A surprise of the past three years has been realizing that I have an optimistic nature. I have always seen myself as cynical. What I’ve learned is that I can be both.
In Chicago, we’re eleven days into a new mayoral administration. Since the runoff, several friends and neighbors have commented to me that while they prefer the new mayor to the alternative, they think the obstacles are too great to be surmounted and nothing will really improve.
But I’ve also encountered neighbors setting aside apathy engendered by the city’s history of corruption. I’ve seen and heard hope as I haven’t before. For 16 years, I’ve lived in this city and worked in some of the areas hit hardest by the austerity measures of previous administrations. I’m well aware of the challenges we’re facing. Also that it was a slim majority of people who saw their self-interest as better served by new approaches.
No leader is a savior. Real change involves hard work from all of us. We’re all flawed, and yet there’s a difference between mistakes caused by hubris and ones made while risking something bold and new.
As I prepare to preach this Sunday, on the feast of Pentecost, I try to imagine what it was like for Jesus’ closest friends, but especially Peter. All of them deserted Jesus and fled—Peter denied three times that he even knew Jesus. And yet, out of his failure, the Holy Spirit propels Peter into a new vocation. It doesn’t erase the past, but incorporates it into a new reality. Rowan Williams writes, “Life in the Spirit unites truthfulness and hope.”
After its miraculous beginnings and the communal life of the early church, Christianity has had a winding history. Each of us likely has our own list of horrific events and eras that distress us the most. Yet many of us hold another list, too, of people and periods that buoy us toward transformation in our own lives and the world.
Peter gives us a promise in his sermon on Pentecost, quoting from the Prophet Joel: God’s Spirit will be poured out on all flesh. In case some hearers still wanted to think, “surely he didn’t mean those people over there,” Peter and Joel emphasize that the promise is for all who have flesh.
In a sermon in the Community of Christ, the ecumenical group I wrote a book about, longtime member Doug Huron described Christianity as holding a “promise of radical inclusiveness.” Even as it is “a promise that is always being broken,” still, “the good news is available to all.”
Andrew Wells-Dang, another Community member, appreciated how Doug was cynical, hearing from his homilies “this is how it’s always been and how they treated the prophets. The church has also oppressed people through its history, and yet we’re still here.” It was also a message of hope, Andrew said. “You recognize all the obstacles, but still, we have a chance to do this.” Or, as Elizabeth O’Connor of the Church of the Saviour in DC, a mentor and partner congregation to the Community, put it in her book Journey Inward, Journey Outward, “Things do not have to be as they are; laws can be changed and dehumanizing structures overthrown.”
Whether we tend toward optimism or pessimism, reality is likely to include both victories and setbacks. In the midst of it all, we may be served by holding on to both cynicism and hope.
Book update
My manuscript for What You Sow Is a Bare Seed: A Countercultural Christian Community during Five Decades of Change has been through copy editing and I am responding to author queries. I still don’t have an estimated release date, but it’s exciting for things to be moving toward that point.
Reading & listening
“The Short Life of Baby Milo.” By Frances Stead Sellers, Thomas Simonetti, and Maggie Penman. The Washington Post, May 19, 2023.
“A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning.” By Daniel Immerwahr, The New Yorker, May 8, 2023 issue.
“Wildflowers,” by the Wailin’ Jennys. My first semester of college, a woman in the dorm room next door to me played Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” every morning. I never told her I could hear it. She was an athlete with a bit of a tough exterior, and I didn’t want to risk embarrassing her if she felt vulnerable about needing those moments of affirmation. And the song is lovely for that, even lovelier with the harmonies in this cover by the Wailin’ Jennys. For this season, I’m the one listening to it every morning.
Love this! Thank you... weaving in voices from the community and reminders of realism and radical hope. Also thanks for the link to Immerwahr's piece in The New Yorker! He lived in the same house of grad students that I did in Berkeley for a year - so it's fun to see his good work out in public!