Hope
O God, our sea is so great, and our boats so small.
Cory Michael+ began his sermon this past Sunday with this old fisherman's prayer. Lately the sea does feel great, and our boats do feel small. Our boats, tossed to and fro by personal circumstances or national or global events. Even so, hope persists.
Hope, Cory Michael has reminded us, is not the same as optimism. Drawing on the theologian Jürgen Moltmann — who first found this hope as a young prisoner of war in the 1940s, surrounded by men dying of despair — Cory Michael described a hope grounded in Christ’s resurrection: a hope that passes through suffering and reaches back from God's promised future to pull us forward.
We are pulled forward in part because, in Moltmann’s words, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.” (Theology of Hope, p. 21).
This past Sunday, Cory Michael set that hope inside the wilderness of Hagar — the outsider, cast out, certain her child would die of thirst, until God called her by name and opened her eyes to the water she and her son needed, already there. This was the second time God brought her from despair to life. Recall, Hagar was the one who named God El Roi: the God who sees me. Her gift to us is a brave hope — one carried through the wilderness not only for her own sake, but for someone else's future.
In her book, Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault names this same mystery of hope from the inside. Hope, she writes, "does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth" (p. 99). Its home is "at the innermost point in us, and in all things" — a quality of aliveness entered only through surrender, and when we enter it, it fills us with a strength beyond our own.
This strength, God’s work in and through us, is what gives us the capacity and the impulse, small as we are in a sea so wide, to hope. In Moltmann’s words, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.” (Theology of Hope, p. 21).
I invite you this week to listen for the hope that God has sown in you and the hope that you encounter in the world. Where has God already met you in the wilderness? And whose boat, small as it is beside that great sea, might your hope help carry?
Listen to Cory Michael’s recent sermons on hope here and here.
