The following comes from my 2017 Lenten series.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

from this time on and forevermore. Psalm 131: 3

Leaving the Redwood forest, I was filled with a renewed spirit. It was a magical place that allowed for regeneration. The Bible imagines Eden as a garden. I wonder if it might have been a forest in the northwest. Although the paths that we traveled throughout our stay in Redwood National Park were mostly flat, it was a place for the heart to ascend.

When you are standing at the base of a Redwood, there is a pull upward. Your eyes can’t help but follow the enormous trunk skyward. It is hard, maybe impossible, to see the crown of some of these giant trees. Far above, where the sun breaks through the heavy canopy, a focal point emerges just beyond the limits of our vision. It is bright and lofty. Is this a manifestation of hope? A glimpse of the heavenly realm?

Hope. It is an essential Christian value; it is a precious treasure that lives in that space beyond our seeing. According to St. Paul, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (Romans 8:24-25).” What is more, all of the creation shares this unseeable spiritual reality as it groans and waits for God to generate new life, whereby setting it from the shackles of decay and death.

We hope because we seek reconnection for our broken lives; we yearn for God, the source of all life, to write the next chapter of Genesis with us included. Living in the midst of messy contradictions and paradoxes, we find ourselves confronted with the unlikeliness that this will ever happen; we resist by not getting our ‘hope’ too high. Still, with the fragment of the Divine spark in our gullet, we can’t help ourselves. We hope with high hopes because that is how God created us.

Psalm 131 concludes with a hope that is communal. We find ourselves in another spiritual paradox between the individual and communal. We were created by God to hope and trust deeply in the relationship that God established with each of us. Hope is an intimate thing – between our hearts and God’s heart. And, it is also corporate. Hope exists in the context of a community that encompasses the whole creation. We groan along with the Redwoods in mystical forests for God to redeem.

Hope seeks the renewal of ALL brokenness and decay. It looks to a future, that lies beyond our sight when God will establish right relationships between all life in the universe. To do this, it borrows the vision of eternity and the language of ‘forevermore.’

As a community of faith and struggle (borrowing Letty Russell’s definition of ‘church’), we sing hope-filled songs of redemption for the whole creation, and we are inspired to walk the ascending trail that heads in God’s direction. That direction, of course, is the same one that leads from the cross to empty tomb.