Hope Rising! Hope is a funny thing, we simply can’t live without it. I am on this side of the hospital now with my brother being the one who is a resident. No one told me how hard it is to be on this side of things. So I have had my share of feeling almost undone. The one thing that has given me the most hope is that I have been there and know that things don’t get better fast—you just lay there and languish. However, that is the most hopeful thing! The pneumonia doesn’t go away fast. To not get worse is actually a good thing. You are somehow muddling toward health if you just don’t get worse.

I have lived in that existential reality for this week, and I have lived in the exile and return this week as well. Both fill me with hope, kind of a muddling hope. In Ezra this week, we see a people utterly destroyed and taken as refugees into a strange land. Yet how do they manage to somehow keep their identity and not just become absorbed into the nations around them? Hope. They had the promise of God that they would be delivered. For Israel it always hinged on a promise: God will keep his promise of grace and love to us.

Along the way we will look at how God keeps his promises, and it is not typically by the miraculous but by God taking even the wickedness of men and weaving it into a better story. Nothing has changed really, has it? We still muddle along in uncertain times where we control very little, and yet we live with a greater promise than God’s ancient people had. We live with the hope that Jesus will heal all the brokenness of the world. And often all we can do is just hang on—in our grief, in our anger, in our shame—but hang on we must because the same God that brought his ancient people home promises to bring us home as well.

Hope to see you Sunday, live and in person or via livestream. I appreciate so much hearing from many of you weekly who have been with us online when you couldn’t be with us in person.

Oh, by the way, Josh and I talked and during Sunday School this week (yes, Sunday School starts back this week!), he will be giving an overview of the Exile. I really, really, really encourage you to come. This period of redemptive history is difficult to get your head around, and yet is crucial to understanding the world we see Jesus walking into when we come to the New Testament. Just as all the Old Testament is telling a story about Jesus, this one does so in a particular way.

Blessings,

Jim