Living with Hope

Dearly Beloved, 

Last Thursday evening, I had dinner with a small group of bishops at a restaurant in a small Alabama town. The staff seemed overwhelmed and out of sorts, and there were a series of mistakes and delays with our order. None of us were bothered at all, but the staff was effusively apologetic. The intensity of their apologies seemed wildly disproportionate to what were very small inconveniences. Like so many front line workers in service industries, I imagine they are well accustomed to people being quick to outrage over minor real or perceived mistakes, and their response was informed by all the ways they have been mistreated because of it. 

We approach every situation with a set of expectations about how things should go. Of course, things never go that way, and our frustration at this can so quickly turn to outrage. We see those unmet expectations as a personal attack, and so we double down on demanding they be met. So much of the quiet violence we inflict on each other flows through this frustration to outrage pipeline. 

As a contrast to outrage culture, following Jesus is about learning to live without expectations, and to live instead with hope. Expectations are how I try to impose my preferences, my desires, and my opinions on the people and world around me. Hope is about surrendering this fight, and taking up the vision of what God wants the world to be, and what God alone can do. Living with expectations is believing the lie that I am in charge, and that life is a matter of getting what I want. Living with hope is accepting the liberating truth that my life is not about me, but about how I join my will to God’s project of love. 

The repentance Lent calls us to is about  turning from expectation to hope. In these last weeks of the season, as our gaze is drawn again toward the cross of Jesus, can we join ourselves and our expectations more fully to his way of suffering, that we might be crucified on Calvary, and by God’s great power, be raised up in the freedom, love, and deep joy of living with hope in a world starved for it?

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya