The Audacity To Hope

I am currently reading — or more accurately listening to — Barack Obama’s book ‘The Promised Land’. Early in this book he mentions the inspiration of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s talk entitled ’The Audacity To Hope’. Obama himself wrote a book ‘The Audacity To Hope’, and intrigued by this, it seemed worth looking into.

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. describes George Frederic Watts's 1886 painting "Hope" in his sermon, "The Audacity to Hope." Here is a short extract ...

We think of being on top of the world as being in heaven. But when you look closely, all in fact is hell. The harpist is sitting there in rags. Her clothes are tattered as though she, herself, had been a victim of Hiroshima or Sharpeville. … Yet the artist dared to entitle this painting ‘Hope’.

When you look closer at what the artist did on the canvas – the illusion of power giving way to the reality of pain, you may ask, Isn’t that just the way it is with so many of us? We give the illusion of being in an enviable position, but when you look closer at our lives, what you begin to find is the reality of a pain sometimes too deep for the tongue to tell.

See, in spite of being on a world torn by war; in spite of being on a world destroyed by hate; in spite of being on a world devastated by distrust and decimated by disease; in spite of being on a world where famine and greed were uneasy bed partners; in spite of being on a world where apartheid and apathy fed the fires of racism … her harp all but destroyed except for that one string that was left – in spite of all these things, the woman had the audacity to hope. She had the audacity to hope and to make music and to praise God on the one string she had left.

We must realise the frontiers of death, that there is no more chance of our entering the life of God than a mineral has of entering the vegetable kingdom, we can only enter into the Kingdom of God if God will stoop down and lift us up. That is exactly what Jesus Christ promises to do.

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