Hope: The light of the promised future that is to come

Here's the reflection that I shared during Reflective Evening Prayer this evening at St Mary's Runwell. 
The readings were Lamentations 3:19-33 and 'Hope' is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson.

Disasters are frequent occurrences, “some natural, many more due to man’s ham-fisted neglect of the planet or our inability to get by without recourse to violence.” “The result is always the need for a new start, and how we respond and rebuild colours an uncertain future more than ever. Yet, for all the carnage and chaos that catastrophes bring, an odd truth is apparent: disasters do give us the chance to shape things differently.”

As a result, as Terry Eagleton writes in Hope without Optimism, “the most authentic hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution.” It is whatever survives a general ruin. This is where we find the writer of Lamentations; bowed down with the reality of exile, yet trusting that it is in the nature of God to bring a new beginning from this disastrous affliction which is “wormwood and gall” to him. Similarly, Emily Dickinson claims that, hope is heard most sweetly in the Gale, “the chillest land” and “on the strangest Sea”.

Hope, Eagleton writes, “is to be found in the unfinished nature of the actual, discernible as a hollow at its heart.” “Potentiality is what articulates the present with the future, and thus lays down the material infrastructure of hope.” Hope is about a vision for a future that is different from the present; one which therefore requires imagination and vision. For Christians that vision is of the kingdom of God; which has begun to be realised but is still to come in its full reality.

As a result, in Theology of Hope Jürgen Moltmann argues that “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope. This hope keeps man unreconciled, until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God.

The Church, then, is intended to be “the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come.” Our hope should “provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love.” It should constantly provoke and produce thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to humanity and the world, “in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility.” “Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.” The Christian hope should always have “a revolutionary effect in this sense on the intellectual history of the society affected by it.”

“Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.”

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Van Morrison - These Are The Days.