11 April

Dear friends,

I read a prayer this morning in which the author, after a long and traumatic season of illness, writes: “…Recently I heard that first whirring,

 as of small wings alighting in a tangle of twigs,

and I recognise its name: Hope.  

Such a dear friend, parted for so long.”

The author continues to praise God for hope’s first return. Like the blossoms in springtime, almost too small to see, but growing, full of life, waiting to burst forth.

“Hope’s first return” seems like a good description for the letter of 1 Peter. Over the next six weeks, the lectionary invites us – as a post-resurrection people – to read this letter of hope. Already, on this first Sunday after Easter, Peter puts all his cards on the table as he invites us to see that God has given us a new birth into a “living hope”. 

Why does that sound so good, so incredibly relevant, for our time? What does a living hope even look like? Can we still claim it today, or have we given in to despair? Should we still speak of hope at all, or is that part of the problem? Has hope become, like Christianity itself, in Marx’s famous adage, the opium of the people? The thing that keeps us drugged, induced, blind to our very concerning realities, and, therefore, numbed and unable to stand up for what is right and just? Perhaps 1 Peter will help us untangle the riddle of post-resurrection hope. Indeed, help us to see what living hope looks like. 

So, I invite you to come along on this six-week journey of hope and let us see where it leads. We can already start by simply observing hope’s first return on Easter Sunday.

One of my all-time favourite poems about hope comes from the South American theologian and philosopher, Rubem Alves:

Tomorrow’s Children

What is hope?

It is a presentiment that imagination is more real

and reality less real than it looks.

It is a hunch

that the overwhelming brutality of facts

that oppress and repress is not the last word.

It is a suspicion

that reality is more complex

than realism wants us to believe

and that the frontiers of the possible

are not determined by the limits of the actual

and that in a miraculous and unexpected way

life is preparing the creative events

which will open the way to freedom and resurrection….

The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.

Suffering without hope

produces resentment and despair,

hope without suffering

creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness….

Let us plant dates

even though those who plant them will never eat them.

We must live by the love of what we will never see.

This is the secret discipline.

It is a refusal to let the creative act

be dissolved in immediate sense experience

and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.

Such disciplined love

is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints

the courage to die for the future they envisaged.

They make their own bodies

the seed of their highest hope.

Marius Louw