The Day that Makes All Other Days Matter

Today is the day that makes all other days matter. It is Easter. Today we celebrate the fact that life conquers death, that hope conquers despair, and that our lives are now hidden with Christ in God. In honor of this day, I'm posting a speech that I wrote on the subject of hope 11 months ago on April 23, 2007 shortly after the shooting at Virginia Tech.

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In light of last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech, some might find it almost sacrilegious to speak about hope. And yet it is in times like these that the Christian message of hope which is rooted in the resurrection is perhaps more pertinent than ever. You and I all watched the television coverage last week of the deadliest school shooting in our nation’s history. We saw the crying students, heard experts psychoanalyze the shooter, cringed as pundits used the disaster to refuel the debate over gun control, and read reports of strained relations between our country and South Korea of all things. We saw the best and worst of our own faith – some Christians rallying to the side of the hurting and offering a word of comfort, others organizing an anti-gay parade to be held near the funerals of the victims (yes, it’s true). But in the wake of the tragedy, it seemed that the best the world had to offer were sentimental sound bytes about “how he was a great guy” and the need of the “human spirit to rise above this.” I don’t know about you, but if my brother had been shot last week, I would have wanted more than hollow platitudes about how “everything is going to be alright.”

Last week a vigil was held in the honor of the victims at Virginia Tech. Students came together for a night of remembrance and solidarity, hoping to bring comfort to one another. Listen to this account of the event as reported by the school newspaper of the nearby University of Virginia:

“Thousands dressed in maroon and burnt orange, not to support a team but to support one another. They gathered in Cassell Coliseum and Lane Stadium to mourn and to begin the process of healing. It was fitting that at the conclusion of the ceremony, the crowd chanted "Let's Go... Hokies," as they do when athletic teams take the field. That athletic cheer was a symbol not only of an intention to eventually move on, but an effort to band together and carry one another through such a heartbreaking reality.”

Let’s go... Hokies?!? This is the comfort that the world has to offer to families who have just lost a loved one? We gather together in order to remember the deceased and the best we can come up with is... “Let’s Go Hokies”?!? Now I’m a college sports fan. My parents live in Champaign, IL the seat of the University of Illinois. I like sports and school spirit as much as the next guy. I confess that I even spent a little too much money to buy a nice hooded U of I sweatshirt for myself last fall. But I’ll be honest with you. If the best word of comfort you could give me when I experience tragedy in my life is a pathetic school slogan, I would give up hope. I would find myself in utter despair. Wouldn’t you?

I believe there are two wrong ways that Christians might respond in the midst of loss and pain. The first is, as we have all talked about over the last few weeks, to give in to despair – to throw up our hands and just give up. The second, sometimes even more common and perhaps even more dangerous reaction, is what I’d like to call “bland moral optimism.” We’ve all run across this before. They are the people who pat us on the shoulder and tell us “It’s not all that bad.” “Chin up.” “Things will look better in the morning.” And the worst is when they couch it in biblical language – “Where is your joy in the Lord?” My wife told me about a little children’s song she was taught in her rural UM church (which I will not sing for you):
I’m inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time (2x)
Since Jesus Christ came in, and cleansed my heart from sin.
I’m inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time.
Thank God the writers of the Bible were not so flippant about the trials we face in this world. No, there must be an extreme between these two reactions of despair and bland moral optimism. And there is. It is what our faith calls “hope.”

Hope is not optimism. Hope looks tragedy straight in the eye and makes no attempt to sugar-coat it. Hope reminds us that there is a time in life to laugh and a time to weep. Optimism ignores the reality of life and it foolishly claims that “everything is getting better” even when all the evidence tell us that actually things are not getting better. In the nineteenth century, philosophers like Hegel taught us that everything is going to get better. Through a dialectical process, human progress and technology will one day evolve human society into a glorious utopia. Human nature isn’t bad, it told us, it’s good! We’re all deep down inside of us really good people! And this general optimism about the future pervaded western thought through the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century. And then, in 1914, all our bland moral optimism came crashing down with WWI when we learned that we can use our technology to create machine guns and chemical weapons in order to kill each other on a scale never before possible. This is where Hegel’s optimism led us and, guess what, it failed.

No, hope is not optimism. Hope runs much deeper. So what’s the big difference? How do we live as hopeful people and not as petty optimists? Listen to the words of the theologian John Macquarrie: “Hope is humble, trustful, vulnerable. Optimism is arrogant, brash, complacent. Hope has known the pang of suffering and the chill of despair. Only one who has cried de profundis can really appreciate the meaning of hope. Optimism has not faced the enormity of evil... What drives some to atheism is not a genuinely biblical hope but an insensitive optimism masquerading as such hope.”

We Christians are a people of hope because we are absolutely convinced that God is in control of history and that he is working to defeat evil. More than that, we hold that God will defeat evil – yes, even death and the grave itself. The great liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez reminds us, “Hope is based on the conviction that God is at work in our lives and in the world.” We hold on to hope, as St. Paul says, because “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” belongs to us (Eph 1:18), because we will once day inherit glory (Col 1:27) and eternal life (Titus 1:2), because, we know with John the Revelator, that soon we’re going to see Jesus riding on a white horse. We mourn and long and yearn alongside of all of creation for that day, but in the meantime “we do not mourn like those who have no hope.”

As followers of the resurrected one, we have more to say that “Let’s Go Hokies.” No, we say: “Jesus Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”