Hello everyone. Having read Julyan's post on the last blog I thought it deserved consideration and exploration. Below is Julyan's contribution.
"Hope is an interesting thing; it can be everything from an excuse for doing nothing to the motivating power behind our efforts towards change. In a Christian context it can perhaps have the same range from those who hope for better things but wait for God to intervene to make things right to those for whom, again, hope is that motive power to action. For me, I suppose, hope is that of Christ which I find to be within me, offering a different reality, a different possibility, revealing potential in self, others and situations. It is, I think, the ability (gift) to live with one foot in the realities of the present and the other in a different tomorrow, to know, as I put it in one of my songs, "That what lies before us is more than it seems." Hope is, therefore, a spiritual comfort while also being a spiritual and practical challenge."
I invite you to share your thoughts.
Shalom friends!
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Thanks for this Julyan, very thought provoking. I will certainly be doing some research on hope and will post my findings in due course. For now the one idea/dynamic that springs to my mind from your description of hope is "Kingdom of God". Does not the "Kingdom" offer a different reality, a different possibility, revealing potential in self, others and situations, to live with one foot in the reality of the present and the other in a different tomorrow, a spiritual comfort, while also being a spiritual and practical challenge. Or am I mistaken in this? Further, you talk about hope in a Christian context, would hope then be different in a non Christian context? Maybe I will ask my work colleagues what they believe hope to be.
I look forward to responses from fellow bloggers.
Shalom
Yes, hope will be different in other contexts though the outworking may be the same. We choose (have been brought up to) live within the Christian story but hope is not always a feature of church life. Now at the beginning of Lent I am starting to think about giving things up - not chocolate - rather those things that we surround ourselves with to insure us against the vagaries of an unknown future and that are therefore a denial of hope. This is a challenge for the church in particular. We had a position in our culture, our society that older ones among us remember as being quite powerful. The church had status and influence; that, as for many other instiutions, is no longer the case. What to do? One reaction is to mourn the loss, demand that "people" give us back the position we deserve. But Christ did not consider equality with God something to be held on to ..... Our new position in society is not a threat but, I think, a place where we might discover God in a new way, the God of service and suffering, the God of letting go, and where we might also discover what it really is to be church. There is, I believe, hope in this place, not for the continuation of church as we have known it, but that out of the dying of that model, a new growth will come; smaller perhaps, but a prophetic community acting as salt and light for society. Off I go to think some more about these early ramblings, probably to expand on them on Sunday. Blessings all.
Thanks Julyan, I for one look forward to your "ramblings" and look forward to responding in due course. (Much better than my rantings lol)
Well fellow bloggers eventually here are the observations I have come across/discovered regarding hope.
HOPE: An attitude to the future; an assurance that God's promises will be kept; a confidence that what is bad will pass and what is good will be preserved;
“Hope disposes the believer towards change. Hope is orientated toward what is coming tomorrow. In hope we count on the possibilities of the future and we do not remain imprisoned in the institutions of the past.” (Jurgen Moltmann). (Hmm is this familiar to Julyan's last post?)
“The exodus, with its picture of a God who takes the side of the oppressed and the powerless has been a beacon of hope for many in despair.” (Robert Allen Warrior).
“Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to it.” (Rubem Alves).
“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness that the world affords.” (Samuel Johnson).
“Hope is the power to be cheerful in circumstances we know to be desperate.” (G.K. Chesterton).
Shalom friends
Thanks for your comments above Julyan.
I am taken with your reference to the God of letting go. You mention that one way to react to the loss of status and influence of the church as an institution is to “mourn the loss”. Moltmann makes the comment of not being “imprisoned in the institutions of the past.” I think you are right to say that the church has to find a new way of “operating” (for want of a better phrase).
I have been thinking for some time about church can offer that is not already being offered. And I am struggling. I think of education, medicine, charity and welfare, workers rights. Aspects that were not always available, certainly to the poorest in society in past times, but now, due in no small part to the influence of the Christian movement accessible to most citizens of this country, however the provision is now made in the greater part not by the church but through Government, Trades Unions, Charitable organisations etc. which ironically have a number of Christian people operating in these agencies. In short there seems to be a lack of recognition in society regarding the church’s involvement which I would suggest is there but low key and fragmented. (By fragmented I don’t mean insignificant far from it, just not visible as the church as an institution).
Julyan mentioned that the church will possibly be smaller but still prophetic. I recall a conversation where the following slogan was mentioned for Trinity Methodist Church The Centre.
“Digging into village life.”
With so many services being withdrawn locally, Post Office, local shops, public houses etc, elements that were not just valuable for the goods and services they provided, there is an opportunity for the local church to step in and become the binding that holds the fabric of the local community together. (Perhaps this is what the church in older peoples eyes used to be and to do.)Over to you for comment
Shalom
Time for something new in response to hope with Easter season still with us. I preached last Sunday evening on the Emmaus story, making the point that only one of the two disciples, Cleopas, is named. Has Luke left a space for his reader to be the other disciple? It can be interesting and enlightening to think ourselves into the biblical situations and Luke eases the way for us in this account. Think what these two disciples felt like; think of their probable sense of hopelessness, defeat, failure, frustration. What is it to know Jesus present among us in those times?
There is, too, the matter of how we read this story. It seems to me that it is a story written from a meal rather than about a meal. Where we celebrate the Last Supper, I like to think of this as a First Supper, a first meal of a new order. Perhaps it was one of the disciples’ hands that broke the bread as Jesus had always done previously when he and his friends ate together; (perhaps it was you, fellow traveller), and it was in that moment, in that familiar act, that the disciples realised that Jesus was with them still. This isn’t a matter of people appearing and disappearing, not a cause for debate about what sort of body Jesus could have in order that he could do that (how about the stranger on the road as Luke’s literary device to get his readers to think about the scriptural context of all that had happened?), but is about a deep spiritual reality. When we do those things that once Jesus did, Jesus is present with us (where two or three are gathered together ….), whether that be breaking the bread, healing the sick, releasing prisoners, welcoming the stranger and the marginalised ….
Christ has no hands now on earth but yours …
Enough for now. Let us receive hope and be hope. Shalom.
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