By Rev. Paul Graves
“Hope” is one of my favorite words. I want (hope) something to happen or be true. I trust (hope) someone is doing well.
Many people speak of hope in those ways. We use the word correctly, but incompletely.
Percy “Happy” Watkins was remembered at a Nov. 15 memorial service for many acts of social justice. But his obvious claim to fame was his regular, impassioned presentations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Since 1983, Happy kept King’s prophetic hope alive.
King lived in the tradition of the biblical prophets in many ways. He knew that hope is so much more than short-term, well-intended wishes. It was also long-term, hard and often dangerous work.
The prophets reminded the Hebrews their faithful God was tired of waiting for the people to shape up. That message understandably angered the people.
King’s legacy embodied that danger. These prophets, and Jesus, understood prophetic hope was not pie-in-the-sky wishing. It requires the hard work of waiting and working for a change in the people. Never an easy task.
Our current American culture is a case in point.
I’ve used this description of “hope” before: “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then waiting for the evidence to change.” Jim Wallis of Sojourners learned that from Bishop Desmond Tutu.
Waiting is essential to long-term hope. But is there something else to do while you’re waiting? Yes! So I adapted that description to affirm that, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then working to help the evidence change.”
Waiting and working can be great partners in the intricate dance called hope. That’s what biblical prophets did. So can we.
So how did the prophets work to speak out for God in those ancient years? I re-read my 1978 copy of “The Prophetic Imagination.” Walter Brueggemann’s classic commentary about the prophets speaks so well of their tasks. Bruggemann once summarized it like this: “Like the ancient prophets, we are dispatched back to the good work entrusted to us. It is the work of peace-making. It is the work of truth-telling. It is the work of justice-doing. It is good work, but it requires our resolve to stay (the course), even in the face of the forces to the contrary that are sure to prevail for a season.”
So the hard work of hope needs more than passive waiting, especially in the political and religious seasons we endure today.
Prophetic hope must call out the overwhelming examples of toxic denial, cruel misinformation and irresponsible policies at many levels. But that alone only exaggerates a climate of fear and retribution. Long-term hope offers more than that. Prophetic hope begins with anger, but it goes beyond anger, too.
Richard Rohr speaks of this in his article “The Path of the Prophet” in the 2024 spiritual journal Oneing. By itself, anger seduces us into staying separate from the persons or events we’re furious about. Rohr insists prophetic hope will move us to compassionate sadness, so that love and justice can direct our anger. Then we’re no longer controlled by it.
Prophetic hope reminds us we are in the same human space as sufferers of injustice. We’re also immersed in self-righteousness and the woundedness we call sin. That demands hard work few of us are willing to endure.
Some of the biblical prophets were transformed by that kind of love. Some were not. Rohr’s experience affirms that “We can only have solidarity with suffering and tragedy, and if we do not transform our anger, it will destroy us.”
I’m working on that, folks. Maybe you are too.
The Rev. Paul Graves is a retired elder member of the Pacific Northwest Conference of The United Methodist Church.
