Great God! Is this our certain doom? And are we still secure?

Still walking downward to the tomb, and yet prepared no more?

-Isaac Watts

By Colby Register

There’s no doubt that great uncertainty, consternation, and general weariness are found in today’s climate. Whether it’s economic or political, social or individual, voices are quick to assert that the times in which we’re living are “unprecedented.” There are many choruses who lament that great, extraordinary change is needed, nay demanded, in moments such as these; others plead for a “return to normalcy”, as if that was something that was ever constant or even agreed upon. Oscillating between anxiety and nostalgia, feverish attempts to fix the present and wistful thinking for a past that may never have existed, is where many in our society, and one might imagine the Church, find themselves.

It was in this milieu that I joined clergy, seminarians, discerners, and church leaders from across the globe at the RADVO conference hosted at Church of the Incarnation. RADVO convenes some of the most thoughtful theologians and speakers of our day – Ephraim Radner, Simeon Zahl, Wesley Hill, Amy Peeler, Tish Harrison Warren, etc. – to reflect on and discuss the prevailing witness of the Church “at all times and in all places.”

If your mind immediately envisions beleaguered clergy and frantic lay leaders discussing strategies to enact greater social change, bolster church attendance, or save dying institutions, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, what emerged over the course of three days was something far more fundamental, and far more hopeful: a reminder of the Church’s grounding in the living God, the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

Ephraim Radner, Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College in Canada, opened the conference with a characteristically striking image: the grasshopper. Drawing from Isaiah 40, Radner reflected on the paradox of Christian vocation in terms of smallness. The life of the Christian is not an escape from the ordinary into spiritual exceptionalism, but a deeper immersion into the ordinary life as the arena for Gods work. This, of course, stands as a sharp contrast to our cultural ethos in a World that always implores us to “achieve more, do better, and transcend your limits”, but we, as humans, know that this is not sustainable, nor something we could ever master. We, like grasshoppers, are creatures capable of both relative strength and innate destruction. Such is life: fragile, mixed, and ordinary. And yet, within our precarious smallness, the greatness of God is revealed, because “Our normal,” Radner said, “is bound up in Jesus.”

To bear God’s image is to hold within our brittle lives the magnitude of God Himself. The calling of those in ministry, and indeed of every Christian, is not to escape normalcy but to inhabit it as a testimony of hope; to become a living witness that God’s greatness dwells even, and especially, there. Vocation then, is not an endless demand for improvement but a grateful reception of what has already been given: the grace of God’s presence in our ordinary, tenuous, and uncertain lives.

Simeon Zahl, Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge in England, followed by lifting our gaze from the smallness of the present to the vast horizon of God’s future. In his lecture, “The Grammar of Christian Hope,” Zahl reminded us that hope is not simply an emotion but a theological structure rooted in God. Drawing on Romans 4, he asked, what kind of God stands behind Christian hope? The God who raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Zahl distinguished between optimism and hope. Optimism is a human calculation based on probabilities; hope is God’s future breaking into the present. Using the haunting landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, he showed how light on the horizon transforms even barren, wintry scenes. Quoting T. S. Eliot’s The Rock, he reminded us that in every moment “you live where two worlds cross.” Hope is living at that intersection, inhabiting the present with eyes fixed on the God whose future is certain.

Wesley Hill, Associate Professor at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan, pressed this vision into the depths of human experience. Hope, he argued, is forged precisely where our capacities end. It is not a vague wish that things will improve, but a trust in God’s promises joined to a deep longing for their fulfillment. “The angst of mortality,” Hill said, “has no solution in probabilities.” Christian hope faces the void honestly and relies in the God who creates where nothing else exists. It is born in the places where strategies falter and control slips away. In a world addicted to guarantees, our hope is radical, commending all to the One who raises the dead.

Do we then do nothing? Merely wait expectantly for a new day and retreat from a world that’s longing? By no means. In her keynote, “The Fecundity of Hope,” Amy Peeler, Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, reminded us that Christian hope is not passive postponement but active participation in God’s work. Using the image of welcoming a child into an uncertain world, she challenged the unease and hesitation that often governs ministry decisions today. To evangelize, disciple, and grow the family of God is precisely to act in hope, to know that our future, in God, is secure enough to risk unwavering love in the present. The Church’s willingness to welcome and nurture others, without hesitation or fear, is itself a hopeful witness, resisting the cultural impulse toward control and self-protection.

Tish Harrison Warren, author, columnist and priest in the Anglican Church of North America, closed the conference by bringing hope into the “furnace”; for like Sharach, Meschach, and Abednego, what gives us the strength for perseverance is not “faking it until we make it”, but looking up to see someone else, God, with us and present in promise. Channeling Dorothy Day, she reminded us that Christians more than ever, have a duty of delight, to practice endurance in the transformation of all things, knowing that in them God sees us and continues to bring forth the impetus of wholeness and joy. When we do something as simple as enjoying the little moments of the ordinary, the small moments of beauty, the miniscule echoes of love, we are indeed tasting the fullness of what is certain to be ours in the eternal home. Even as we do so, the Great Cloud of Witnesses, who dwell there in the fullness of God’s arms, implore us to hold on, and labor on, in ardent anticipation.

The great hymn “All My Hope on God Is Founded” names the reality and summation of all this. “Mortal pride,” “earthly glory,” “sword and crown” all falter and betray our trust. Though with great care and immense toil we seek to preserve “towers and temples,” all fall to dust eventually. Large they seem; small they are. Small we are. Yet within this smallness, the magnitude of God takes up residence, and “God’s power, hour by hour” becomes “(our) temple and (our) tower.” And, this kind of smallness, infused with God’s grandeur, is in the end all life is meant to be, and where true Hope is found.

Our hope cannot be in the greatness of our constructions, our strategies, or even our resolve. It is not in “our” radical vocations, but in the vocation of the One who has called, sustained, and redeemed us in the radical promise of the Kingdom of God. I know this because I’ve seen it. It was present in every coffee hour, in conversations of friends new and old, in the faces and smiles of people all over the globe, in the Word of God preached, and at the Table of God given. All of us, great and small, joined with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven in Dallas Texas, on three ordinary days in the normalcy of our uncertainty, to proclaim with one accord the greatness of the Lord; the Confidence that anchors us across every age. And the God who promised to “never leave us or forsake us”, who has led us to this point, was there to indeed remind us of Hope for years to come.

Colby Register is in discernment for Holy Orders and attends St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Dallas.