Hope of the hopeless

I learned about hope from Jeremiah the prophet. It changed my life.

He lived in the 7^th-6^th centuries BCE. During his life the Babylonians destroyed the Temple of Solomon, drove the population of Judah into exile, murdered the royal family and blinded the king. The survivors, counter to his prophecy, ran off to Egypt, taking him along.

Most saw it as a time to despair.

“Don’t chase after pagan gods,” Jeremiah had warned the people; they brushed him off, “It’s hopeless, we won’t change.”

Hope takes courage. Spiritual change takes courage. It’s so much easier to go with the status quo.

Hope requires you to humble yourself before God, to wait for God’s time.

Judgment fell on Judea in the form of drought. These people were subsistence farmers; they had no stores of grain.

No rain, no crop spelled starvation, famine.

Jeremiah pled with them to return to God, their hope, the fount of living waters.

I grew up in the desert southwest. The Rio Grande, dammed north of El Paso, ran a muddy trickle most of the time—or dry.

Rain swept across the desert, a thin  gray veil, fragrant, refreshing. The arroyos gushed full of water.

Then, for a few days, the bare slopes of the Franklin Mountains blossomed with yellow flowers.

In the desert water is precious. Lack of rain quickly becomes a crisis; if it continues, it is catastrophic.

The catastrophe for Judah was exile. Its people marched stripped and starving into a strange land. By its waters they couldn’t sing.

Jeremiah wrote those exiles. “Seek the welfare of the city you live in,” he wrote.

The welfare of Babylon?!

“You have a future and a hope!” he promised. “In 70 years (a symbol not of arithmetic but of God’s harmony) you’ll come home.”

Hope is for the long term.

 Near the conclusion of his writings he calls God again Israel’s true pasture, their hope. The image reminds me of green pastures and still waters.

But Jeremiah didn’t limit himself to words. He acted.

At that moment, likely, Babylonian armies trampled the land. Standing at Anathoth, you could feel the thunder of their cavalries in the sole of your foot.

In prison, where governments often put prophets, Jeremiah received a visit from his cousin, who had a plot of land to unload, a parcel of the ancestral acreage in Anathoth, a few miles north and east of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah had no clue about his personal future, but he bought the land. He told his scribe Baruch to keep the deed safe for a long, long time.

By law Jeremiah was obligated to redeem the land. Later, when he set out to see it, however, his enemies accused him of desertion, and had him thrown in jail again.

For Jeremiah, as for people of God throughout the ages, hope is not a quick fix. The arc of the universe is a moral one. Love and truth always win at the last. Hope requires the long view, though, the willingness to set aside self-interest.

I confess I’m an M&Ms kind of guy. I want the good times to roll now, today, not tomorrow. As for next month, next year, next generation—forget it.

But that’s not how the God of hope works.

I had a friend who was involved in the People’s Revolution in the Philippines. He said, “We called it, not ‘theology of liberation,’ but ‘theology of struggle’ because many of us would never live to see liberation.”

The saints tell us that every step toward heaven is itself heaven. That’s hope, for sure.

O God, Hope of the hopeless, thanks for hanging on to us, when in our weakness we let go. Thanks for hoping through the darkness to the coming of light that was always there that we hadn’t opened our eyes and our hearts to see. Amen