Dear PCUM family,

As the the waves of bad news keep crashing, like you, perhaps, I've been looking for something firm to hold onto. So I decided to look again at what Walter Brueggemann has to say about hope. Brueggemann is an American Old Testament scholar and theologian, as well as longtime professor at Columbia (Presbyterian) Theological Seminary outside Atlanta. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church, arguing that, as followers brought by God again and again into a new reality through Jesus Christ, the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, cynicism, and nationalism. Here is what Brueggemann has to say about hope:

“Hope...is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion, and one does that only at great political and existential risk. [Hope] is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.”

― Walter Brueggemann - The Prophetic Imagination

In Christ's peace,

Pastor Greg