March 29, 2026 Reflection

I wonder how many of you heard the reading from the Psalm and thought ‘Really? Really? Trust in God and everything will work out? Can we still have that kind of hope?” I know that is the first place I went, my doubt fueled in no small part by the state of the world. Then my doubt had me thinking about hope which led me to wanting to preach a hope-filled sermon today. Had me wanting to work through with you some things I’ve been reading about hope. Because it can be in short supply these days, and Palm Sunday leads us into a very dark week, a week when there seems to be no hope before dawn next Sunday.

The people who have inspired my thinking about hope span generations, not only in terms of the times in which they wrote and are writing, but in terms of their generations’ capacity for hopefulness. Paul Tillich is generally considered one of the last century’s most outstanding and influential thinkers and theologians. Tillich was born in Germany but lived most of his life in the United States, teaching in prestigious American Universities. I’m reflecting on a sermon he preached in 1965 – a time of profound hope in the possibilities of progress. Rebecca Solnit is a contemporary American writer born in 1961. She is an environmentalist, feminist, activist and purveyor of hope. And finally, Trevor Noah is a 42-year-old South African black comedian and social commentator, coming at the question of hope from quite a different context.

But the first inspirational writer was the apostle Paul, who some 2000 years ago wrote: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1) Faith is a trust, an assurance that the things we can imagine, that we can hope for, that we dream of, will come to pass.

We’re living in a world where faith is held in pretty low regard, looked at with suspicion and even derision. Not only because of the many sins of the church and heresies of bad religion but because of the pervasive trust in science, because of the the faith we place in empiricism – that if something can be seen, measured, touched, replicated, it is real and can be trusted, and if not, it’s at least suspect. This empirical test corrodes our faith that the ephemeral, the imagined can be ‘real’ enough for us to stake our lives on it.

In his sermon of 1965, and was there ever a time when we were more confident that we could change the world, Tillich notes that even then hope was devaluated by being considered wishful thinking or utopian fantasy. But he argues, ‘without hope, the tension of our life toward the future would vanish, and with it, life itself. [without hope we’d be completely and utterly a boat with no wind in its sails, drifting listlessly wherever the tide would take us] We would end in despair, a word that originally meant ‘without hope’ (de – sperare), or deadly indifference.”
What Tillich and more contemporary writers are leaning into is our capacity not only to hope, but to imagine what we hope for. To conjure up in our hearts and minds a reality that escapes us in the present moment. But by holding this vision, this hope, in our imagination, we are in some ways actually making it present. Making the dream part of our reality because it exists, if only, and let’s not say only, let’s say, most importantly, Making the dream part of our reality because most importantly the dream, the hope, exists in our minds. In our hearts. It lives in us. The hope then becomes, “… a power which drives [us] into the future. …The hope … becomes a .. power, and makes fulfillment not certain, but possible.”
It seems to me that a critical element of hopefulness is imagination. Without imagination, how to we dream, how do we envision a better way, how do we make an alternative present except at first in our imagination? I worry that in our time, when so much of reality is tested with tangible proof, that our imagination muscle is atrophying. I always worry that all the focus on getting an education so you can get a job leads to this kind of atrophy – that studying, learning, reading for its own sake means our brains and our hearts aren’t stretched and tested, broken and mended and expanded. When all our focus is on what is pragmatic and useful, then the ‘flights of fancy’ that can change the world have no opportunity to take hold, to take root, and to disrupt the ground they grow in. And then, we are doomed to living in what only others can tell us is real and good enough.

Trevor Noah in an interview with New York City mayor Zohran Mandani wondered if the demise of religion has led to the demise of the capacity to imagine and hope. “One of the things that faith requires of you,” he says, “is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen.” But we have to develop our imaginations. The imagination is a learned skill for seeing possibilities embedded in the present moment. And Christians are skilled at this – at noticing the sacred hope of a new shoot growing out of a fallen tree. Out of flowers poking through concrete. Of an older brother patiently reading to a troublesome younger sibling. Of rights for women and people of colour and differing sexual identities and new appreciation for the precious nature of the environment…we are accustomed to seeing these things as signs of God’s hopes breaking in because over centuries, we have developed and are still developing the muscle of sacred imagination.

Religious traditions have been teaching people how to look at the world as it is and at the same time to hold in their minds/our minds what it could become. Not through fantasy or denial. Through ‘disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible.’ Faith … can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them. We work out of not a blind optimism or toxic positivity but a cognitive and emotional framework that lets us stare directly at how bad things are while still organizing toward how things could be.”
“Religions have spent literally centuries building deep thinking and emotional capacities for imagination and hope. For sustaining vision through disappointment. For training people to believe in transformation they can’t see yet. For building the kind of trust that makes costly commitment possible.” The author of the article about Trevor Noah asks: “What’s left to train people for hope if not religion?” “I genuinely don’t know,” is her somewhat despondent response. ‘Maybe,” she wonders “we need to take seriously what religions have always understood: Imagination isn’t frivolous. Hope requires training. Trust needs practice. The capacity to envision and organize toward futures you cannot yet see is a skill, not a personality quirk some people are born with. You can’t inspire people, can’t move them toward a vision of better futures without the capacity to imagine and trust in possibilities beyond the current ceiling.”

In her new book Rebecca Solnit “blasts with a pragmatic positivity, writing with a ‘pull yourself together, don’t even think about despair” tone. Solnit believes that all evidence to the contrary, we are moving to a better world. That the current upheavals are a global regime responding to the moves towards a ‘better world’, towards even the kindom of God breaking all the way through. She writes that in the last couple of centuries the growth of industrialization and hyper-capitalism and environmental destruction, have been “’…a weird detour from how most people, throughout most of time, have thought about nature and our place in it. The mistakenness of that detour might show itself in environmental destruction, or it might show itself in an epidemic of loneliness, or in the scourge of corporate rapacity, but, once the imagination has woken up to it, the change is deep and profound.’” And it is powerful. An estimated 9 million people showed up at No Kings rallies in the States yesterday. 9 million people at more than 3100 rallies. People are waking up to memories of what could be and leaning into future hopes of the fulfillment of those possibilities. Journalist David Rothkopf wrote last night that the United States is at “.. a moment when either we will wake up, remember our aspirations, and put in all the work to make a brighter future possible for our children and grandchildren or, in the years to come, the demonstrations in our streets will be a symptom of the unrest of a dying great power.” Memory to imagination to hope and power.

(https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-no-kings-protests-may-be-the-turning-point-we-desperately-need/)

Back to the apostle Paul: “Now hope that is seen is not hope. But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24-25) The waiting for this thing hoped for calls for attentiveness and solidarity. Tillich says that “We wait in quiet tension, open for what we may encounter, working for its coming. Waiting in inner stillness, with posed tension and openness toward what we can only receive. …and the struggle between hope and despair in our waiting is a symptom that the new has already taken hold of us. …the kindom of God does not come in one dramatic event sometime in the future. It is coming here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy. The hope of the kingdom is not the expectation of a perfect stage at the end of history,…it lies in the here and now, for there is always a presence. And a beginning of what is seriously hoped for.” Hope in our time calls for memory of the past and an imagination for the future. Memory of the stories of our faith and the ways in which God has accompanied God’s people through every disappointment and every apparent failure. Memory of God’s promise which propels us into a new future, a new hope, a new creation and an imagination that makes the remembered promise present in the moment. Holding the memory in our imaginations and in a posture of attentiveness and stillness so we can see where the new beginning has already has broken in. Having the imagination to see it, to seize upon it, and to strive in the power and grace of God towards its growth. On this of all weeks, as we remember the empirical realities of denial and death, may we also remember and imagine the signs of hope being birthed in renewed life, in our hearts and in our world. And in God may we align our whole lives towards its fulfillment.May it be so. Amen