Hope in the System

Earlier this month we lost one of the most influential and engaging biblical scholars of the past century. Dr. Walter Brueggemann died peacefully at the age of 92 on June 5, 2025. His penetrating work on the Old Testament has been a gift to the church, helping a generation of pastors and church leaders see the contested nature of the text as an expression of Israel’s ongoing struggle to live as a people delivered out of and set apart from the oppressive control of imperial rule. Shaped by the imagination of the biblical prophets, Brueggemann’s writing often carried an edge that afflicted the comfortable while comforting the afflicted. Here is a quote representative of the former, capturing the nature of hope and why it is that hopelessness has become such an enduring problem in the affluent West:

“Because hope has such a revolutionary function, it is more likely that failure to hope—hopelessness—happens among the affluent, the prosperous, the successful, the employable, the competent, for whom the present system works so well. We are the ones who are likely to be seduced into taking the present political, economic, intellectual system too seriously and equating it with reality. Indeed, it is prudent to take it that way, because that is where the jobs and benefits are. The more one benefits from the rewards of the system, the more one is enraptured with the system, until it feels like the only game in town and the whole game. Our ‘well-offness” leads us finally to absolutize, so that we may say that ‘the system is the solution.’ The system wants us to believe that, for such belief silences criticism. It makes us consenting, docile, obedient adults. The system wants to contain all our hopes and fears, wants us to settle for the available system of rewards.”

The Judgment of Hope

When we think of hope we may not often connect it with judgment. But hope, as described in Scripture, is all about judgment. Judgment is the hope for what the oppressed and the marginalized long for — for God’s righteous judgment to fall on those who have rigged the system for their own personal gain. And for those of us who are on the profitable end of things, we are tempted to equate our hope with the rewards set by the system: we hope to be prosperous, successful, employable, competent. Much of this can be summed up with the word affluent. Our hope, within the system, becomes the wish to be affluent.

And so, before we can speak of hope, there may be the need for some of us to enter into despair — the despair that comes from hearing God’s word of judgment. God’s judgment over the things we hope for. Not all hopes are created equal and to hear rightly the hope that Scripture points us to, may very well require a radical recalibration of our hopes. This begins with a willingness to question what we currently long for and aspire to. Are our hopes simply the product of what the available system of rewards has trained us to desire?

All this to say, the hope God intends for us may very well rub against our own personal goals and wishes. In this way, hope moves us out of conformity to the pattern of this age and invites us to the renewing of our minds to discern what is the will of God — the will of God, which is nothing less than God’s hope for a creation healed of the greed that makes it so only a few benefit at the expense of the many.

“It’s the hope that kills you.”
Ted Lasso (out of context)

I am starting this blog post with a quote from the show ‘Ted Lasso.’ In the episode titled “The Hope That Kills You,” our titular character, Ted, is presented in contrast to a deeply cynical mindset. This attitude suggests: Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t expect too much, or you’ll get hurt. It implies that anticipating good things only magnifies our suffering when they don’t come to fruition. This sentiment is common among football fans—and I imagine sports fans in general. Ted’s message challenges this way of thinking, which is rooted in fear and apathy, as it tries to protect us from disappointment. He counters this perspective by embracing hope, believing it is essential for confronting uncertainty.

Ted’s argument is certainly important, hope is often linked to greater resilience, motivation, and overall well-being, encompassing physical, mental, and emotional aspects. However, Christian hope does kill you, not by crushing our spirit through disappointment, but by killing off our illusions of progress, control, and solutions. But unlike Christian hope, which embraces fragility and faithful presence without guaranteeing outcomes, American political hope tends to demand control and certainty, craving to secure the future on our terms.

Hope lies in the difficult, daily work of being human. It is not grounded in the binary optimism of American politics, but in the slow moral formation demanded by the Christian narrative. A costly, embodied witness to a different way of life that acknowledges the painful truth precisely because genuine hope exposes us to a particular fragility and faithfulness in our interactions with others and the world around us. It is about risking love, patience, and presence even in times of pain and messiness. This hope, whether political or otherwise, is not something we can control; instead, it is for us to receive.

Politics of Hope

The Civil Rights Movement, deeply rooted in the witness of the Black church, achieved vital legal advances—most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet despite this progress, systemic racial inequalities remain entrenched in American society. Still, many mistakenly believe the struggle for justice and equality ended with those landmark victories. This illusion is particularly dangerous for the Church, because it tempts us to forget a model grounded not in the pursuit of power, but in a hope rooted in God’s justice breaking into the world. That legacy stands in stark contrast to the growing influence of Christian nationalism in our time.

Christian nationalism rests on the problematic assumption that Church and political power should be intertwined—whether in conservative or progressive forms. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement, which bore witness to the kingdom, Christian nationalism treats the kingdom as something to be secured through control of political systems. Drawing from Ken’s April sermon on “what we believe the goal of Christianity is,” and his Hope post on “Natural” Hope, we see how many Christians fall into the temptation of viewing political participation as a guaranteed way to realize the kingdom of God.

This may be the central temptation of Christian nationalism in all its forms: the belief that through political power and influence, the Church can establish God’s reign on earth. But this conflation mistakes the tools of empire for the mission of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is not a political project or human achievement, but a spiritual reality that calls the Church to faithful presence, humility, and patient hope beyond any earthly institution or agenda.

As theologian Dr. Jonathan Tran notes, the danger of Christian nationalism lies not only in its politics, but in the spiritual damage it inflicts on the Church’s witness:

“The greatest damage of Christian nationalism and the temptations on the left and the right of Christian nationalism is the damage it does to the church. Because what Christian nationalism tempts us to believe, what it tempts us to do, is to evacuate the Gospel of God and to replace it with an impoverished political imagination. […] To say that, in so far, as Christian nationalism is now what American Christianity is, this vaunted dream on the left and the right, both its crude and sophisticated versions of the Christian nation, the Christianized nation of a Christian America, that in so far as that is what Christian American Christianity comes to, then my hope that what is happening now will be God killing American Christianity and making room for the church.”

My left-leaning political convictions are closely tied to my pursuit of a degree in Public Health, grounded in the belief that government has a moral responsibility to protect the well-being of its people. Like many others, I lived through the COVID-19 pandemic witnessing overwhelming pain, loss, and systemic strain. In that season, I placed hope in the government’s ability to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies—especially around vaccine development and distribution. Yet, I came face to face with a painful reality: the same systems I hoped could save lives often prioritize profit, making access to life-saving medication feel like a privilege rather than a basic human right.

The church is not to fix the world but to live as a witness that God’s kingdom has come—and is still coming. This means caring for the poor, advocating for women, protecting the vulnerable working class, and seeking peace—both within society and in political spaces—while always recognizing these efforts as expressions of our witness, not as ends achieved through political power. Christian nationalism misuses these good desires by tying them exclusively to political power as the path to the kingdom. The church’s task is not to conquer the world’s brokenness through government but to embody a different politics that critiques, challenges, and offers an alternative to the powers that be.

The Church’s Hope

The Incarnation—God becoming human in Jesus Christ—is central to understanding hope. It represents God’s willingness to be present with us in our humanity, which is the deepest expression of hope. This event reveals God’s true nature by entering into our lives through nearness, vulnerability, and love. The Church serves as a witness to the incarnate God, embodying His love by being present, serving, and living in solidarity with others.

Hope is made possible not by removing suffering, but by being faithfully present in the midst of it. Hope recognizes the story of God by embodying His presence rather than focusing on future outcomes. In our culture, there is often a desire to escape, fix, or rationalize suffering. However, Christian hope stands in contrast to this by choosing to remain with one another in times of pain, vulnerability, suffering, or disability. In other words, being present in suffering creates the space for hope to flourish. Hope is the assurance that we are not alone, even in suffering, and that God is with us. Hope is then received through the presence of God made visible in the Church’s faithful love towards our neighbors. 

Central to this embodied hope is empathy—the call to enter into another’s reality not just emotionally, but physically and relationally. Empathy is often thought of as a feeling, but the Incarnation shows us that empathy is embodied. Jesus does not just feel what we feel from a safe distance; He lives it. Walks it. Suffers it. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 NRSVUE). We don’t serve others from a place of detachment or superiority, but in imitation of the God who stooped low to serve and suffer alongside.

As we saw in our last post, hope is not to be mistaken with optimism. If this is the case, then neither is pessimism to be taken as the opposite of hope.

Both optimism and pessimism depend upon possibilities latent within us to affect the future. The optimist places more stock in human potential while the pessimist not so much.

But hope operates on a different register. It does not traffic in human possibilities, but rather in the God who is “able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). What this does is reconfigure our usual way of understanding how the present relates to the future.

We often envision the future as the end result of a long chain of cause and effect events. But the logic of hope does not work from past and present conditions to forecast the future. It does not build a prospectus of what will be based on what can be reasonably deduced from what is. Hope works in precisely the opposite direction. It imagines the present in light of the future. Hope trusts in a future that is received as a gift not of our own making and lives according to the expectation that that future has the power to erupt in and disrupt the present.

The Substance of Hope

Hope does not extrapolate from our current circumstances to discern a plausible future, but rather, extrapolates from what faith holds to be true to envision a future that transcends what we assume possible.

This, I think, is what is meant by the curious phrase found in the King James translation of Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is the substance. It holds the pieces that point us to the future. Through faith, we confess that God raised Jesus from the dead and before that, delivered Israel out of Egypt. These are not the result of human achievement. These are the works of a God who has possibilities beyond what we can empirically expect. As such, these are the “stuff”, the substance, of hope. They are glimpses of what God has in store for us that give us “reason” to hope. And so what we believe to be true through faith is, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, the evidence of a future we cannot yet see.

If we comeback to hope and its opposite, we could say that the proper antagonist of hope is not pessimism but despair. Despair is what happens when optimism must finally admit defeat and pessimism is followed to its utter and desperate conclusion. Despair is what results when we realize that if the only evidence we have of the future is the fruit of our past then we are, as they say, up Shit Creek without a paddle.

We despair, in part, because we have lost the ability to carry within us the very stuff that makes hope possible.

Scripture as a Work of Hope

More and more, as a culture, we are feeling the weight of this despair. Studies suggest there has been a substantial increase in mental health issues in the past decade. Deaths of despair (suicide, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses) are on the rise. Some experts go so far as to suggest that this surge in despair ought to be considered a public health crisis.

Here is where I think Scripture, in its very form, has a word to speak to us. For what we find in its pages is that hope and despair are intricately entwined. Though they may be opposites, hope finds its birthplace in despair. One place we see this is in the very opening chapter of the Bible. Simply put, what God does in creation is bring order out of its opposite, disorder. God makes something out of nothing; brings light out of darkness.

At its core Genesis 1 is a story about a God who brings forth hope out of despair. Despair, like that dark and chaotic void “in the beginning,” serves as the womb from which hope is born. This then sets the stage for the rest of the biblical story.

The Bible is very much a work of hope. It is the concerted effort of a people experiencing overwhelming despair carefully collecting and curating all those glimpses of God’s past work to produce a record of evidence that is the soil from which hope springs forth.

Despair, Scripture teaches us, is the very place in which we find the God of hope.

The title of this post comes from a verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes the faith of Abraham as “hoping against hope”, (Rom. 4:18).

It is a curious phrase. What does it mean to hope against hope?

The simplest way to understand it is that hoping against hope is “hoping for something that is most likely an impossibility.” Or we could think about it in terms of two kinds of hope. That is, what Paul has in mind is one kind of hope hoping against another kind of hope.

“Natural” Hope

The first type of hope we can describe as a “natural” hope. The kind of hope we have when January rolls around or when we enter a new stage in life. In sports, it is the hope that springs eternal at the start of every new season. We have an expectation that what lies ahead promises something better than what we have today. Hope is born when we marry this expectation with the belief that we have what it takes to bring about that better future.

This kind of hope is largely about reaching a desired outcome and having the grit to overcome any obstacles that come our way. It is tied up with our capacity to attain what we set out to accomplish and our fortitude to persevere through adversity. When the chips are down, hope names our persistence to believe we can still achieve our goals.

Really, this is akin to how we usually think about optimism.

And so optimism, we might say, is the kind of hope we are called to hope against.

“Unnatural” Hope

This second kind of hope is not like optimism in that it is not “natural.” The desired outcome we hope for does not naturally emerge from the character of the present. We do not hope for something that can be reasonably extrapolated from current conditions. Rather our hope is in a future good that only God can give to us. In this way, Christian hope is “unnatural.” Or rather, it is super natural. Super, simply meaning, “above or beyond.” The hope that hopes against hope is a hope that goes beyond or above optimism. 

This kind of hope hopes not only when the chips are down, but even when optimism has lost all reason to hope. It is here where hope is just getting started. Hope begins where optimism ends.

In this way, hope is made possible by faith. As the Apostle Paul would have it, hope is born in the presence of the God in whom we believe, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” (Rom. 4:17). So to hope against hope is to not allow our hope to be dictated by positive circumstances or limited by the promise of human progress. To hope against hope is to keep the hope even when we no longer have sufficient reasons to do so. We hope against what the present data tells us.

Hope is a Hard Ask

And this, of course, is what makes hope so hard. We live in a time where our vision of what is possible is entirely shaped by the hope that science, technology, and reason possess within themselves the capacity to make all things new (but mostly we just end up with all new things). And so, our default setting as a culture is to look askew at any hope that hopes above or beyond what can be achieved through human ingenuity and empirical know-how. We dismiss it as naive or Pollyannaish.

Even as a person of faith, it is difficult to shake the all too glaring question, “What’s the point of hoping for something you can’t accomplish or achieve by your own effort?” At best, it encourages an ineffectual passivity as we bide our time for the great by and by. At worst, it is delusional and traps us in an endless cycle of denial.

These are questions we’ll want to explore in the coming posts.

In the Christian tradition faith, hope and love are known as the three theological virtues.

To say that hope is the greatest of these may feel a bit off. If you are familiar with the Apostle Paul’s great ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13 you may know that it ends with these words: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Love is the greatest, not hope.

But the point St. Paul was making is that love can be considered the greatest because it will be the last one standing. There will come a time when faith and hope will no longer be needed. Not so with love. There will always be love. Why is that? First and foremost, because God is love. And when that day comes when God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28) and we are welcomed home into the eternal embrace of God — the everlasting love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit — that is all there will be. Love.

But until that day arrives what sustains our love is faith and hope. Both traffic in the unseen and the not yet. As we wait for what we cannot yet see and yearn for what we do not yet have, faith allows us to trust in what is promised and in so doing, opens the door to hope. Hope, in turn, animates our lives toward the fulfillment of that promise.

Without faith, there is nothing to hope for. Conversely, without hope, faith is listless. Or, maybe we can put it this way: faith without hope is dead. So when hope runs dry, our faith begins to languish. But not only does our faith suffer, but also our resolve to act in love. 

A helpful way to see the relationship between these theological virtues is through the analogy of a journey. Among the many routes before us faith is what allows us to see and choose the path marked out for us in Christ; the one Jesus walked before us and continues to walk ahead of us. Love is both what infuses each step we take and the end toward which we walk. Hope is that which keeps us moving. It compels us forward as we anticpate the loving end for which we are destined.

And this, I think, is the greatness of hope. To love in the way Christ calls us to love — namely, to love even our enemies — is an act of hope. It is hope for our enemy and hope in God to vindicate us should our enemy choose to repay our love with hatred and malice. We need hope because hope enlivens us to stay the course (to keep the faith) even when (especially when) the way of love gets hard. 

All this to say, we don’t want to downplay love. Love is indeed the greatest in that it will last through eternity. But there are times in this journey we call the Christian life, where one of faith, hope and love will take on a greater role. Could it be that in our time, when the fulfillment of God’s promises seems so far off and we find it a struggle to keep on keeping on, that the greatest for us is hope?