Snippet: When Even Our Best Disappoints

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Justin Giboney, quoting a Twitter post by Jane Coaston:

“One of the most fascinating things about politics is that at no point are the truest believers ever happy. Not once. Not ever.”

Later in the same Church Politics Podcast (Nov. 24) he says:

“Once you get engaged in civics, sometimes you slowly start to realize that there’s no finality or ultimate conclusions in human accomplishments. The best of our accomplishments are usually reversible or corruptible. Even the greatest policies that we’ve been able to enact, none of them have ended human suffering and none of them will ever end human suffering.”

This is a follow-up to my sermon from this past weekend. I wanted to include some of these thoughts but I had to make cuts, not add to the sermon.

As I said this weekend, “waiting hopefully” strengthens our hope in difficult times.

To wait hopefully means we do the work Christ called us to do in the world. Part of that is the difficult work of restorative justice.

But involvement in restorative justice without the distinctly Christian hope of the new creation and God “putting the world to rights” (N.T. Wright’s phrase) can lead to deeper hopelessness. Our biggest efforts and biggest wins for justice are always “reversible and corruptible,” even in the individuals who are helped.

As Christians, we simply don’t get a pass on seeking justice or on living hope-filled lives.

We don’t get to say despondently, “What difference will it make anyway in the end.”

Nor do we get a pass on true, enduring happiness.

And most of us don’t want to get a pass. Most of us, given a choice, would not choose hopelessness.

We have a hope on which to set our eyes and our hearts, hope that will not be reversed or corrupted.

Ultimately, that hope is set in God himself.

Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash