Presented on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025, in Weaver Chapel
Hope
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃
Convocation, our gathering here together in the first week of classes, is all about beginnings. As a biblical scholar, I can’t help but have my mind go back to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The first chapter of Genesis tells us how God created order out of chaos. Indeed, the first thing created was light, וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃ “God said let there be light, and there was light;” light was created to banish the darkness where fear and danger dwells. We borrow this imagery, by way of Plato, in our motto, “Having light, we pass it on to others.” It all begins with light and life.
Genesis one is a poem, a lyrical setting for us to understand all of history which follows. The late Irish poet John O’Donohue does the same on a personal level in his poem “For A New Beginning.”1 It feels to me almost as if he wrote it for just such a convocation as ours, sitting here at the beginning of a new school year, a year of promise and possibility, just waiting for us to act.
“Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
O’Donohue’s poem speaks to the nature of beginnings, the start of something new that is often accompanied by fear and anxiety. It speaks also to the fact that we, each of us, the individual, must trust and act. “Though your destination is not yet clear; you can trust the promise of this opening; unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning.”
These first steps of trust, leaning into and accepting the grace of beginning, are done in hope. We look forward and move into the future with the confidence and faith that it will be well. It may not be what you expect, but by planning and acting now, you will be ready to embrace what tomorrow brings. That is hope: the expectation that it will all work out, that what we do today matters for tomorrow and, that there is nothing that is irredeemable, that all things can and will be made new.
Emil Brunner, the Swiss reformed theologian, opened his book Eternal Hope with this statement, “What oxygen is for the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of human life. … As the fate of the human organism is dependent on the supply of oxygen, so the fate of humanity is dependent on its supply of hope.”2 We need hope.
But what is hope, really? In everyday parlance, hope can carry the sense of wishful thinking, baseless optimism, a desire for some outcome or something to be true without any evidence that it ought to be true. You know the sort of thing I mean. “I hope I get an A on my exam,” even if I haven’t spent any time studying. This sort of baseless wishing is why some people say that hope is simply fantasy. They feel that the notion of hope, the unfounded optimism that somehow tomorrow will be better than today, is a kind of evil, that keeps us from acknowledging the harsh realities of life.
“Grow up! Face the real world!” they say. These are the people who tell us that we cannot achieve our goals. “You’ll never finish your degree. You can’t be a world-class sprinter, so why bother?” Those sorts of people believe they are being practical and realistic, that hope is simply a fairytale, a myth, that will distract you from getting on in life.
It is a myth. Specifically, it is the myth of Pandora.
Before there was the music service or the jewelry store, there was the Greek story of Pandora. This story is an ancient theodicy, an attempt to explain evil and suffering in this world. The Greek poet Hesiod tells us that after Prometheus stole fire and gave it to men (not humanity, as there were only dudes at this point), Zeus wanted to punish the men and so ordered Pandora to be created out of the earth, the first woman. [If you watched Jeff Goldblum’s show Kaos on Netflix, it is that Prometheus who is tied to the rock who is narrating the story.] Anyway, Zeus has Prometheus make this first woman out of clay, Pandora, and sends her down to the men.
Pandora brought with her a jar (often mistranslated as “box”) that contained all manner of pain, disease, evil, and hope. When the jar was opened, all of these flew out except hope; Hesiod wrote, “only Hope was left within her unbreakable house, [hope] remained under the lip of the jar and did not fly away.”3 Thus, the story explained that evil entered the world, but hope did not. Evil entered into the world along with pain, suffering, and disease, all the ills of the world poured of Pandora’s jar (box). Yet hope remained trapped, locked away and inaccessible.
There remains debate to this day as to whether the fact that hope remains in the jar is a mercy or further punishment. Some in antiquity are like those naysayers I mentioned a moment ago, they thought that hope was an evil itself. It draws one away from actually living, engaging in the present, the real world. So, keeping hope from entering the world, forces one to be pragmatic, requires you to “buckle down” and get to work on the job at hand, instead of dreaming that there is a future where things get better.
Hope is not an evil. Hope is what enables us to live. As Brunner said, hope is the oxygen for the human soul, it is what we need for life.
Convocation, this gathering together, is about the beginning of things, it is about hope. When we start a new job, a new school year (whether it is your first year or your last), when we get married, or at the birth of a child, we do so in, with, and through hope. Hope is, of course, always a looking forward, an expectation of something that has not yet happened.
The roots of Wittenberg University are found in the Lutheran church and the faith of that church, the faith of Christianity, is grounded in hope, the hope of the resurrection which defeats even death itself. Again, it is often suggested that this hope is a mere crutch, to make life palatable, yet living in the hope of the resurrection is not escapism. Christians and Christianity acknowledge fully the hurting and hurtful nature of this world.
In Romans 5, the New Testament writer Paul speaks of how hope enables us to come through even the most difficult of times. “We…boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” You will experience suffering in life, of course! The “pragmatists” are certainly right about that! College life, whether as a student, a faculty member, or even an administrator, will present challenges and difficulties. Because it is life and that is the nature of living.
But through those challenges and hurdles, you will persevere, you will press on, and how do you do that? Through and with hope. For Christians, that hope, the hope of the resurrection is what enables us to overcome the hardships and continue to live and work for justice and reconciliation in this world, even as we live in a world that is not as it should be.
It is this same hope with its prophetic commitment to justice that motivated Martin Luther King, Jr. He looked out at a world roiling with hatred and bigotry, poverty and persecution, and he believed, not only believed but worked, for a future that was better than his today. Just two months before he was assassinated, Dr. King said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” It was that hope that enabled Dr. King to persevere.
The hope possessed by Dr. King, the “infinite hope,” is not optimism. As the professor of psychology Kendra Thomas (coincidently from Hope College!) points out, “Long-term hope is not about looking on the bright side. It is a mindset that helps people endure challenges, tackle them head-on and keep their eyes on the goal….”4
Nothing will happen, of course, unless we begin. Hope is not simply a belief or an attitude; it is the first action we must take in any endeavor. The great Lutheran scholar Jürgen Moltmann wrote that “God created everything in finished form, but he created human beings in hope.”
Hope is what moves us to practice our sport, to work together as a team with the certainty, not of winning, but that as we practice, we will get better. We study and research in the hope that the knowledge we gain will improve not only ourselves and our lives, but the lives of others and the world.
If you are a first-year student or a faculty or staff member just starting at Wittenberg, you may not know that one year ago, there was some doubt, in fact, there was very real, very reasonable and credible doubt, that we would be here today. Some gave up all hope that Wittenberg University could continue as a university. They were being pragmatic and realistic. Yet here we are!
I am willing to bet that there are some who never thought that you would get to this point in your life. Yet here you are!
What was a hope for some a year ago, is reality for all of us today.
We are here today, because over the years, others had hope and acted. Wittenberg University stands today because of the hope others had nearly 200 years ago. Each of us are here are full of the hopes and promise of those who have gone before us, be they parents, grandparents, alumni, or faculty. Now add your hope, your expectations and hard work, to theirs as you grow to become who you are called to be.
That John O’Donohue shared this anecdote. “Years ago my neighbour here set out to build his new home. He had just stripped the sod off the field to begin digging out the foundation, when an old man from the village happened to come by. He blessed the work and said: ‘You have the worst of it behind you now.’ My neighbour laughed and said: ‘But I have only just begun.’ The old man said: ‘That’s what I mean. You have begun; and to make a real beginning is the most difficult act.’”
You have hope. Now, let us begin.
And “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen.
Footnotes:
[1] O'Donohue, John. 2007. Benedictus: A Book of Blessings. London: Bantam, p. 29.
[2] Eternal Hope, p. 7.
[3] Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 96-99.
[4] https://theconversation.com/hope-is-not-the-same-as-optimism-a-psychologist-explains-just-look-at-mlks-example-226384 Accessed August 26, 2025.