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The Prophetic Imagination - Part 4
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We are inundated by messages that say that “hopeful” or promising language is too much, too idealistic for this world.
The prevailing wisdom tells us repeatedly, this world is a violent world that needs violent solutions. We are confronted by the “facts” and we clam up.
“Hope... is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts... hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.” - Walter Brueggemann
Prophetic Hope is not optimism.
Optimism is somehow managing the reality and massaging the facts and attempting to create reasons for positivity. It’s fatuous.
HOPE however isn’t afraid to look into the darkness. Christian hope, rooted in ancient traditions reaching back to the Hebrew Bible, connects us into a perspective, a posture which is one of hope, in the middle of darkness.
Texts such as Isaiah 25:6-9 and the stories about banquets and weddings told by Jesus in Matthew 25:1-13 are energizing us to defy the darkness. In Jesus’ story he insists hope is an active work to be done through the night, keeping our lamps fueled even if the wait seems interminably long.
Jesus will come, at the midnight hour, and we will see a new world comprised of all the tens of thousands of gestures of justice, sacrifice, grace and love, with all the compassionate and loyal movements rolled up into a new world where there is only beauty.
No more tears, only beauty, only love and no more death… all that has been beautiful, all that has contained love (however imperfectly we enacted it) will be preserved and brought forward to this new world. The great mending. The great reversal.
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