Tag Archive: Hope

Confident Hope

November 14, 2024

Last night Origin Church prayed for the church as we do on each Wednesday evening. We asked God to give the church confident hope. The Apostle Paul modelled the prayer:

“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13, NLT

We began our evening together by rejoicing in the assignment of Jesus as the LORD’s Servant in Isaiah 49:1-7. The breadth of the LORD’s commission is astonishing. The Messiah says,

“And now the LORD speaks — the one who formed me in my mother’s womb to be his servant, who commissioned me to bring Israel back to him. The LORD has honoured me, and my God has given me strength. He says, ‘You will do more than restore the people of Israel to me. I will make you a light to the Gentiles and you will bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.'” Isaiah 49:5-6, NLT

He goes continues:

“The LORD, the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel, says to the one who is despised and rejected by the nations, to the one who is the servant of rulers: ‘Kings will stand at attention when you pass by. Princes will also blow low because of the LORD, th faithful one, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” Isaiah 49:7

Confident hope.

This quality characterized the life of Christ Jesus. Though facing rejection from family and His hometown, though serving under Roman rulers in Israel, He drew Israel to Himself, and became a light to the Gentiles. He will bring God’s salvation to the ends of the earth.

Confident hope.

Paul writes to the Gentile and Jewish followers of Jesus gathering in the house churches of Rome. He commends the servant life of Christ to them. He writes:

“We who are strong must be considerate of those who are sensitive about things like this. We must not just please ourselves. We should help others do what is right and build them up in the Lord.” Romans 15:1-2

Confident hope.

“For even Christ didn’t live to please himself. As the Scriptures say, ‘The insults of those who insult you, O God, have fallen on me.’ Such things were written in the Scriptures long ago to teach us. And the Scriptures give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises to be fulfilled.” Romans 15:3-4

Confident hope.

“May God, who gives this patience and encouragement help you live in complete harmony with each other, as is fitting for followers of Christ Jesus. Then all of you can join together with one voice, giving praise and glory to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 15:5-6

Confident hope.

“Therefore accept each other just as Christ accepted you so that God will be given glory. Remember that Christ came as a servant to the Jews to show that God is true to the promises he made to their ancestors. He also came so that the Gentiles might give glory to God for her mercies to them.” Romans 15:7-9

Confident hope.

Oh how we need confident hope today. Come Holy Spirit come. Come from our Heavenly Father and from the Lord Jesus who gave Himself in service to us. We trust you O God! Fill us with joy and peace. Fill your church with the harmony formed by your acceptance. The miracle of repentance is something we share no matter where we came from. And now by your power cause us to overflow with confident hope as we serve before those in our city and workplaces who might be like kings and queens and rulers of another kingdom. We need not worry about what to say. We need not worry about how to act. We have confident hope that you will grant us what is needed in every situation because we trust in you. And may your salvation come to the ends of the earth even as you raise up servants for yourself everywhere.

Church, Jesus, Society

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What is a university chaplain good for?

March 16, 2021 0 Comments

“Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope you who enter here.’”
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

I am a Christian minister serving a Baptist church in our campus community. I love Jesus and I love students so I regularly encourage ministers from a variety of faith traditions to join their local multi or interfaith chaplaincy on campus. A dynamic and thriving university chaplaincy will pursue the common good. In that pursuit and in service of the wholistic health of the person in front of them, chaplains reach into their lives and their traditions in order to offer hope to students who come to campus looking for community or who are at times being squeezed by their loneliness and angst. After serving with the Multifaith Chaplains Association for eleven years on campus at the University of British Columbia I’ve landed on four words to describe what might be one of the most important things chaplains do: Chaplains offer H.O.P.E.

Hospitality

Almost every tradition of faith and spirituality welcomes people and invites them to move from stranger to friend. Chaplains serve the university or college by offering a wide welcome to students, staff, and faculty. When students arrive on campus from home for the first time they often look for the familiar. If they are seeking to connect with their familiar communities of faith,  it might be a chaplain from their tradition, or any chaplain who is part of the chaplaincy that points the way and welcomes them into campus life. Hospitality opens the door to the hope found in friendship and community.

Orientation

Change and growth is often preceded by disorientation — a sense of not quite getting it or knowing the way. I prefer the term discombobulated! No doubt, life in university can be discombobulating! However, a chaplain can assist a student wrestling with the big questions of life by giving them language to formulate what they are feeling or ruminating on. Chaplains are able to introduce the basics of their traditions and point students to resources that will aid them in their own hopeful journey of discovery and change.

Personality

Some chaplains have BIG personalities. But most of us are regular persons without a lot of flash or hype who have had to reckon with aspects of ourselves in relation to family, the stuff of earth, and even our failure to live up to a transcendent vision of maturity. Hopefully each chaplain has some wisdom to share, a question to ask, or a story to tell that could unlock a door to growth. Universities and colleges are not just communities where some truth out there in the universe is being uncovered and manipulated for wealth. Hopefully universities and colleges can be communities where people become personable, flourishing humans, who are full of compassion and kindness.

Encouragement

After a string of bad days people lose courage. Sometimes in college or university the string of bad days becomes a week, a month, or even a term. Chaplains listen. They offer language and processes for metabolizing loss and grief. By asking questions they may help a student discern or begin discerning what they truly want. Having lived just a little longer the chaplain offers the hope that “it does get better.” We too have had to face our fears. We too have had our catastrophes. But we have learned that the catastrophe of the day is not necessarily the defining moment of our whole lives. We’ve had the experience of benefiting from counselling, from community, and from honesty. Chaplains, I’ve noticed are also pretty good at recognizing what is pretty good in another person, so they see the possibilities. Chaplains are encouragers, ready to speak an apt word that releases courage into the heart that had lost it. Chaplains can  help students name the dementor lurking in darkness and sucking away their hope; having named it they can face it.; facing it they can take their next step forward with hope. That step could be the one that makes all the difference in their university experience and blazes a path full of courageous struggle but also full of blessings.

“Even though high-hope people are goal directed, they enjoy the process of getting there as much as the actual arrival. This is one of the seeming paradoxes I initially had difficulty disentangling when talking with high-hope people. Goals certainly capture the attention of high-hope people, but this largely seems to be true because such goals offer a marker for progress or mastery occurring along the way.”
Charles Snyder, pioneer hope researcher, The Psychology of Hope.

Change, Education

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Being American on the 4th of July — Somewhere Else

July 4, 2020 0 Comments

For me being American is about a people, a place, and the promises and dreams that were nurtured there. This combination has the potential of nurturing hope.

My favourite places were lived in without much thought in my younger years of their promises. I was just living, enjoying, and experiencing the life I lived as normal. In fact if questioned at the time of this picture (see above) I would have probably thought everyone’s life was like this. But upon reflection I think my sister and I knew even then that the regular weekend and summer trips to camp on land that my mother’s parents had farmed was not everyone’s norm. But once there, we were having a grand time anyway!

Nor was it normal in my neighbourhood at the time to have an immigrant father who solemnly put the flag of the United States in its holder as a reminder of the journey he had taken and the promises he had made and the promises a country had made to him. Even when he was disappointed that these promises would not be fulfilled in the highest court of the land to the degree to which law and merit would have warranted, he continued to be thankful for the freedoms we enjoyed in this place and with these people. I believe my dad treated his movement of appreciation, flying the flag, what some would call patriotism, as a civic act of thankfulness and of hope.

For even when personal advancement and success did not meet all his dreams, my Northern Ireland, Irish Catholic father was grateful for the freedoms he enjoyed with us. These freedoms were measured out in society in such a way that we could pick up the newspaper and read the news and the opinion sections without fear. Where we could attend religious services and assemble with any people and in any church, on any given day as we desired. Where we could access the legal system and seek justice as needed. Where we could vote and generally expect that the elections would be fair. Where we could walk down the street without worrying that our neighbours or the police would track us with guns drawn and fingers on the trigger.

It does not escape me that what I have described above is now being tested and has been tested all along.

But are these aspects of liberty what made me an “American?” 

Yes, but not by themselves.

Being American for me has in large part been about a society infused with hope. It’s strange to me but hope seems dangerous. Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, knew his hopes were dangerous to others. But, when the full ideals of our hopes cannot be fully met in this place, people, and it’s promises, I know, even as Roger Williams knew, that we must look elsewhere. Disappointment of hope can be crushing. That’s why I look ultimately look to Jesus and His Kingdom for my hope. “Hope we have as an anchor to the soul.” (Hebrews 6:18-19)  I have now lived half my life outside of the United States of America  because of the promises and dreams fuelled by Jesus. No matter where one lives or started life the allegiance to Jesus supersedes all others and some allegiances of the soul must be renounced in order to be free in Christ. (If you don’t know Roger Williams, b. 1603 — d. 1683, please get to know him!)

Yet every follower of Jesus has a body and lives in a land so I do carry some tension in my body. Participation in the life of the land can be limited to “our neighbour” but most followers of Jesus I know at least still choose to vote locally and federally as participants in our common governance. Some even choose to participate in politics with the ambition of serving others and not just themselves. I have been thankful for the immense liberty I have enjoyed as an American and now as a Canadian where we celebrated “Canada Day” on July 1st. Both countries share a “freedom construct” that seeks to share liberties broadly. And so I am thankful that I enjoy civilly many of the liberties only once afforded to kings and queens.

Yet, not all people in our lands are getting to participate fully in or enjoy the fruits of our most noble ideals. The blindness and the inequities created by self-interest work against some people and their places. When dreams fuelled by promises remain unrealized hope decays and the accompanying despair can be a crushing burden. It will be replaced by raw self-interest so people are enslaved to false loyalties and governed by fear. That’s what racism and classism does. Every meme and cheap news story becomes a physiological reinforcement for finding identity in what we are against or what we fear rather than in the higher ideals of what we could be for.

I hope for my friends and family in the States that we would insist on creating favourable conditions in which the most noble ideals are extended and even re-formed in all neighbourhoods across America (and Canada) socially and economically. That’s what hope inside our liberty seems to demand. 

So thankfully our calendar arrives again with me still living on the 4th of July. To celebrate I had grits for breakfast! Butter, salt, and pepper. Want some? I had coffee with almond milk, no sugar, in an “Ole Miss Civil Engineering” mug given to me by a dear person who prays for me. But does any of that make me an American? Today I’ve been asking myself, “how do I know I’m an American?” What do I carry in my body, beside grits, that tells me I’m an American? 

Here’s what I’ve discovered: I carry in my body more than memories, I carry hope.



Pictures:
1. Me and my sister enjoying “the camp.”
2. The Seal of Rhode Island created by Roger Williams.

Relationships, Society

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Journey Through John, John 1.23-28, The Voice of One Calling In The Wilderness

March 27, 2020 0 Comments

Dear Friends,

I think most of us have an angry vision of John the Baptist. He might have been angry at times. But I don’t believe that emotion is the main posture of his ministry.

The main postures of John’s ministry are humility and hope.

John 1:23-28

23John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’ ”

24Now the Pharisees who had been sent 25questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

26“I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. 27He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

28This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

We hear John’s humility as he insists on pointing to Jesus as the lead character. “Among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

We hear John’s hope in his prophetic identification. “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”

When John the Baptist quotes Isaiah 40 he taps into one of the most hopeful texts in the Bible. 

Isaiah is realistic about the frailty of humanity, “All people are like grass and their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” (Isaiah 40:8)

However, this word of reality is not given with anger. The whole prophetic passage begins like this:

“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…” (verse 1)

There is “good news” (verse 9) for Jerusalem. The voice calling in the wilderness declares that “the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all the people will see it together.” (verse 5) The emissaries of God are to declare “Here is your God!” “The Sovereign LORD comes with power and he rules with a mighty arm.” (verses 9-10)

But we might ask, “how shall the Sovereign LORD rule?”

Wow look at this. Isaiah says,

“He tends his flock like a shepherd:
He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young.” (verse 11)

That’s a word of hope!

John the Baptist’s ministry is one of humility and hope. He wants people to get ready for the coming of the LORD, for the LORD is coming in His sovereignty as their shepherd.


We can also see John’s humility and hope in his choice of where to post up for ministry. He is not in any religious centre. Instead, he has located himself on the “wilderness” side of the Jordan river. He is in “Bethany East of the Jordan.” Folks are coming to him and are having to cross the Jordan river to get to him. They are figuratively retracing the path of Israel in reverse for a baptism of repentance.

I believe these early adopters where invited by God into a pilgrim’s journey in order to prepare for God’s coming. They were invited into the wilderness so they might see the true wilderness conditions of their souls. With John they were invited by God into postures of humility and hope so that they might know Him.

Isn’t that how all of us come to Jesus?


Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father,

We come to you from the wilderness of our souls; its barrenness, vulnerability, constant striving for security and identity, and its false affections. With humility and hope we lay them down as we come to you. We long for your comfort, your good news, and your Presence with us. As we come to Jesus the Shepherd of our souls, fill us with your Spirit that we may rejoice in you and your mighty power for redeemed relationships.

In Jesus Name we pray,
Amen.

Our next reading will be John 1:29-34.

Journey Through John's Gospel

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The Danger of Despair or What We May Feel After We Give

June 22, 2018 0 Comments

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Galatians 5:22-25 (NIV)

 

Have you ever felt as if your giving was accomplishing nothing, except making less of you? Here’s a contemplation for you from Miroslav Volf and The Porter’s Gate Worship Project.


Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, 118-119.

We are good trees who bear good fruit, wrote the apostle Paul, because “we live by the Spirit”, whose fruit our gift giving is.

 

The Spirit counters our indolence as givers by molding our character to conform to Christ’s and employing our talents for others’ benefit. The Spirit also gives us hope. Often we experience a sense of futility in giving. We give, and recipients seem none the better off for it. Unscrupulous people insert themselves between our gifts and the recipient’s benefits, and gifts seem to disappear together with their intended benefits. Or recipients seem to receive gifts like a black hole sucks in light. Giving doesn’t make sense, not so much because we lose by giving but because the world doesn’t gain much. We give, but it seems to us that we aren’t mending the world.

 

What is the relationship between our gifts and others’ benefits? We tend to think of it in terms of cause and effect. The gift is the cause: the benefit is the effect. As causes produce effects, giving should produce benefits. Often that’s not what happens, so we despair of giving.

 

But in fact, our gifts and others’ benefits are not related as causes and effects. They are related as the cross and the resurrection. Christ gave his life on the cross — and it seems as though he died in vain. His disciples quickly deserted him, his cause was as dead as he was, and even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But then he was resurrected from the dead by the power of the Spirit. He was seated at the right hand of God and raised in the community of believers, his social body alive and growing on earth. Did Christ’s “gift of death” cause his own resurrection and its benefits for the world? It didn’t. The Spirit did. So it is with every true gift of our own, however small or large.

 

Like Christ’s healings or feeding of multitudes, often our gifts offer immediate help. We give, and the hungry are fed, the sorrowful comforted, and loved ones delighted. We are like a tree, laden with fruit that only waits to be picked. At other times, we give, and the gift seems less like a ripe fruit than like a seed planted in the ground. For a while, nothing happens. Dark earth covered with cold winter holds the seed captive. Then spring comes, and we see new life sprouting, maybe even growing beyond our wildest imagination.

 

Sometimes it seems as if a fate worse than lying in the dark earth befalls our gifts. It is almost as if some evil bird takes away the seed we planted before it can sprout and bear fruit. We labor in vain. We give — and it seems that no one benefits. Yet we can still hope. The Spirit who makes a tree heavy with fruit and who gives life to the seed that has died will ultimately claim every good gift that the evil one has snatched away. Just as the Spirit resurrected the crucified one and made his sacrifice bear abundant fruit, so the Spirit will raise us in the spring of everlasting life to see the harvest of our own giving. Our giving is borne by the wings of the Spirits’ hope.

7Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 9Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Galatians 6:7-10 (NIV)

 

Listen & Watch: We Labour Unto Glory, Porter’s Gate Worship Project

 

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuPZCXShg4

 

Change, Discipleship, Giving, Leadership, Quotes, Work

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