LENT 2008
From the Editor...
Hope, the Thing with Feathers
What is hope? Recently I was asked to address young Anglican
leaders under 30 on the subject of “portraits of hope” and it set me to
thinking on that question. It is harder to answer than it may at
first seem.
The American demotion of hope has turned it into a feeling that somehow
it will all work out for the best, or even simply a desire, as in “I
hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow.”
Somehow there is more to it than that. We all know Emily Dickinson is onto something when she writes:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all…
She is right. Hope is something far more vigorous than getting up
in the morning and telling oneself “every day in every way I am getting
better and better” (Emile Coue).
In the New Testament, the writers understood Christian hope to be: confidence grounded in the character of God.
In Romans 5 Paul writes: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him
we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice
in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we
rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope
does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”
Here we have a breathtakingly God-based and God-shaped hope. We
worship a God who is able to do “far more abundantly than all that we
ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20). It is because of who he is that
we can have confidence. May God grant us all that kind of real
hope, which does not and will not disappoint us either here or in the
life to come.
-- The
Rev. Canon Dr.
Kendall S. Harmon
Contact Dr
Harmon by
e-mail at ksharmon@mindspring.com
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