The nation swore President Joe Biden and Madam Vice-President Kamala Harris into office on Wednesday. It is a change in leadership that many people welcomed gladly and others less so. Personally, I felt that President Biden’s inaugural address was incredibly conciliatory and Father Leo Donovan’s invocation, Amanda Gorman’s poetry, and Rev. Dr. Silvester Beaman’s benediction were all very well done, as was all the music. It seemed to be a hopeful, hope-filled event, but there was plenty of recognition of the tragic losses that COVID-19 has wrought, as well as the significant divides that our nation’s people are experiencing. It puts me in mind of a powerful book that my mentor Douglas Ottati wrote called Hopeful Realism. (If that title sounds familiar, I spoke about it in my “St. Mark Minuscule Morning Moment” on Wednesday. It’s in my head, y’all.)
Dr. Ottati describes hopeful realism in the Christian tradition as a way of life that is different from the kind of managerial process that we often take for community leadership these days. The Reign of God, specifically, is intended to be a banquet, a party, and celebratory event into which the least likely candidates are invited and welcomed. Undergirding this celebration is hope – hope in God and, therefore, hope in the prospects of life. But, it’s not a simplistic hope. It is hope in tandem with realism.
So, within that framework let me muse a bit about hopeful realism.
Some of the challenges we face as a human community – or any subsection thereof, such as a nation, a church, or a family – are written into the human condition. Right now, apart from any ideology or belief system, there are 7,800,000,000 people in this world. That is 7.8 billion people to feed; 7.8 billion people to house, 7.8 billion people who need healthcare, 7.8 billion people whose lives matter, 7.8 billion people who are true gems in God’s eyes. And, it is 7.8 billion people, among whom there are fundamental differences in beliefs, aspirations, experiences, and dispositions. The challenge of having a world where everyone receives the kind of dignity and equality that is ideal is enormous. And that challenge continues to be enormous even if we break it down from 7.8 billion people to a nation of 328 million people, just as it is for a family of four. These challenges are simply germane to being part of the human community. I’ve often thought that our liturgies need to supplement our familiar “Prayer of Confession” with a “Prayer of Condition.” Perhaps that is the role that prayers of lament and even those hideous prayers of imprecation in the Psalms intend to play. Being human-in-community is hard and often heart-breaking.
And some of the challenges that we face as a human community are because of human sin. The word “sin” is a musty old thing that has been used so improperly to bludgeon people and perspectives over the years. I hesitate to use it because it has been so misused; or else it has been watered down to the extent that it hardly names anything of substance any more. I think our Reformed tradition invites us to think of the word “sin” as “anything that is destructive of life and community.” Honestly, the challenges of the human condition are hard enough, but when we add hate, racism, selfishness, greed, bullying, and the like into the mix, it ensures that some people will never experience the dignity of housing, nutrition, healthcare, acceptance, justice, and peace that they ought to experience. I think one reason the biblical writers gave. Us stories of Cain killing Abel and other moments of egregious violence is because injustice is so wrong, yet so predictable. Reinhold Niebuhr once called sin, “inevitable, but not necessary.” What a hauntingly precise depiction.
Hopeful realism takes the human condition and human sin into account as true words, but not the last words. Only hope has the privilege of the last word. As such, it is the power that saves us from despair, and enables us to be honest in confessing sin, pursuing justice, and telling the truth.
That’s enough for now. Thanks for listening.
Mark of St. Mark
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