What is hope?

August 24, 2025 • Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Lesson: Ezekiel 37: 1-10 (NRSVUE, adapted)
Rev. Dorothee Benz, PhD, Guest Preacher

[You can view the full worship video recording at: https://youtu.be/gOwtQVm2jeE]

I had the privilege this year of taking a pilgrimage to Selma, Alabama, the site of the most consequential campaign of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for the right to vote. There, in 1965, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, hundreds of African Americans were brutally assaulted by police on what became known as “Bloody Sunday” as they dared to march for their rights. Five months later the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. I was there in Alabama with Dr. Timothy Atkins-Jones, the homiletics professor at Union Theological Seminary, and our class on “preaching and protest.” It was an incredibly powerful experience, and I want to share with you this morning some of the highlights and insights I gained from that time.

 Our trip began in Montgomery at the Legacy Museum, a museum documenting the history of oppression from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, and a visit to the lynching memorial a few miles down the road. It’s impossible to describe the impact of the memorial, walking through endless rows of steel monuments with the names of thousands upon thousands of people brutally tortured and murdered. Each of them a person, like me, flesh and blood, with hopes and dreams and families. Each of them, not like me, Black Americans, murdered by people like me, white. Over at the museum there was a huge wall of newspaper headlines that reported on the lynchings, often approvingly. Headlines like, "John Lee Killed for Talking Too Much" and "Insulting Talk Over a Phone Gets Negro Lynched."

 At the memorial site there is an inscription on the wall vowing to remember the victims. Amidst several deeply moving lines, this one stopped me in my tracks: “With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice.” Hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

This feels like a word in this moment – this moment of rising fascism, of genocide, of unchecked white supremacy, and unfathomable cruelty. This moment when masked government agents are abducting and disappearing our neighbors. When Christian bullies are tormenting transgender children and denying them healthcare. When science is replaced by ideology and history by white supremacist lies. When our government is shoveling money at the obscenely rich while condemning countless thousands to death by stealing their healthcare. And antisemitism is weaponized to defend genocide while our government funds the slaughter and starvation of babies.

 Hopelessness feels reasonable. But standing there in Montgomery, reading the names of the slain, I was challenged to understand that hopelessness is the enemy of justice.  We cannot give up hope. To do so is to give up the very possibility of justice.

 To fully appreciate those words at the lynching memorial, we need to step back for a moment from the horrors of our own time and ground ourselves in historical perspective. We need to understand the true terror of the times for which those words were written. A time when Black people in the American South lived under rigid segregation, separate and brutally unequal, grinding poverty, the denial of the right to vote, and the constant threat of the lynch mob should they step out of line in any way. A time when the mayors and governors and sheriffs and judges and county clerks were all aligned against them, with no recourse.

Despite the depth of that oppression and the incredible danger of even the slightest resistance, though, African Americans wrote the finest chapter of our history in these dark years, from the Underground Railroad to the legal brilliance of the NAACP’s attack on segregation to the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham – and Selma. If they could see that hopelessness was the enemy of justice, then surely we can, indeed we must. If they could have hope, we can, we must, too.

 What does it mean to hope?

 To begin to answer that question, let’s take a look at this morning’s scripture. Let me set the stage for you. The author of Ezekiel is writing during the time of the Babylonian exile, when ancient Judea had been conquered and occupied. The Babylonians had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, the focal point of religious as well as political and economic life for the Judeans. They also deported thousands of people, forcing them into exile. This is the backdrop for the vision that Ezekiel relates in chapter 37.  In this vision God shows Ezekiel a valley of dry bones, representing the hopelessness of the Judeans’ plight in exile. Not just dead bodies, people so dead so long that nothing is left but dry bones. And God asks Ezekiel, “mortal, can these bones live?” and Ezekiel says, “O God, you know.”

O God, you know.

There is so much in those four words. O God, you know they can. O God, you know that you can make them live. O God, yes!

 God then proceeds to give Ezekiel step by step instructions to bring these dead bones back to life. God says, “prophesy to these bones,” prophesy, and Ezekiel does. Step by step he prophesies them back to movement, back to flesh and sinews, back to living breath in them. Ezekiel commands the wind on behalf of God, “breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” And they live.

This, my friends, is what hope looks like. It looks like standing in front of a valley of dry bones and believing they can live again because we believe that God can make them live. It looks like prophesying when God tells us to prophesy. It looks like acting when God calls us to act.

Let me tell you what hope looked like in Selma six decades ago. It looked like Bernard Lafayette, a young organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) standing in the SNCC office in 1962 studying a map of the South with a big black X across Selma because SNCC had decided “the white folks are too mean and the black folks are too afraid,” as their researcher had put it – and Bernard Lafayette deciding that he was going to take on the challenge of anchoring a voting rights campaign there anyway. It looked like Lafayette spending two whole years organizing in Selma, day in and day out, being thrown in jail, surviving an assassination attempt, working tirelessly with local activists to educate and train community members to go to the courthouse to register to vote. It looked like starting with eight courageous individuals and painstakingly adding to their number until there were mass meetings of hundreds every week. It looked like local youth stepping up to play a leadership role in the campaign. It looked like Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference coming to Selma in 1965 to help bring the campaign to a climax on that bridge, when hundreds faced down police clubs and whips and horses and tear gas.

I stood on that bridge sixty years later, a few months ago, thinking about the immense courage and determination that the people of Selma had. Thinking about Barnard Lafayette’s words in his memoir when he said that his task in Selma had been to find a way to free people from “the handcuffs of hopelessness.” Because hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

I stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with some friends from our class for a long time that afternoon. The following day we all took part in the annual commemorative march across the bridge – thousands of people from all over, all of us together retracing the footsteps of history, each of us thinking about what role we have to play in our own time to move the cause of freedom forward. People sang so many songs on the bridge – behind me I could hear “We Shall Overcome,” up ahead on my left “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around,” and right next to me “We’ve Come this Far by Faith.”

That one has been playing in my head ever since:

 We’ve come this far by faith
Leaning on our God
Trusting in God’s Holy Word
God’s never failed us yet
Singing oh, oh, oh, can’t turn around
We’ve come this far by faith.

There’s nothing like standing at the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge singing the words “can’t turn around" to bring home the power and the courage of those marchers 60 years ago as they stood in that very place looking at hundreds of armed state troopers.

When Bernard Lafayette got to Selma, there were 156 registered Black voters in a county of 15,000 Black residents. When he left there were more than 9,000. Breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

Hope is a practice. It is daring to act like God calls us to. It is prophesying to dry bones. It is breathing life into people handcuffed by hopelessness. It is working tirelessly, day and night, to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.

Oh God, you know.

 Amen.

Copyright (c) 2025 - Dorothee Benz
All rights reserved.