By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Hope does not disappoint, Paul claims.

To which the philosopher Friedrich Nietzche retorted, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.”

Is hope the lifesaver that Paul declares or is it a dangerous sedative prolonging suffering and encouraging inaction as cynics and pessimists would claim?

I believe with Paul that hope is foundational to the Christian life – that cynicism, pessimism, and despair are antithetical to Christ’s call, but at the same time, I must admit a bit of sympathy to the rumblings of people like Nietzche who have seen just a few too many dewy-eyed dreamers who turn hope into an excuse. They swath themselves in a comforting and smothering cotton of denial and call it hope.

Many years ago, I did the funeral of an Alfred University student who died of leukemia. I doubt if anyone remembers Aaron since his disease had caused him to miss a lot of time and his group of friends and acquaintances here was small, but those who attended his service were struggling mightily with their sorrow over the loss of a young man who like themselves had barely entered adulthood. But unfortunately, what I remember most from his funeral was the comment of a well-intentioned but clumsy older aunt who assured those present that they should not grieve over his death. “God needed a rosebud for his garden,” she said, “and so he picked Aaron.” How many of us have heard similar platitudes spoken in times of terrible grief, or must even confess ourselves guilty on occasion of such remarks because it is frankly easier to cover the realities of suffering and tragedy with a thick blanket of rose-colored escapism than it is to provide healing by opening ourselves to the deep pain of others?

If Christian hope is rose-colored escapism than Nietzche is right to condemn it as prolonging the suffering of humankind; but rose-colored escapism is not the hope that Paul preaches.

Nor is the hope that Paul describes a hope that causes people to blithely stride into the future unprepared resting on the false belief that “God will provide.” When I was in Junior High, every girl in the seventh grade was required to watch a film on birth control in health class. (Whether the boys also had to watch the film or not, I don’t know, since in those days Health classes were segregated by gender probably to save the Health teachers the constant headache of listening to embarrassed giggles from both sexes.) Anyway, since I had three younger sisters who eventually also had to watch the film, the film’s tagline quickly became a family joke. None of us actually remember anything about the film and whether it promoted abstinence or other methods of birth control, but we all remember the bold letters splashed across the opening screen: “Hope is not a method!” Even today, anytime someone in my family is inclined to rush forward unprepared and just trust that everything will somehow work out for the best, we intone sternly, “Just remember, hope is not a method!”

If Christian hope means adopting a Pollyanna confidence that the future will be full of bliss without your having to lift a finger to help make that happen, then Nietzche would be justified in condemning hope as prolonging the suffering of humankind; but passive inaction is not the hope that Paul preaches.

When we believe that hope requires that we turn a blind eye to the ragged reality that is our world, when we believe that hope means we have to overlook the abject suffering of people in poverty, wars, hunger, and illness; when we believe that hope means that we have to somehow put aside all of our doubts and fears and practicalities and suddenly become wild-eyed optimists spouting cheery Hallmark sentiments into the face of tragedy, it is no wonder that others condemn Christianity as a sugar-coated escapist faith. But that is not what Christian hope is.

Christian hope is the insistence that even though the world sometimes does stink to high heaven, and even though life is often much more tragic than we want it to be, even though we ourselves are flawed weak people surrounded by other flawed weak people, we still have hope that our lives can hold the promise of goodness and meaning and that with God's help, we can find that promise even in the middle of the muck. Christian hope doesn’t deny the pain in Christ’s hands as the nails drove through his wrists; it doesn’t try to erase the reality of the blood that flowed from his side on the cross; it doesn’t turn its eyes from the agony of the grief endured by Mary and Christ’s friends as death took the one they so loved from them; it doesn’t discount the power of cruelty and sin in the world. What Christian hope does is free us from bondage to those powers, from bondage to those realities, so that we can, with Christ find new life on the other side of the cross.

Terry Simonik, a nurse who works with young women with eating disorders, says that hope is the glimmer of a possibility that we have the potential for liberation from our imprisonment and that this potential for liberation generates the energy needed to not only persevere through adversity but also to act to enable to make the difficult changes necessary for liberation. Simonik tells the story of Diana, a young woman in her early twenties who had been caught in the grips of a serious eating disorder for over seven years. Diana finally reached out for help and at first the young woman described her seeking counseling as an act of desperation. “I thought I was the impossible case,” she admits, “the girl that would never recover. I thought I was stuck in hell forever.” Her counselor, however, helped her to see that her act was actually based in hope not despair and today Diana says, “I think for me hope was about telling the truth. I stopped lying about the disease and everything else the day I chose to go into recovery.”

“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” Paul declared. Christian hope is not a denial of reality but it is the denial of the power of that reality to shape who we are and who we will become. For Diana, hope was the willingness to face the truth about herself and the recognition that if she had the strength to face the truth, she would also have the strength to be freed from her imprisonment. For the person who confronts challenges and an uncertain future, hope is a willingness to actively seek the wisdom and resources God puts before them, and work for change. For the person who grieves over the death of a loved one, hope is the faith that the love they shared with the person in the past will continue to abide with them molding their hearts into the future. It will be a different future than the one we have known but Christian hope says that God will not allow the suffering and pain of today to deny us the possibility of love and freedom tomorrow. Christian hope is the testimony that God will work with us and through us to free us and our world to new possibilities. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

A few years ago, a magazine called, “Hope”, interviewed a number of well-known and not-so-well known professionals, artists, successful business people, social workers, and activists and the magazine asked them to define the word “Hope”. One doctor said simply, “Hope is action.” An environmentalist said, “Hope is living for my daughter and her future.” A congressman replied that “hope is believing he can make a difference.” But one woman, Julie Su, a lawyer and co-founder of Sweatshop Watch, didn’t answer the question right away. Instead, she told a story; and at first the story sounded anything but hopeful.

“On August 2, 1995,” she remembered, “the American public was horrified by press reports about the discovery of seventy-two Thai garment workers who had been held in slavery in a city in California by their employers for up to seventeen years, sewing clothes for some of the nation's top manufacturers and retailers. The workers labored over eighteen hours a day in a compound enclosed by barbed wire. From their homes in impoverished rural Thailand, these women and men had dared to dream the immigrant's dream--a better life for themselves, hard work with just pay, and decent living conditions. What they found instead was an immigrant's nightmare. The slave labor compound where they were confined was surrounded by a ring of razor wire and iron guardrails with sharp ends pointing inward. Crowded eight or ten into bedrooms built for two, rats crawled over them during their few precious hours of sleep. Armed guards imposed discipline. Workers were forbidden to make unmonitored phone calls or write uncensored letters. Living under the constant threat of harm to themselves and to their families in Thailand, they labored over sewing machines in dark garages and poorly lit rooms, making clothes sold in some of the biggest retail stores in America...

[When their condition became public, the workers’ humiliation,” Julie Su recounts, “was not ended for now they were rounded up and put in detention by the INS, forced by the government to live in prison cells and chained hand and foot anytime they went to court. A coalition of organizations was quickly formed to advocate on their behalf and they were able finally to put up bonds for the workers to secure their release.] “Churches, shelters, supermarkets, and hospitals stepped forward to help provide transitional housing, emergency food and clothing, and medical care.... Sweatshop Watch conducted a job search on behalf of the workers....locating jobs that pay the minimum wage in shops that comply with health and safety laws. All of the Thai workers were re-employed within two months, a testament to the efforts of the community-based organizations working in coalition.

It took years for them to work their way through the legal tangle, and one could listen to their story and despair over the horrific consequences of human degradation and bureaucratic apathy, but Julie Su instead insists on seeing hope. “In the aftermath of the brutal enslavement,” she says, “they have slowly and courageously rebuilt their lives and joined to fight for corporate accountability. Each time I look in their eyes I see hope.... Their freedom today gives me reason to hope.... because I, too, am the daughter of immigrants... I am a product of .... hope, and I can only carry that spirit in my heart, and do my best to spread hope to the many who are [still] suffering..."

The Chinese writer Lin Yutang says that “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”

Christian hope rests on the belief that we when we believe in the liberating power of God to shape a new reality, we leave footsteps of love in the plain of the world’s suffering. And our hope will cause others to hope and follow. Our faith assures us that we do not walk alone but are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who continue to insist that beyond the cross there is a new life, and that together all of our footsteps will carve a new path for others. Though we may never see it, we have hope that one day, there will be a person or a whole people who will say, “Thank you, because we are the product of your hope.”