hope
The thing with feathers: A quotidian kind of hopefulness
1 Peter says we should always be ready to give a reason for hope. Always?
The eighth day: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 30; Luke 7:11-17
The Bible is full of strange things—oil cruets and flour containers that never become empty and young bodies that are restored to life at a word from Jesus. Are we supposed to believe that these things happened? Maybe the ancient peoples did, but we moderns suffer under the curse of Bultmann’s lightbulb: we know why the light switches on. We are cursed by rationalities that prevent us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.
Reality show: Mark 9:2-9
Do not look for this mountain on a Bible map. It juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God.
Hopeful grieving: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Perhaps the most insidious byproduct of modern apocalyptic scenarios is that grief is shoved right off the table.
Are we there yet? Romans 5:1-8
I want to go from suffering to hope as quickly as possible.
God's arms: Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
Paul’s daunting promise to the Romans haunts me: “Suffering produces endurance,” he assures the Romans and us, “and endurance produces character and character produces hope.” Recently I stood in the pulpit of my church and looked over the top of a white, 32-inch-long casket at a young couple from my congregation. Their six-month-old son, who had been happy and healthy just days before, had died in his sleep. The unfathomable suffering of the family was shadowed by a church filled with mourners for whom the scene enacted their most dreaded fears.
System failure: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
"A virus breached the campus computer network last week and the entire system crashed. Repair has been difficult, but I bring a word of hope.” The director of information technology at the college where I was about to lecture on eschatology added, “This has been frustrating for everyone. Files have been corrupted and programs do not run properly. Please be patient. Some files have been restored. . . . Any day now we will be back to full operation.”