Saturday Faith: Moving through the Crisis of Hopelessness

By Charles Ensminger

Saturday Faith deals with the times between Friday and Sunday which, in Christian parlance, are associated with Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Yet, what can be said about the time between the loss of one hope and the emergence of something new? What about the moments of hopelessness?
In Saturday Faith the issue of hopelessness is examined as both an issue found in the Bible and as an experience through which one can travel. Hopelessness is actually a part of the journey of faith. Saturday Faith sets out to examine the stages of faith and demonstrate how one's theology can fall apart in crisis. In this assessment, one can begin to recognize that, even in places of hopelessness, there is more faith to be found in those Saturday times.
Saturday Faith shows how Job, the disciples, and even Jesus experienced hopelessness. What the reader can hear in these pages that if one finds themselves walking through a "Saturday time" in life, they are not as hopeless or alone as they might feel. It may require a shift in thinking, but Saturday is not where the story ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jul 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666707205

Charles Ensminger

Charles Ensminger is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and has served as a pastor for more than twenty-five years. In addition to his work in the parish, he is an adjunct professor of religion at Tennessee Wesleyan University. He is also the author of Crafting the Sermon: A Beginner’s Guide to Preaching and Saturday Faith: Moving through the Crisis of Hopelessness.

Book preview

Introduction

What things? And they said to him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

(Luke

24

:

19–21

a¹)

The Idea of Hopelessness

The story of the road to Emmaus is profound. Often characterized as a post-resurrection story, the narrative of the walk to Emmaus contains an emphatic declaration of resignation and hopelessness. In this narrative there is found the moment when we hear these two followers of Jesus state that they had hoped. Right there, contained in the word had, is the poignancy of their words. Had. They do not hold this hope any longer.

These two disciples, venturing on the road to Emmaus, have lost hope. In particular, they have lost the hope that Jesus will be the one to redeem Israel. It is important to reflect on the fact that the author of Luke uses the word redeem and redemption only in 1:68, 2:38—prior to Jesus’ birth—and in 24:21. The word, as used here, means, in the context of the Old Testament, the reestablishment of the relationship between God and God’s people. In the New Testament, in particular in the Gospel of Luke, there has been added to that idea the salvation and redemption of creation through the death of Jesus.² As the Christian hymn O Little Town of Bethlehem puts it, The hopes and fears of all the years were to be met in the person of Jesus. The words of these two on the road to Emmaus suggest they believe that hope to be dashed as they express their hope in the past tense. Further, they go on to say, It is now the third day since this happened.³

Three days! For those three days, the tragedy of Jesus’ death had weighed upon them, finally reaching the point where their hope had been broken.

Jesus, at this point in the narrative, remains dead in the minds of these two. All the promises and dreams on which they had apparently staked so much remain unfulfilled. These two, on the road, are coming to terms with the fact that their situation in life has not changed. Their hearts are broken, the future uncertain, and the past is no longer as clear as it had been three days earlier. It is as if these two on the road are saying, We had hoped. We do not so hope now. They speak from a place of resigned hopelessness: what they had anticipated, hoped for, and desired had not come to pass. Now they were having to reassess their hopes, as well as their beliefs.

For many, hopelessness seems anathema, if not completely heretical, to the Christian faith. And yet, there are tremendous examples of hopelessness throughout the Bible, from the Prophets to the words of Jesus himself. While it may seem anathema, it is, nonetheless, not absent.

In the book of Job, perhaps one of the most profound works of theology that wrestles with the question and state of hopelessness, the character of Job laments, My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope.⁴ Likewise, the psalmist writes, my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; thou dost lay me in the dust of death.⁵ Even Jesus will weep and ask God to change the course of his life. And yet, while Jesus gives his consent to follow the will of God, even that does not keep him from crying out with the psalmist, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?⁶

And yet hopelessness is demonstrative of investment. To be hopeless means that you had hope and that you had a deep investment in an issue, situation, idea, or even in a particular person. For a person to experience hopelessness, there had to have been a vested interest in something happening a particular way, someone fulfilling a hope, or having a particular outcome in mind. Hopelessness can result from that investment failing and, for our purposes, that investment can be a theological one.

Hopelessness also comes from the fact that the individual feels (or once felt) a compassion about life, about people or a person, or about the unfolding of events. The fact of their compassion is perhaps most evidently and paradoxically demonstrated in their hopelessness. Hopelessness often stems from a broken heart, and a heart invested is a heart with the potential for being broken. One has to have had hope to lose it. This is certainly the case for the two on the road to Emmaus.

I wish to point out that in the midst of hopelessness, there comes an opportunity—unwanted, to be sure—in which one can reassess their theological constructs and recognize that the belief or theology that has held them through the stable times in life has seemed to fail in times of crisis. As Robert Wuthnow explains, sociologists generally assume that people believe in God [or hold particular theological beliefs] because they get something out of it. Further, that belief provides a sense of comfort and even explanation. Injustices, sufferings, and tribulations, as well as positive moments, can all be acceptably made sense of via these theological ideas.⁷ This is, not to be too flippant, true until it isn’t. That point is when we find that our theology, our constructions and ideologies of what should be, falter. We find, in this moment, that the grounding in which we placed so much confidence now eludes us. This fair-weather theology is something that is a part of all of us. We all have those ideas that have served us well so long as all things are well and remain the same. When things change or life shifts, those old touchstones often fail to be comforting and, in some ways, can become quite problematic.

There is the adage that the opposite of faith is doubt. Doubt is, likewise, often associated with hopelessness. It works like this: you have no hope because you doubt. You doubt because you do not have faith. If you had faith there would be no doubt and, therefore, there would be hope.

This does not seem to be the case. Instead, the opposite of faith is not doubt: the opposite of faith is certitude. As Michael Novak expresses, Biblical faith demands putting childhood behind, and adolescence, and the lazy-ness of young adulthood. It requires an appetite for bravery of going into unknown territories alone to wrestle against inner demons, and a willingness to experience darkness, if darkness comes.⁸ The comfort of certitude can effectively prevent faith and resists hopelessness. Certitude allows for no mystery, no possibilities, no vulnerability, and insists on only one way of being. Faith allows for mystery. At least it could. A faith based on certitude does not and cannot allow for mystery or ambiguity. Faith based on certitude finds the idea of resigned hopelessness as an impossibility, even a sin.

This does not have to be the case.

1

. All biblical quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

2

. See "Redemption" in Achtemeier, Harper’s Bible Dictionary.

3

. Luke

24

:

21

b.

4

. Job

7

:

6

.

5

. Ps

22

:

15

.

6

. Mark

15

:

34

.

7

. Wuthnow, God Problem,

97

.

8

. Novak, No One Sees God,

2

.

Part 1

1

Hopelessness and the Stages of Faith

In 1981, Dr. James Fowler of Emory University wrote a book called Stages of Faith, in which he suggested that there are six stages that religious people may experience in their spiritual and psychological development. Granted, no one system works for every individual, but his ideas were grounded in