Living Hope

An Inclusive Vision of the Future

Paul W. Chilcote, Steve Harper

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725270916
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

We are living in a world desperately in need of hope. Do you yearn to live into a future filled with hope as a beloved child of God? Rooted in this great gift of God, Living Hope explores life in an inclusive vision of the future. This book offers you an opportunity to reflect on the witness of hope, the legacy about hope, the reason for hope, and helps you to engage in the practice of hope. Living Hope celebrates the possibility of restored hope in the church and the world and invites you to become a bearer of hope to others in our time.

Four

The Practice of Hope

Hope, like love and faith, is an active verb. It implies engagement, not passivity. You don’t simply sit and wait for hope to happen. If you do, it is likely to elude you. God invites you to live it out, to put it into practice. The beauty of hope emerges—blossoms might be a better word—whenever you participate in God’s vision and mission. You discover the hope that lies within you when you take action, even if that means quite simply welcoming shalom into your heart and life. Hope begins in the act of opening your heart to the presence of the God of hope and peace.

The Hebrew word for hope—yakhal—means to wait or to trust. This is why it is so closely related to that other theological virtue, faith. Trust in Jesus and his way situates you in the space in which hope dwells. Participation in Christ ignites hope. It cannot do otherwise. Hope implies confidence. It expects wonderful and beautiful things. Hope orients your life to the future. But in a paradoxical kind of way, through hope the past meets the future in the present. Hope pulls things together and propels you forward. Hope has this existential quality. It exudes urgency. It lifts, illuminates, fills, liberates, sustains, inspires, empowers, connects. Hope, in other words, begs to be practiced. So here are five different practices in which God can work through the Spirit to inspire, encourage, and excite you to a life of living hope.

Lectio Divina on Hope

One of the best ways to practice hope is simply to pray, to immerse yourself in God’s word, and then to put your spiritual learning into action. Prayer lifts the soul into the presence of God and elevates the spirit. God’s word orients your life to the way of Jesus, which is the way of hope. One of the most popular forms of praying the word today is known as lectio divina. It involves all three dimensions of most practices alluded to above: engaging, reflecting, and acting. The term literally means “divine reading.” The primary purpose of this ancient spiritual practice has always been to cultivate deep attentiveness to the God who speaks to us through the word. It fosters a receptive, imaginative, and loving spirit. It also facilitates your movement into concrete actions that both reflect and inspire hope. Classically, this discipline consists of four movements, lectio (reading), oratio (prayer), meditatio (meditation), and contemplatio (contemplation).

I recommend a simplified version of this meditative technique oriented around four simple words: proclaim, picture, ponder, practice. This adapted form of lectio divina moves intentionally from contemplation to action. It emphasizes the formation of a receptive spirit and the cultivation of hope. When used with stories from Scripture related to hope, this technique can open windows and doors to hope in your life. Here are simple instructions for each of the four movements in this form of prayer.

Before anything else, pray for the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Proclaim. Read the passage. We recommend that you actually read it out loud. It helps to actually hear the word “proclaimed.”

Picture. Read the same text again, this time picturing yourself somewhere in the narrative. With which person do you identify? Where do you find yourself in the drama that is unfolding imaginatively before your eyes?

Ponder. After a third reading of the text, ponder what these words might mean for you today. What insight have you gained about yourself, God, your neighbor? What significance do you attach to your discoveries given your recent experiences, relationships, concerns?

Practice. Following a final reading of the passage, resolve to translate your experience in the meditation into action. What is God calling you to do with this today? What action is required? What does God require of you to live in and to be an ambassador of hope throughout the course of the day?

Close your meditation with a prayer for God’s help and support as you seek to be faithful.

In order to enhance the connections of this practice to the biblical vision of hope, we invite you to meditate specifically on the following biblical passages. There are seven, so you may want to set apart one week and use these for your quiet time with God, one per day. Or you can stretch these out over a longer period of time if you wish. Listen for God’s word of hope to you as you pray.

• Luke 7:11–17 (Jesus raises the widow’s Son at Nain)
• Luke 8:49–55 (Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter)
• Luke 13:10–17 (Jesus heals a crippled woman)
• Jeremiah 29:11–14 (a future with hope)
• Psalm 43:3–5 (hope in God)
• Romans 8:22–25 (awaiting hope with patience)
• Romans 15:13 (abounding in hope)

Martin Luther’s Four-Stranded Garland

Luther developed a very similar prayer technique related to his sixteenth-century rediscovery of the Bible. When his barber and friend, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, he responded with a letter that he later published as a little tract entitled A Simple Way to Pray. Like lectio divina, this process consists of four movements or threads that Luther wove together to produce what he called a “four-stranded garland.”

First, he recommended that you reflec...

Table of contents

• Prologue: An Unfettered Hope
• One: The Witness to Hope
• Two: The Legacy about Hope
• Three: The Reason for Hope
• Four: The Practice of Hope
• Epilogue: A Hope-Filled Future
• Addendum: Hope in the Midst of a Pandemic
• Appendix A: A Word to Those in Despair
• Appendix B: A Word to Those Who Have Hope
• For Further Reading
• Bibliography