In What Do We Place Our Hope?

Hope is the capacity to anticipate and imagine a better future.  In our epistle reading for this Sunday from 1 Peter, the author urges us to “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.”  Human beings need hope as much as we need food and water. None of us can function without the ability to imagine new and better futures. 

The question, then, is in what do we place our hope? We can, and often do, place our hope in our own efforts. We can place our hope in financial security, or a political candidate, or military might, or a spouse, or child, or obtaining a particular job, or on and on. Everyone grounds their hope in something or someone. 

But as followers of Jesus, our hope is anchored in one thing and one thing alone: the world-saving power of God’s love that has been revealed in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. I have given my life to Jesus because I have seen all the other things I place my hope in have fallen short and proven hollow. To claim that God raised Jesus from the dead, that Jesus ascended bodily into heaven, and that the same future awaits every one of us, is just about the craziest thing any of us could claim to believe. It is literally impossible to fully imagine. And that’s precisely why it is good news. 

The world is despairing because the ground of hope we are so often offered is so much shifting sand. What a broken and despairing world needs more than anything is for those of us who follow Jesus to give an account, by our words and our living, of the crazy, unimaginable hope we have in Jesus. What a despairing world needs more than anything is for us to proclaim the outrageous and in-credible good news of Jesus without shame or fear.  We join God in healing the world when how we live together boldly anticipates God’s future, which is too crazy to believe and too good to be true. And make no mistake, we can be bold, unashamed, and unafraid because every time we gather in the presence of God and each other, we taste and see the future in which God will swallow up devastation, disease, sorrow, injustice, hatred, and death itself forever in a flood of perfect love.