Am I hopeful?

The question everyone is asking lately ...

I just wrote a long post about how despair is my favorite sin, so maybe you’re surprised to see me write this week about hope.

The truth is, though, in recent weeks, I find myself being asked about hope and talking about hope more than anything else. A retired college professor who attended my recent book talk in Fayetteville, Ark., wrote in response that I seemed to have moved from hopeful to hopeless and (maybe?) back again in the past three years, but that he couldn’t go there with me, as much as he might want to.

When I first started talking about my research for the original edition of Red State Christians, pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd’s murder, pre-Jan. 6; I centered my book talks on four words. I started with surprise, moved into the central warning of Christian Nationalism, and then talked about opportunity and, finally, hope.

Hope was always a fitting place to end, and I often got there by telling a story from my visit to Appalachia, at a church service where the elderly (retired) pastor, filling in at a last minute’s notice, forgot he’d already said the communion liturgy and un-ironically repeated it a second time, speaking on behalf of a few half-dead parishioners, including me. It could have been a postcard from the end of American Christianity, except that my doom-and-gloom narrative was interrupted by the presence of a 6-year-old girl seated a few pews in front of me, wearing a fantastical pink tulle skirt and fuzzy pink slippers.

Image from “Hope is a thing with feathers” a visual representation by Julian Peters for PLOUGH magazine

It was as though she’d been transported there by a crafty and whimsical Holy Spirit, and I almost winced as I looked into her dancing, laughing eyes, staring back at me in my pew, while congregants shuffled forward, finally, for Holy Communion, as the pastor shakily wrapped up the Words of Institution and together we muttered the Lord’s Prayer.

What did this little girl’s presence there even mean? Or my presence there, for that matter? Were we merely worthless vestiges of a bygone religious dream, clinging to the last few ice floes on a melting Arctic Sea?

Why should we even bother?

I yawned, looked down at my sandaled feet and the church yard outside bedecked with American flags and names of the town’s military dead.

Then, together, we walked forward up the center aisle to the altar. The sermon hadn’t meant much to me. It felt vacant, irrelevant, out-of-touch, as had most of the entire service.

The closer I got to the altar, the smaller my irreverent ego became. The once-diminished clergyman grew larger as he held Jesus’ crumbling body in his shaking hand, offering it to me, free-of-charge.

Body of Christ, given for you.

I chewed silently, chastened. Jesus was here, too.

I received gratefully the tiny gray ceramic cup, filled with sweet red wine.

Blood of Christ, shed for you.

I swallowed. I swallowed again, hard, this second time swallowing something more than this inadequate meal of Godly flesh.

I swallowed my sense that I understood what hope meant at all. Because now everything was all screwed up, and here I was feeling hopeful in this hopeless Appalachian town, beaten down by opioids and big industry and outsourcing and predatory politicians and Trumpism. I was meeting Jesus in what many had called a godforsaken place. I was tasting Jesus in my unworthy flesh, swallowing my sin and its undeserved redemption.

Thinking about that moment, recounting it later, I feel it again and sometimes I find it frustrating, that unmistakable feeling of real hope that doesn’t make any worldly sense. The best I can do is explain that I felt hopeful there because I realized Jesus had chosen to be right there, yes, in a church, in America, for people who didn’t deserve him, like me.

That gave me hope.

On good days, it still does.

***

Autumn is always beautiful and exhausting. School starts, but then kids get sick or families get COVID and there are never enough hours to get all the work done. Hot days are too hot and filled with bees; cold days take away your breath and sting your eyes.

American mid-term elections are coming up. The rising tide of Christian Nationalism might not be growing, but it keeps getting more and more powerful and influential, eclipsing the Savior from which it claims to draw its inspiration.

Like all Americans, especially those of us in the middle-class, working class, and those living in poverty, our household is experiencing rising bills and higher prices, coupled with stagnant wages and assets. We sigh each month again after paying the mortgage and credit card bills, living to fight another day.

I overhear moms talking behind me at the pumpkin patch about the Rapture, how everything in America is so bad that it must almost be the end of the world. They reference the Left Behind book series and which ones are their favorites. I figure they must be Christians, and I also figure that we probably disagree on almost everything political, religious, and social. So I bend down my head and stare at the muddy ground, wanting to avoid conversation, feeling a vague sense of foreboding.

Still, in other moments, I hear myself talking about hope. I feel my heart swell as worship begins on sunny mountain morning in Northwest Arkansas, and a mother and son sing praise music while he plays the drums. I hear myself talking about little local churches and why they all - why you all - need an injection of pride and self-confidence. I read a message from a pediatric ER doctor in Michigan who says he’s not really a Christian anymore, but he tells me about his childhood in a welcoming Midwestern church, and he says his heart is warmed as he reads about my book and resistance to Christian Nationalism, and I think about John Wesley.

I see and hear people who are choosing to stand up and tell about a benevolent, forgiving, and truth-telling God who leads us unceasingly toward justice, slowly, patiently, in contradiction to a world that marches heedlessly into war.

I see the pretzels Christian Nationalist leaders twist themselves into to justify their hatred, their intolerance, their egotism; and I see their masks slip.

I tell a writer who I admire that this movement of Christian Nationalism, which has terrorized us both, cannot survive: that these movements built on hatred will always cannibalize themselves, and we nod together knowing it, hoping it, believing it, resting in it - before rising anew exhausted and beaten down to tell the truth another day.

I leave my congregation in Minnesota on Sunday to do this work in Arkansas, and I watch them worship, beautifully and powerfully online, without me; led by guitars and a formidable retired pastor who speaks the truth plainly and inarguably, with the confidence of one who knows God and knows the failure and the promise of the Church.

So, dangit. I’m hopeful. As much as I want to be hard-bitten and cynical and angry and frustrated and funny. I just can’t shake it …

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 that has been given to us.

I keep harping on and on about how Christian Nationalism is a theology of glory and instead Jesus’ life, death and resurrection insists upon a theology of the cross, which reminds us of Christian persecution and Jesus’ crucifixion, and that when we are most lonely, devastated, and despairing - in those very moments God is doing God’s most powerful work in us and through us, in spite of it all.

My hope is built on nothing less.

But don’t take my word only for it, because Emily Dickinson might say it best:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

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