“Putting Your Hope into Practice”

Religion in Daily Life (c) By the Rev. Edward Chinn, D.Min. Rector, All Saints’ Church 9601 Frankford Ave. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19114 (215) 637-5225 Written 7 November 2001 http://www.allsaintstorresdale.org

Rumors spread through a small town in Maine about its coming death. The state government had decided to flood the area where the town stood, create a large lake, build a dam, and add to the state’s water and power supplies. With this prospect ahead of them, residents in the town stopped making improvements to their houses. Paint began to peel. Grass grew high in front yards. One man in the town explained the town’s bedraggled appearance. He said, “Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present.” There is a word for having faith in the future. It is the word “hope.” Now is the time for Americans to put their hope into practice.

Jeremiah put his hope into practice. About 588 B.C., Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem. His city was under attack by the Babylonians. The citizens felt panic. In a year, the Babylonian army would capture Jerusalem and start moving its people to prisoner of war camps. A relative of Jeremiah asked him to buy a piece of land from him. Though the land was already in enemy hands, Jeremiah put his hope into practice. He bought the field. He put the deed in a pottery jar. In the face of his people’s hopelessness, Jeremiah defiantly invested in Israel’s future (Jeremiah 32).

Jesus of Nazareth put his hope into practice. Mark’s gospel account says, “Jesus chose twelve men and called them apostles. He wanted them to be with him” (Mark 3:14). “The Jesus movement saw itself as a way for Israel, as a historical alternative in the crisis facing the Jewish social world” (Marcus Borg). Jesus invested himself in his relationship with his men. After watching children at the beach whose sand castle had been knocked down by the water, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote: “All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure.”

Now is the time for us as Americans and as people of faith to put our hope into practice. In a British church is an inscription. It celebrates a man named Robert Baronet. There was no monarch. Oliver Cromwell ruled during the Commonwealth. The inscription reads: “In the year 1653 when all things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished or profaned, Sir Robert Shirley Baronet founded this church whose singular praise it is to have down the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.” May we do the best things now and so put our hope into practice!