Surprised by Hope - Part 2

for the Essentials Blue In Worship Theology Certificate Course with Dan Wilt

(see Part 1 here)

With the issue of the resurrection settled once again in my mind, Wright moves to why a good understanding of Easter is important. Easter is not “Jesus is raised; therefore there is life after death.” Easter announces that “Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world’s true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun – and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his Kingdom come on earth as in heaven.” [1]

This gives life so much more purpose than waiting and watching for death to come or the end of the world to arrive so that I might go to Heaven. I have a job to do, and the resurrection means that “nothing done in the Lord, in the power of the Spirit, in the present time will be wasted in God’s future.”[2] It brings meaning to everything I do in His name.

The Enlightenment and the Renaissance say that “history is accelerating towards a wonderful goal…[and] we will become what we have the potential to be by education and hard work.” [3] Platonic Dualism that says the physical is evil, the body is a tomb to escape. But Christianity says that the new creation was birthed through the resurrection of Jesus and it is only through the work on the cross that redemption occurs.

Early Christians didn’t believe in progress nor in deterioration of the world with a goal to escape it. “They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter”[4] and that they were to be His instruments for that work. They, along with all of creation, had a forward look to the future in God.

“It looks as though God intends to flood the universe with himself, as though the universe, the entire cosmos, was designed as a receptacle for his love…it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God…”[5] Creation is not yet complete and is waiting for that day when all the forces of rebellion have been vanquished and creation is completely free to respond to the love of the Creator.

In Revelation, joining of Heaven and Earth is not the separation of the world from God, but the right joining of God with creation in a redeemed relationship. Erroneous end-times theology says that this world is doomed for destruction and Christians will be rescued out of it. Judgment is mistakenly seen as vengeful. In reality it is that “God…in the end, [will] put it all to rights, straighten it out, producing not just a sigh of relief all around but shouting for joy from the trees and the fields, the seas and the floods. “[6]

The settling happening deep within me is an echo of that sigh that all of creation will breathe on the last days. It’s the recognition that this process, this journey that I am on is all part of God’s straightening-out plan that He’s called me to be a part of. The resurrection is not all about me and my redemption, although it certainly is a part of it. My ultimate destiny is not the ultimate question. Israel thought that how they were going to be rescued by God was the ultimate purpose of God. But what God was really acting on was how He was/is going to rescue the world through Israel and rescue Israel in the process. Asking instead what my part is in God’s rescue mission of the world puts me in a position for being rescued in the process of the world being rescued. [7]

Jesus was doing in the present what He was promising in the future, giving people the opportunity to experience redemption in the present so that they might enjoy the renewal process leading into the future, becoming co-laborers with Him in this renewal, re-creation, redemptive process. “The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future…They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”[8]

Thus, my whole life, every act of worship must be reordered around the resurrection. “…our present space, time, and matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption.”[9] I must look at my world with new lenses because of the resurrection. It infuses hope into every situation because God is at work right here and right now through His agents (you and me empowered by His Spirit) to redeem the whole of creation. This world is passing away in the sense that the old is gone and the new is here. It is not awaiting destruction but rather redemption and that work began at the cross and was birthed at the resurrection.

While some days it may feel like my world is sliding into greater and greater chaos and disarray, the truth in light of the resurrection is that it is being redeemed bit by bit through the power of the redemptive work of Jesus. My hope that was being whittled away by the worries and cares of this world so needed an infusion of the Truth that came via N.T. Wright and Surprised by Hope. There will still be days of struggle. There will probably still be days when I find my hope in need of refreshing. But now I stand stronger, wiser, more firmly convinced of Whom I have believed, of the reality of His resurrection, and of the wonderful, redeeming move of God that has been sweeping the planet since the day Jesus rose from the dead.

Glory, halleluiah. What a Savior! I have been surprised by Hope.


[1] Ibid, 56.
[2] Ibid, 26.
[3] Ibid, 81,85.
[4] Ibid, 93.
[5] Ibid, 102.
[6] Ibid, 121.
[7] Ibid, 185.
[8] Ibid, 192-193.
[9] Ibid, 264.

Surprised by Hope - Part 1

for the Essentials Blue In Worship Theology Certificate Course with Dan Wilt

As the wife of an ex-Christian agnostic, there are days when my faith feels shaky, when I wonder (again) if there is any validity to my husband’s doubts, when I wonder if what I’ve chosen to believe is really true. Most days what anchors me is the experience of a relationship with Christ that has sustained me the better part of my life. But there are days when the intellectual arguments replay in my thoughts and doubts creep in.

Enter Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. I wasn’t having “one of those days” when I started reading it, but as the words began to soak into my soul, I found myself settling somewhere deep inside. This particular season of life has been so crazy that I didn’t even notice the internal swirlings as needing to be settled. I hadn’t even had time to acknowledge their existence, much less analyze the source.

The reality is, though, that my hope had been waning, and I didn’t even know it.

N.T. Wright begins by asking: “First, what is the ultimate Christian hope. Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?”[1] What is this hope that fuels all we are to do as Christians? Answering these questions is a matter of “thinking straight about God and His purposes for the cosmos and about what God is doing right now, already as a part of those purposes.”[2]

Straight thinking. It really begins there. Having renewed thinking, getting the right thoughts about God and who He is is essential to a vibrant and healthy relationship with the Triune God. In this 2-part post I am going to explore some of the ideas put forth in Surprised by Hope that have helped to restore hope in my life.

My view of death and resurrection are key to sustaining straight thinking about God and His Kingdom. Is death an enemy or “welcome friend”?[3] According to Scripture, death is an enemy that was conquered at the cross. The Platonic view has invaded Christian thinking, however, causing us to devalue this present world, our physical bodies, and to think of them as somehow shabby or shameful. With this view, death is welcomed as an escape from this world.[4]

But is Heaven just a place we go to when we die? If so, then shouldn’t we welcome death so that we can go to heaven to be with God? Wright points out that such a view of heaven limits our understanding of God. Heaven is God’s Kingdom, and it’s not just somewhere we go when we die. Heaven is “the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life…God’s dimension.”[5] It is His rule coming on earth as it is in Heaven.

So where does the ultimate Christian hope lie? While glorious and certainly wonderful, Heaven is not it. Our hope lies in the event of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and the new creation that was birthed in that moment.

Not found in paganism, the idea of resurrection was unique to Jewish and later to Christian thought.[6] For the first-century Jew, however, resurrection was thought to be a sweeping event for all of God’s people that would bring God’s Kingdom here on earth as in Heaven. With Christianity, resurrection became two events: 1) Jesus – one person in the middle of history and 2) believers on the last day.[7]

For my husband, the resurrection is one of the key points of contention. Most agnostic literature around our house brings it into question and categorizes it as a tale told by the disciples in order to explain away an awkward situation: the death of Jesus, the supposed Messiah.

What is interesting to note is that the Jews did not ever anticipate a messiah who would die, much less one who would raise from the dead. When Jesus spoke of raising from the dead, it would have confused the disciples who were thinking of the resurrection as one event for all of God’s people, not one that their teacher would experience before them. “No Jew with any idea of how the language of messiahship worked could have possibly imagined, after his crucifixion, that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Lord’s anointed. But from very early on, as witnessed by what may be pre-Pauline fragments of early creedal belief, the Christians affirmed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, precisely because of his resurrection.”[8] (to be continued)

1 N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperCollins Press, 2008), 5.
2 Ibid, 5.
3 Ibid, 17.
4 Ibid, 26.
5 Ibid, 19.
6 Ibid, 42.
7 Ibid, 45.
8 Ibid, 47-48.

Praying the Prayers of Others

I did not grow up in a tradition that used or truly valued the use of prayers written by others. The only exception would be the Lord's Prayer which was used because, of course, it was written by Jesus. The spontaneous or "unique" prayer was what I was taught, learning to pray in public, putting my thoughts to God into words to be spoken, on-the-fly aloud in a group. Although I don't think anyone actually ever said this to me, I grew up thinking that this type of praying must be superior to reciting prayers or even pre-writing a prayer to pray outloud at a later time. And this type of thinking has engendered a type of pride within me because I know how to pray aloud, on the spot.

Not pretty.

Today as I was listening to an interview with N.T. Wright, something he said nailed me between the eyes regarding this pride that's been growing in my heart over the years. He says that to use the prayers of others is actually a sign of humility, allowing someone else's words to express some longing within my own heart and learning from them. He further encourages that if the Holy Spirit helped them to pray in that fashion, why not "ride in on their coat tails." [1]

These "old" prayers can serve as a structure, not that restricts or boxes in my prayers. Rather, they give me a framework from which to start, a springboard into areas of prayer and meditation that might not have occured to me before, offering me a fresh perspective of the Lord and His work in my life. The very speaking of them become a form of praise as I join in with another's expression of worship.

In these last couple of years, I have been discovering these ancient prayers and their writers and have been so blessed by them. But, to be honest, a part of me has struggled with using their writings and prayers in my "quiet time" because somehow I felt like it was less authentic since it wasn't spontaneous and uniquely from me.

Like a good friend of mine says: "We sing other people's songs. Why not pray other people's prayers?" I am looking forward to this next year, to discovering the prayers of the ancients (anyone older than I am) and being blessed by the move of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

1 "Reclaiming Worship: a training interview with N.T. Wright"