Hope is a person—Christ crucified and risen—and he is actualized in the life of the church through the Holy Spirit as she goes about her daily, routine business of preaching the gospel, baptizing, and serving communion. There we encounter life in the Christ who defeated death not be escaping from it but by coming through it in resurrection triumph. Only in that context—in the life of the church—can hope be found.

Over the last twelve months I have seen death touch the lives of too many friends. Not the expected kind of death—that of the elderly person full of years—but the hard, dirty deaths of those who should have lived for decades more. Of course, to the Christian no death is ‘natural’ in the strict sense of the word. But there is something deeply unnatural about a husband losing his wife before she is 60, still more about parents standing by the graveside of their teenage child. Though we have been as yet untouched by such tragedy, my wife and I find our devotional times preoccupied now with asking the Lord to comfort our numerous devastated friends.

These sad events put in perspective our current cultural moment. The temptation at a time of extreme polarization in the realm of earthly politics is to set aside the eternal for the temporal or, to put it more bluntly, to set aside hope for hopelessness. Whoever wins in November can at best only help to save the body.

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