December 1998 Issue

The Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers of the Rodney King beating filled streets with the arson and looting, skies with the smoke of hopelessness. The night of the verdict snipers fired on people leaving a prayer meeting at a prestigious African American church. "Nothing you're talking about is going to do any good," one man shouted to the crowd. "Come with us—let's burn."¹

People with nothing to hope for are worse than dead. Hopelessness kills by stages, embalms the body and flatlines the spirit.

Rather than face hopelessness, people cling to false hopes. Bumper sticker theologians preach "No Hope in Dope." Yet, there is no hope either in a society which prefers to build prisons rather than schools. Before the epidemic of drug abuse can be addressed, recovery must begin from the deeper horror of hopelessness that infects inner city minorities and upscale white professionals who live in suburban ghettos of material prosperity and spiritual poverty.

Like chemotherapy for the body, hopelessness is the treatment of last resort for spirits devastated by the giving of ultimate loyalty to penultimate concerns. Materialism, racism, nationalism, egotism and dozens of other false hopes die in the darkness of the cross. "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel," the disciples said, not recognizing the Risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:21). All hopes were lost for a military victory over the Romans and the resuscitation of the Israelite monarchy.

Hosea 2 presents the yin and yang of hopelessness and hope as God pleads with Israel to put away her idolatries. She refuses and God lays her waste, then lures her into the wilderness and there makes "the valley of Achor a door of hope" (v. 15). Achor was the site, marked by a heap of stones, where an Israelite and his entire clan were put to death, because he broke the holy ban and took loot from Jericho. To think of Achor as hopeful is like thinking of Auschwitz, or the electric chair, or the cross as hopeful. Sunday's listeners—scrubbed, impassive, respectable in their pews—have heaped up stones of guilt, loss, grief and sin across the landscape of the spirit. They wait in hope of forgiveness, restoration, renewal, righ teousness.

The theologian and preacher true to her calling cannot hurry on to hope before despair has killed the cancer of idolatry. Nor can she wallow forever in the slough of despond. The Hebrew prophets offered both confrontation and consolation. Thomas Merton wrote, "all the hopes that seem to founder in the shadows of a cross / Wake from a momentary sepulchre."²

Romans 15:4-13 centers on hope. The first paragraph (vv. 4-6) cites the scriptures, which provide us examples of hope; the second (vv. 7-12) urges welcome for the gentiles patterned after God's purpose of redemption; and, the climactic benediction (v. 13) identifies God as "the God of hope" by the power of whose Spirit we "may abound in hope."

The first movement of the reading identifies the encouragement of the scriptures as a source of hope. Hebrews 11 defines faith as "the assurance of things hoped for" (v. 1). This chapter, like the Bible as a whole, is a family album of hope. One person mentioned is Rahab, the prostitute who threw her fate in with the Israelite invaders rather than the principalities and powers of Jericho. As a sign of her hope she bound in the window a tikvah, a crimson cord. The word also means "hope" and is so translated in verses like Psalm 71:5, "For you, O Lord, are my hope."³ As we worship, we gather around the family table and feast on the stories of those who won release in this world and those who refused it in hope of the world to come.

The second movement of the reading focuses on Jews and gentiles as beneficiaries of God's faithfulness and mercy. When Paul wrote of the gentiles before they became the people of God, he said they were "without hope and without God" (Eph 2:12, RSV). Paul includes both the Jews in their historic role as recipients of God's covenant promises, and the gentiles as recipients of God's mercy. In so doing Paul points to the hope of liberation of all people from religious and racial hatred, and of all creation from oppression in all its forms. Hope subverts the present world order which is passing away by introducing the reign of God, the new world order which is and is to come. Hope flourishes not in parliaments or universities or textbooks, not in corporations or institutional churches, but in human hearts. Hope is "the deepest and most radical part of human nature, the part that never dies. It is only what is that dies; that which is not yet cannot die."⁴

The third movement of the text brings it to a climax. Paul, having moved first through sacred story of scripture, then through the divisions of first-century society, finally offers a benediction for the believers in Rome. He prays to the "God of hope." It is this God, the God of hope, to whom, increasingly, people of faith turn in our day, the God beyond all we can ask or imagine, and paradoxically the God within, "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col 1:27). The absence of the God of hope is joy; the mystery of becoming; the hush of awe; the heart that leaps at the knock of the Beloved but, opening, finds no one there (Song of Songs 5:4-6). The presence of the God of hope is peace, the light and clarity of being, the laborer's song, the beat of ordinary time in the arms of the Beloved (Song of Songs 2:16).

In the fourth Narnia tale, The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis created a character named Puddleglum, a marshwiggle wont not to take life seriously enough. Doleful as a funeral, courageous as a lion, Puddleglum guides the children on their adventures through the northern wastelands and the dark underworld. Said the wiggle's relations to him, "You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie."⁵

Hopelessness is a momentary sepulchre, a manager where—for all the angels cracking open all the heavens with their glorias, and all the Herods ruling all the kingdoms of the earth with swords, hope lies safe asleep in swaddling clothes.

John Hamilton
Richmond, VA

1. Time, May 11, 1992, p. 26.
2. "Freedom as Experience," Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Books, 1967), p. 69.
3. Brown, Driver & Briggs, p. 876.
4. Leonardo Boff, The Lord's Prayer: The Prayer of Integral Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), p. 55.
5. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Religious Book Club, 1973), p. 63.