a smoke screen to conceal resignation from life, or surrender to what we hate. Obviously society has not developed a healthy use of hope to remedy its many ills. When you lose hope you get filled with anger and violence. Excess of hope is presumption and leads to disaster. Deficiency hope is despair and leads to decay.

The future gives new meaning to the present and hope for the future empowers the present. One of the truly magical qualities (power) of hope is its ability to reinvent itself to adapt to changing conditions. From the womb of hope have emerged the twin blessings of faith and love to enrich all mankind. “Binding together faith and love is hope” said Georgia Harkness. Hope has never failed us. Hope is the effectiveness of faith. Hope gives faith within love as one of the three God-centered virtues of the spiritual life. The faithful Christian has a hope rooted in the assurance that God is adequate to his needs and the needs of the world- that tragedies, howver poignant, are not the final chapters.

The passage from Romans 5 sounds very masochistic. Paul says in verses 3 & 4 “Affliction produces perseverance, and perseverance character, and character hope.” But to us the rhetoric of such a proverbial saying is unconvincing, if not disgusting. Affliction tends 6to produce despair and hopelessness rather than character and hope. However, the horizon of our hope is what gives us life; a sense of measuring the suffering of the injustices we must cope with in the present and also our own unfulfilled expectations – of measuring those against the love of God in Christ, whose amazing grace toward us has lifted us out of our prejudices, idolatries, and blindness and has given us the foundation of our hope. It is crucial to realize that Christian hope not only has a cosmic horizon, but that this cosmic horizon necessarily entails suffering.

In the powerful words of J. Christiaan Beker: “Unless we know that as Christians we are called to work in and suffer for the sake of God’s world and for her promise of restoring her creation to its intended glory, our hope will lose its proper horizon and will be distorted into egocentric preoccupations accompanied by a conception of the church as a safe refuge that must do battle against an evil and indifferent world. Thus, the dynamic of the gospel signifies that Christian life in this world participates in both ecstasy and agony. In ecstasy because we, as Paul says, may celebrate God’s peace and justification among us in the midst of all our disappointments and suffering; but our Christian life is necessarily accompanied by agony, because of the immense suffering of our brothers and sisters in God’s world, which far outweighs our personal suffering. And so our hope becomes profound and realistic, because it is a hope that knows the burden of suffering for the sake of others in God’s world. Paul even goes so far as to draw a parallel between boasting in hope and boasting in suffering. He does so because our suffering in and for God’s world not only demonstrates our integrity as Christians but also stimulates the yearning for that day when all of God’s children will together be embraced by his loving arms.” It is precisely this willingness to reach out - to establish sympathetic connections with others in pain – that provides still another important key for winning the toughest battles of our lives.

Hope is the trust that God will fulfill God’s promises to us in a way that leads us to true freedom. The person of hope lives in the moment with the knowledge and trust that all of life is in good hands. All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope; e.g. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Gandhi, Dorothy Day. The ability of hope allows us to face the trials of daily life. It reminds us that no matter what happens, we will prevail. With hope we can change a potential tragedy into an achievement. “The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.” (Norman Cousins) “As long as there is life, there is hope.” (Talmud) The Hebrew tradition teaches that if you really want to do a good deed, then God will help you to accomplish it.

Charles Swindoll suggests that hope consists of three things: (i) The Lord’s loving kindness or mercies never cease. God’s two sheep dogs as outlined in psalm 23 are goodness and mercy; (ii) The Lord’s compassions never fail. Speaking of the prodigal son he states somehow, when you are ankle deep in the filth of the pigsty, you get a different perspective than when you’re fat and sassy at home, resenting the rules; (iii) The Lord’s faithfulness never diminishes. Even when you make several stupid decisions great indeed is His faithfulness. It is unconditional, unending, and unswerving. The Lord’s mercies, compassions, and faithfulness are new every morning (Lam 3:22-3)

Hope is a gift of the spirit. Among the certainties of faith are these: (i) Christ came again in the Holy Spirit (See the Fourth Gospel’s statement of Jesus’ promises); (ii) He comes where ‘meek souls will receive him”; (iii) He comes everyday in judgment and in mercy; (iv) At the end of history he will come as savior and judge. When we pray ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done’, it becomes a prayer of hope that God will achieve his own full possibility. Certainly the church has a unique message concerning hope. The message is the startling news that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them’. The world is full of all kinds of possibilities, namely all the possibilities of the God of hope. We have the voice of God saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new’. The word of promise if heard acquires the freedom to renew life here and now and to change the face of the world. The promise of Jesus to his church was that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Mt 16:18) Emily Dickinson had much to say about hope. She recognized hope as ‘the native land’ of the spirit. You will recall God telling Moses that he will know for certain it is God who has called him to the task only when it is accomplished, only when he has brought the people with him to worship on Mt. Sinai.

This is the New Testament witness: “…We have been born anew to a living hope.” Since we do not ‘birth’ ourselves, this is God’s gift to us, flowing forth from God’s gift to the whole world. “Blessed be the God…” (1 Peter 1:3) Christian hope leads us confidently into the future, knowing that God will complete his new creation. In God’s own time, in the power of God’s grace, it will be accomplished. Hope can mend your broken heart, if you give God all the pieces.

The heart of Paul’s hope can be put in three words :’being with Christ’. (Rom 6:8; 1 Thess 4:17; Phil 1:13) Being with Christ means being ‘in Christ’ which includes being like him, ‘conformed to the image of his son’ (Rom 8:29); Christ in you the hope of glory (Col 1:27) Paul calls it a ‘hope that never disappoints’ (Rom 5:5). It is why the writer to Hebrews calls Christian hope a ‘sure and steadfast anchor for the soul’ (6:9) Years ago an S-4 submarine was rammed by a ship off the coast of Massachussetts and sank immediately. The entire crew was trapped in a prison house of death. Every effort was made to rescue them but all failed. Near the end of the ordeal, a diver placed his helmeted ear to the side of the vessel and heard a tapping inside. He recognized it as Morse code. It was a question, forming slowly: ‘Is…there…any…hope?’

Hope has two daughters, said Augustine.: anger and courage, anger at things that needs to be changed and courage to make that change. C. S. Lewis has these precious words: “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth and you will get neither.” (Mere Christianity) I have always liked acrostics, and this one says it all about hope: ‘He Offers Peace Eternal’. Jesus said ‘I am the light of the world’ (Jn 8:12) In summoning us to discipleship, he also says, ‘I am the world’s hope. You are hope for the world’. Whatever our daily work, wherever we are, our Christian vocation is to live and minister in all settings and relationships as people of God’s new creation, to be hope for the world because Christ’s Spirit dwells in us. Jurgen Moltman wrote: “God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.”

In his book Success through a positive Mental Attitude, Naploeon Hill tells about a successful cosmetic manufacturer who decided he would retire at the age of 65. Each year thereafter, his friend and former business associates gave him a birthday party and tried to find out the ‘secret’ for his special cosmetic formula. But year after year he refused, good-naturedly, to reveal his secret. ‘Maybe I will tell you next year’ he would say. This went on for ten years until the man celebrated his 75th. As usual the friends insisted to share the secret formula. Finally he said ‘I never told a woman that my product would make her beautiful, but I always gave her hope’ ‘Hope’ he said, ‘is the magic ingredient’. A poor woman bought s lottery ticket everyday. She said ‘a dollar is not too much to pay for 24 hours of hope’ To hope is to cope and to cope is also to hope. Much of our hope is trivial. It expends energy on items of small importance which will be decided in short order. As Cornell West in conversation with Bill Moyers said “When you talk about hope, you have to be a long-distance runner. This is again very difficult in our culture, because the quick fix, the overnight solution, militates against being a long distance runner in the moral sense.”

Best of all, hope is a renewable quality. One of the best ways to have it renewed is to surround yourself with positive, uplifting people. Hope is highly contagious. You can catch it from hopeful traveling companions. Seek them out and make them part of your life. In fact one reason for hope is our friends. One of the greatest teachers America has produced was Professor Endicott Peabody, Headmaster of Groton for many years. One day at Chapel he told his boys, ‘Remember things in life will not always run smoothly… The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward.’ These words stuck in the mind of one of his students, and about forty years later that student gave new heart to the nation when he said ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Franklin D .Roosevelt will always be remembered for the hope he gave to a hopeless nation.

The Spanish Christian philosopher Miguel Unamuno, insists that if you want to know what a man’s real faith is, you must find out not what he says he believes but what he really hopes for. The Hebrews were liberated from the Pharaoh not just to be free, but to be a servant people, to return once again to the world as free men so that they could be servants. They were called to bring hope to the world. Hope is deeply embodied in the Old Testament which uses the word more than 125 times. Many modern thinkers have no use at all for the concept of hope. Albert Camus sees both suicide and hope as retreats from the courage to absurdity of life. On the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantsaki’s tombstone on the island of Crete are these words: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Karl Menninger, the great psychiatrist, however, sees hope as a vital process in life and in the fight against despair. A prominent psychologist has suggested that a man can survive without bread and water for unusual periods of time, but if he has no hope, he will perish immediately. Corrie Ten Boom who was in the Ravensbrook prison, a strange place to hope, was in Barrack 28 which became known throughout the camp as ‘the crazy place, where they hope!’ She wrote: “Yes, hoped, in spite of all that human madness could do. We had learned that a stronger power had the final word, even here.”

Give it a symbol – something concrete that you can center your thoughts around. Remember the story of Jeremiah and the field of Anathoth? What a marvelous symbol of hope that was! Jerusalem was under siege; almost everyone agreed that the kingdom was doomed – everyone, that is except the long-bearded old prophet, Jeremiah. Just as the armies of Babylon reached the gates, Jeremiah taught his people a great lesson in hope. Calling together a large number of witnesses, and with a great show of attention to all the legalities, Jeremiah purchased a plot of land outside the city. For, said Jeremiah, we will be taken away, but we will come back. And during all the long years of captivity, the memory of the field that Jeremiah had purchased in a far away Judah was a symbol of the restoration to come. A symbol can give staying-power to hope.

Hope is really a form of blessing. To hope is to create a sacred space. The stance we adopt in that sacred space is one of readiness, openness and non-attachment to a particular outcome. Hope ;looks at all things the way a mother looks at her child, as someone said, with a passion for the possible. Learn to hope. We have to know what it is that we hope for. What do you want most in your life? The hope that you settle on must be your own, but one that in reality you do have.

When the human race gets itself into a major crisis, it shows a strong tendency to abdicate moral responsibility and to commit sin on an enormous scale. That is the kind of situation we face now. Unless we realize the moral and spiritual roots of the problem, our best efforts to solve it in a positive and human way are bound to be meaningless.

Our natural tendency at the time of a crisis, is to want to handle all our problems at once. It is good to remember that there is a difference between psychological first aid and crisis therapy. It is important to allow yourself to feel bad. Life looks so bleak that all sorts of fearful thoughts crowd in – thoughts that if focused on exclusively, become immobilizing. Sometimes we think we can handle the crisis ourselves. We try and try and then we find we can’t. Nothing I do will make a difference. Everything may seem hopeless. Even though I may have no control over what happened I do have control over how I will react to it. We have to take small steps toward healing. The age old approach ‘This too shall pass’ must be a consoling thought. The founder of gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, reminds us that anxiety is actually ‘stage fright’. It is worry about things that have not happened yet. No one has any idea what the future will be, so it makes absolutely no sense to conjure up the worst picture you can imagine and then worry about how bad it’s going to be. . A crisis is no time to neglect your friends. Use your social resources wisely. Remember, each of us has the choice to interpret a life event in a way that either builds our strength and self-respect or undermines it.

The confidence that God is able to overcome our mistakes and to create new opportunities for building a world that is just and humane, more in accord with his intention for his people, and fit for human habitation. Easter event is the guarantee of all of this. It has meaning for persons and nations. It represents the triumph of light over darkness, freedom over bondage, hope over despair, life over death. It is the miracle of grace that enables us to rise above the perils of today and to become witnesses and partners in God’s work of making all things new. When St. Paul completed his great statement on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians he included a doxology: “But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” However, he did not stop there. In the light of the resurrection every human being is set free to serve the living God. So St. Paul concluded, “Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

In simple terms my task is threefold: (i) challenges me to wrestle with, get real about the crises that exist; (ii) To help you and me take responsibility for the crisis; (iii) Help bring some hope that always there is. God does not leave us alone. The choice we make in every time of crisis: to believe in love or to capitulate to fear. A hopeful attitude, many researchers believe, can lead to physiological changes that improve the efficiency of the immune system – the body’s defense against toxins and disease.

People are so tied up in trivialities. We have a ‘crisis of confidence’ as Patrick Moynihan diagnosed the situation with urban problems. In Ralph Ellison’s words we have a ‘crisis of optimism’ because things don’t appear to be happening fast enough. We also face a serious ‘crisis of values’. “The challenges before us question our shallow materialism, our assumed righteousness and our future destiny. Confronted by this crisis we must search for new purpose and meaning in life, seek a long-suffering love, yearn for integrity, and pray for wholeness of personality. This quest finds ultimate direction in the person of Jesus Christ; in relationship to Him one discovers a new quality of life.” (Mark Hatfield)

“We must become good plowmen”, Albert Scweitzer said. “Hope is the prerequisite of plowing. What sort of farmer plows the furrow in the autumn but has no hope for the spring. So too, we accomplish nothing without hope. Without a sure inner hope that a new age is about to dawn. Hope is strength. The energy in the world is equal to the hope in it. And even if only a few people share such hopes, a power is created which nothing can hold down – it inevitably spreads to others.”

The issue ultimately is not the gravity of the crisis but rather the quality of our response. No life is without traumas. Eventually we must all confront events that test our Limits. “There are many ways to be a victim.” We know that what seems a minor incident to one victim may be a personal catastrophe for another.