Hope is Not a Strategy

At the end of 2008, progressive America was sloshing in optimism. Eight long years of a Republican Commander-in-Chief from Texas were ending, and a liberal young senator from Chicago, Black and charismatic, was just elected to the highest office in the land. For progressives, everything was going to be better now, barriers were being broken and, at last, hope seemed real. Which is, of course, exactly what Barack Obama had campaigned on—hope and change.

There was the famous Obama “HOPE” poster (and the myriad snarky parodies), the “Yes, we can!” chants at campaign rallies, and of course, the campaign slogan, Change We Can Believe In. As then-Senator Obama said in his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, “…change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington.”

But not everyone was on board with Obama’s upbeat campaign branding. In a speech at the Republican National Convention a couple of months before the election, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani offered some pithy counsel (gratis) for Obama:

“Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.”

Well! Talk about opening up a can of good ole American pragmatism! The "hope and change" emperor had no clothes, and America’s mayor wasn’t about to help him pretend.

American pragmatism declares that if you intend to succeed you must form goals, develop plans and strategies for reaching those goals, and you must enact those plans and strategies systematically and relentlessly. You must be prepared to track your progress and approach your success one deliberate step at a time. Do not enter the business world with a headful of dreams and a heart full of hope and expect Wall Street to gift you a posh retirement. You must do more than hope. You must strategize, act, and plan if you wish to succeed in the real world.

In business, hope is not a strategy.

In politics… maybe.

But for the Christian, hope is not only a strategy but also an anchor.

That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; (Hebrews 6:18, 19, emphasis added)

If there is anything that this world desperately needs, an anchor for the soul must be it. If anchors for the soul could be packaged and sold, you would do a brisk business whatever your strategy. Christian hope is action, it is a plan, and it is a weapon. It is a thing which not only empowers the Christian to evangelize, but also takes on an evangelistic power all its own.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: (1 Peter 3:15)

Peter seems to suggest that Christian optimism and positivity will be the kind of fascinating thing that draws strangers to inquire about it. Of course, you may be a quiet optimist. Let’s not misread Peter to be baptizing a certain personality type, (Type A, preferably) as much how-to-be-an-evangelist teaching often seems to assume. Introvert or extrovert, there will be an over-arching orientation of hope for the Christian. Much like love, that hope’s presence or absence will be sensed by those around us whether we intend it or not.

When Hope Fails

Notwithstanding Giuliani’s jibes, Obama understood and spoke of the hard struggle that must accompany hope. In his 2008 victory speech he included these cautionary lines; “…this victory alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance for us to make that change.” Those lines would prove prophetic. The 2008 election handed progressive America a new Democratic president, with a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress just for good measure. For Obama supporters, progressive hope and change seemed imminent and real. But just two short years later, Republicans would flip the House of Representatives, and Obama’s progressive hope and change agenda ran headlong into the realities of political opposition and would stay there for Obama’s remaining six years as President.

“That hopey, changey stuff,” as Sarah Palin famously mocked Obama supporters at the 2010 National Tea Party Convention, suddenly wasn’t working out very well. Hope, as a bit of inspired campaign messaging, got Obama elected.

But hope soon fell prey to the fickle power dynamics of Washington D. C., and Obama’s presidency would be succeeded by Donald Trump’s, who promptly set out to make good on his own campaign promises to dismantle the “damage” (as he saw it) of Obama’s legacy. It was now conservative America’s turn to hope, but four years later, Obama’s former Vice President defeated Donald Trump, and back the pendulum came.

What is the lesson in all this? Is Christian hope as fickle and empty as political hope? The Christian can certainly expect negative experiences and the emotions that often follow. There is no sin in that. Some of the most powerful and hopeful scriptures were written from valleys of despair and failure. We can expect to be visited by anger, fear, or cynicism. Many have endured terrible sorrow and loss.

Opposition comes out of nowhere from friend and foe alike, it seems. But the Christian’s hope, unlike American politics, is not on a four-year cycle. It is grounded in a far bigger picture that dwarfs the universe and time itself.

What grounds and justifies such a large hope? What is that answer which Peter speaks of, “for the hope that is in you”? Just two chapters earlier Peter gave that answer:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away… (1 Peter 1:3-4)

For the Christian, hope is not only a strategy, not only an anchor for the soul, but also fundamentally a Person. The resurrection of Jesus Christ provides the power of life in the face of death. He is the hope of new opportunities, of second chances and do-overs, of redemption and healing. He is the hope not only of grace and strength for today, but also of the promise of a new heaven and a new earth in which God’s creation will at last realize that unimaginably joyous reality that God has been planning all along.

The deliberate orientation of the Christian mind is towards hope, personified in Jesus. It doesn’t ignore, deny, or create shame about the sadness and anger we feel sometimes, but it consciously refuses to give in to it. It is bent towards the expectation of good things and healing and celebration in the new heavens and earth, and that orientation offers the Christian a kind of success that the most ambitious man of action cannot replicate.

Horatio Spafford famously penned the lines of “It is Well With My Soul” after losing all four of his young daughters in a shipwreck. This Christian hope is a unique weapon that enables followers of Christ to not necessarily to bypass suffering but pass through it and live. Hope teaches us to overcome suffering with the confidence that life is not “nasty, brutish, and short” after all, as Hobbes said, but has meaning and significance far beyond the suffering we live with.

The living, resurrected Hope who securely anchors us to the eternal realities “within the veil,” which as yet we only partially understand, will never be a concrete anchor in the style of American pragmatism; He will always remain hope this side of eternity. But He is a living, personified Hope with eyes that are seeing and still kind, hands that are scarred and still extended, and a body that the grave cannot hold. Hope is not yet the attainment of final redemption, but the confident journeying towards it in the company of One who makes the journey, not just bearable, but beautiful.