Today, waiting at the train station, I saw a bird perched on a wire, its wings flapping and beak open in song. Spring is clearly here, and with it all the hope and promise of the season. And it reminded me of those oft-quoted words of Emily Dickinson, “Hope is a thing with feathers.”
Contrast that with the photo that I took last Fall, of birds once again perched on a wire. But this was no train station; instead, it was the barbed wire looped along the top of a wall that divides the West Bank from Israel. Turn the other way, and you see a pile of rubble where a house was recently bulldozed, evidence of continuing political conflict. This is Bethany - the place where Jesus raised Lazarus, and where Mary anointed his head with oil in preparation for his death.
Hope in such a place has substance. It is not so much the feathers that matter so much as the strength of those small claws, gripping the wire between the barbs. These birds are tenacious; they demonstrate a talent for survival.
Hope is one of those words that has many meanings. Sometimes it simply means wishful thinking; other times a kind of optimistic outlook on life. But as Christians, our hope has substance. We hope in Christ.
Our hope in Christ is rooted in the events we have just celebrated - those three terrible, joyful days when our Savior died on the cross, lay in the grave, and then, unbelievably, rose again. And somehow in the midst of that terror and joy, Christ brought about our forgiveness, our freedom, our reconciliation with God, and our risen life.
We forget what momentous news that is. A couple of weeks ago,I spoke with a six-year-old who had heard the Easter story for the first time. “But you can’t live when you have died,” he said. No, you can’t. But Christ did. And because he did, we will too!
That is hope, that promise of forgiveness and freedom and reconciliation and risen life. And when you have that promise, that certainty, life here and now looks different; life is different.
Because in Christ, we are transformed, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Christianity is not just about eternal life when we die. It is about the transformation and renewal of all things in Christ, now and in eternity. That is our hope.
And that hope is at the core of our mission as Christians. We proclaim the transformative hope of Christ, and we demonstrate it in our lives. Being “in Christ,” as the apostle Paul puts it, allows us to let go of our own self-obsessions and open our lives to others, reaching out to them with the love and hope of Christ.
And that’s where mission becomes tangible. Those words of Christ, in which he identifies himself as the fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah’s words to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19), give us a hint of what a world transformed might look like. And when we feed the hungry, and provide shelter, and comfort the broken-hearted, we offer a foretaste of that new creation, a world in which no one goes hungry, and everyone has shelter, where the broken hearted will be healed, and every tear will be wiped away. A world where we no longer need our claws to hold tight in safety and the barbed wire is rolled away.
