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Like many others, when I received my second vaccine shot to protect against COVID-19, I experienced unexpected, intense, weepy relief.
With the odds reduced of becoming ill from the virus, and drastically lessened from dying from it, I felt released: released to dream again, to imagine again — in short, to hope again.
What do you hope for?
Whatever your heart longs for, and however in keeping it is with God’s hopes for us, we also know these hopes may never come to pass.
The truth and risk that our hopes may not materialize can lead us to doubt our future, ourselves, and even God.
The prophet Ezekiel, according to Walter Brueggemann, suggests we reconsider where to look for the realization of our hopes.
Given the many comparisons that can be made between our world and the post-exilic shattering of systems and worldview in Ezekiel’s time, it’s fitting that we reconsider the criteria for realized hope.
Ezekiel would say that the criteria is not when our predetermined and preferred events come to pass—but solely on the unshakable nature of God’s holiness.
It depends on whether God is to be trusted or whether only a particular social outcome is to be trusted. To rely on a certain social outcome, however is not trust but only ideology. If one’s hope is reduced to only a certain outcome, God is not trusted, God is used but not trusted.*
It is because God is uncontained that God is trust- and hope-worthy.
When we look to God as the source of our hope rather than looking to human-made outcomes, our trust is placed in God instead of people’s choices and competing interests (that might win out against our own).
We are placing our hope in the one and only thing that will always find each one of us binge-worthy of divine love.
Whether you have ninety minutes, three hours, or six, this free, at-home Easter retreat is intended to help you reflect on God’s holiness as the source of our hope—because nothing else is as worthy of it.
I pray your Eastertide is filled with hope and holiness.
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*Brueggemann, Walter. Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).