Hope

Romans 5: 1 – 11     

I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this reflection with you today. Last year, The United Church of Canada marked its centenary, and as we approached that milestone, we began to ask a forward-looking question: who is God calling us to be and what is God calling us to do in the next hundred years? Out of that discernment, six words emerged that have been shaping our imagination, our prayers, and our liturgies: Deep Spirituality, Bold Discipleship, Daring Justice.

Those words are woven into the stole I am wearing today, but I would like to carry them with us in a slightly different key for this ecumenical gathering. Even if you forget everything else I say, I hope you might remember this: we, too, in ecumenical ministry are called to Deep Hope, Bold Hope, and Daring Hope. I will shape my reflection on our text around these three phrases.

1. Deep Hope – Naming the World We Are In

We meet for this consultation in what another text has named “a season of shaking.” The earth groans, the poor cry out, and powers tighten their grip; climate catastrophe, deepening inequality, racism, xenophobia, Queer Phobia, patriarchy, and violence mark the signs of our time. Our own churches are not innocent: we participate in economic systems that sacrifice the vulnerable, benefit from colonial histories, and sometimes bless injustice with our silence.

In such a world, Deep Hope is not naïve optimism; it is the depth of God’s faithfulness beneath all this shaking. Priscilla J. Owens, 1882 wrote the words of that old hymn

Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift, or firm remain?

• Refrain:
  We have an anchor that keeps the soul
  Steadfast and sure while the billows roll,
  Fastened to the Rock which cannot move,
  Grounded firm and deep in the Savior’s love

Deep Hope therefore listens without flinching to the cries of creation and the crucified of history, and yet dares to ask: in such a world, is hope anything more than pious wishful thinking? Romans 5 answers with testimony, not theory: “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ… and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” This is the depth out of which the United Church’s call to Deep Spirituality arises—a hope that sinks its roots into grace, not denial.

2. Bold Hope – The Strange Sequence of Grace

Paul offers a strange sequence for people like us who want quick solutions: affliction → endurance → character → hope. Hope does not come instead of affliction; it is born through it—through staying, enduring, learning, being changed in the very places that wound the world. At every step, the subject is not our strength but God’s grace: “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”

This is Bold Hope. Steadfast and sure while the billows roll,
Fastened to the Rock which cannot move,
Grounded firm and deep in the Savior’s love

Bold Hope does not merely endure suffering; it boasts in afflictions because it trusts the Spirit to transfigure them into character and hope. It resonates with this call to Bold Discipleship: a life that stands in grace, not in our own certainty, and follows Christ into hard places where Empire tightens its grip. What holds this fragile ecumenical body together is not that we are strong or even right, but that we are held in a love that reached us “while we were still weak.” Grounded and firm in the savior’s love. 

3. Daring Hope – Hope in a Wounded World

The devotional “Reading the Signs of the Time” reminds us that our crises are not only environmental or political; they are spiritual. We are facing “a crisis of idolatry,” where profit is enthroned where God’s shalom should dwell, and Empire demands our allegiance and imagination. If that is true, then Christian hope cannot be a soft blanket over a burning house.

Here we meet Daring Hope. Daring Hope is the courage to call Empire by its name ( Palestinians are created in the image of God, Ukrainians too, Sudanese too, Iranians too stop those bombs and those senseless killings ) , we confess our complicity, and yet we trust that the crucified and risen Christ is already loosening Empire’s grip on history. Hope is not denial; it is defiance, grounded in the conviction that “the God of hope fills us with all joy and peace in believing, so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” This is what the Call names as Daring Justice—hope that takes public, risky, justice‑seeking shape in a wounded world.

4. Deep, Bold, Daring Hope as Confession and Conversion

This consultation is not gathered to admire our communiqués; we are here, in part, to confess. The Signs of the Time text insists that Empire runs not only through governments and markets but through our own churches—our racial hierarchies, our patriarchy, our investments, and our theologies when they justify domination. It dares to name such theologies as heresy against the God who hears the cry of the oppressed and became flesh in a colonised body.

To accept the Spirit’s invitation into conversion is Daring Hope: stepping into the freedom and joy of returning to our first love, allowing hope to re-form our life together for the sake of the world.

5. Deep, Bold, Daring Hope as Shared Vocation

The Signs of the Time document reframes this ecumenical moment with the story of Esther: “Perhaps you have come… for such a time as this.” What if our networks, traditions and global relationships have been entrusted to us precisely for this wounded world—and not for our comfort? In that spirit, we name concrete calls that sound like a grammar of Deep, Bold, Daring Hope for ecumenical life.

• Deep Hope stands together at the edges: it listens first to communities on the frontlines of climate crisis ( like the Kitui Community in Kenya transforming dry lands into productive lands after planting more than 300,000 trees in the nature Plus climate program) , racism, caste oppression, patriarchy, ableism, occupation, and forced migration, and lets their discernment lead our action.
• Bold Hope speaks with one another before we speak for one another: it practices mutual accountability, confessing how our communions have benefitted from Empire and committing to reparative action.
• Daring Hope refuses the myth of inevitability: it declares in word, sacrament, and public witness that there are futures beyond capitalism’s death‑dealing logic, beyond militarised borders, beyond extractive economies.
• Deep and Bold Hope turn our ecumenism into solidarity: we move from polite statements to shared campaigns, shared risks, and shared resources—“from symbolic unity to concrete collaboration for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.”
• Daring Hope reimagines power in our own life: it redistributes leadership, wealth, and voice so that those historically pushed to the margins shape “the very center of our discernment and mission.”

None of this is possible by human resolve alone, but it becomes imaginable when we remember that “Christ goes ahead of us into every struggle for life,” and that “the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words when our prayers falter.”

6. Hope as Foretaste: Living Deep, Bold, Daring Now

Hope, then, is not only a word we speak about the future; it is a life we practice now as a foretaste of God’s reign. Every time we choose to listen at the margins rather than protect the centre, every time we share resources across borders, every time our liturgies tell the truth about Empire and proclaim good news to the poor, we are practicing Deep Hope, stepping into Bold Hope, and enacting Daring Hope. In doing so, we join the United Church’s vision of being “hope-filled communities united in deep spirituality, inspiring worship, and daring justice.”