Today, I Learned…Hope Is a Practice

This sermon grows out of a challenge that has never fully let go: a conversation with a seasoned border activist — someone who had been accompanying immigrants and families through crisis for generations — who said plainly that as a faith leader, you do not have the right to give up hope. Not a comfort. A call. A weight. And an invitation to understand hope as something other than optimism or wishful thinking.

Drawing on Walter Brueggemann's concept of prophetic imagination — the vocation of holding open a future the empire insists is closed, of conjuring and proposing alternatives to the single story power wants to tell — this sermon makes the case that hope is not a feeling you wait to have. It is a discipline you practice. It is what you do when the feeling isn't there. It is lament that refuses to become despair. It is action that refuses to wait for certainty. It is showing up anyway.

The sermon names the cost of hope honestly — the exhaustion of holding it, the temptation to let it go, the grief that comes with caring about outcomes you cannot control. And it holds that alongside the long lineage of hope-practitioners in our tradition: the prophets who spoke to empty air, the women who came to the tomb on Sunday not knowing what they'd find, the activists and faith leaders who kept marching when there was no visible reason to.

Hope, we learn, is the posture of people who believe the story isn't over. It doesn't require certainty. It requires practice. And like any practice — prayer, Sabbath, generosity — it is something we can get better at, together.