When Hope Is Our Best Answer

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

This Week at Plymouth, October 18, 2024

“It is the work of the church to engage in hope that is neither optimism nor a notion of progress, but a confession that God’s resolve for a new heaven and a new earth is not precluded or hindered by the power of death” —Walter Brueggemann, “Resisting Denial, Refusing Despair.”

I recently attended the funeral of a friend’s mother. It was one of those Black church funerals I grew up attending, filled with gospel choir music, ecstatic praise, and celebration preaching. But more than the familiar sights and sounds from the church of my youth were the powerful articulations of hope, the overwhelming sense among even those with tears flowing that they knew that something else better would emerge beyond this moment. In their loss, grief, and pain, the family and the church community testified to their enduring hope for life, victory, and overcoming. In their hopefulness, they did not avert their gaze from what they had lost. They knew, as Walter Brueggemann described, that “the loss . . . is a runup to God’s newness that is beyond our capacity” to evoke relying on their own will and steam.

Earlier this year, so many of my friends despaired about the radicalization and illiberalism of our politics, finding it hard to be hopeful about the future. Conversations about the latest bizarre attack on immigrants and LGBTQ people or the most recent norm-busting outrageous act often turned into talk about leaving the country or fears about life imitating art with our nation becoming some version of The Handmaid’s Tale. But something shifted when we began naming what we feared would happen to us and allowed ourselves to face it. We started to think about the life we desired and the liberation we fought for. And I remembered the testimony of the old saints in the church of my youth who testified that God didn’t bring us this far to leave us. Truth opened our eyes and filled us with courage. Hope was reborn because we remembered that whatever stands against us cannot stop what God has in store for us.

I hope we sing and pray for our hope even as we confront our loss and fear. My prayer for us is that when we come to the end of our endurance, and we think that we can’t go any further, when we find ourselves looking for life in places of oppression and domination, when we find ourselves unable to imagine a life of blessing and abundance beyond the current malaise, that we will remember that the promise of our faith is newness. We confront our fears and anxieties, combining truth-telling about our loss, failures, and weakness with hope-telling of our trust in God’s faithfulness “to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). Hope is our best answer to despair, and with God, it won’t be disappointed. Amen.