Keep Practicing Hope

Opinion

by

Practicing Faith

The Christian year begins with Advent, and I would start by sharing a story about hope as we engage 2026 as a year of practicing hope in the Northern Illinois–Wisconsin Area.

I’ve been thinking about Isaiah 16:11: “. . . my heart plays sadly like a harp for Moab.” Another version reads, “my heart quivers like a harp.” Moab was suffering, Isaiah says, like orphaned birds pushed from a nest. We know God is impacted by God’s experience of our suffering. Advent is the season in which we affirm that the one who knows our needs and limitations comes among us for our healing.

Advent affirms the hope that God’s word is always breaking in for our good.

Yesterday I spoke to an immigrant pastor. This pastor told me that when he arrived, he met a prominent leader of the church, and the pastor held out his hand to shake hands but that the leader wouldn’t shake his hand. The pastor tried again the next week. The leader began to avoid such interactions. The pastor prayed about that relationship and tried to improve it, but nothing seemed to work.

Many immigrant clergy will tell you their days hold not only rejection in the world, but resistance in the church. And yet as he told me his story, he smiled and said, “But I kept practicing hope.”

Unfortunately, the leader was diagnosed with a serious illness, and decline was rapid. The pastor did what he usually did in such cases: he brought the leader communion. Next was a very basic question: “Do you want communion?”

What a fine question to reflect on: Do you want communion?

He did. After communion, the pastor did what he always did: he reached out to take the leader’s hand and pray. This time, the leader took his hand. This pastor wanted me to know how much it meant to his ministry to practice hope, and for me to share his story because God is working among us to help us grow in love.

Only 2.6 percent of the immigrants disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Broadview Processing Center have a criminal record, yet many hundreds are detained. The suffering of those detained is extreme. None has access to a clergy person or family. Health care is offered in exchange for signing a document that gets them sent to a country they have never seen. Mothers who are in the U.S. legally are ripped from their babies and many not yet seen again. Members of The United Methodist Church who are here legally and without criminal records are in these detention centers.

The body of Christ is shackled. The body of Christ is being disappeared. Soon the body of Christ will read about innkeepers and Bethlehem and ask how we would welcome Jesus if the Christmas story unfolded on us.

“My whole being quivers like a harp for Moab.” In this text we see a Wesleyan openness to be changed by suffering, to be changed by relationship, to be changed by God’s call forward, for the expansion from love of those near us to love of otherness, which is the way of God's love. Isaiah, like the strings of an instrument, quivers on the way to being changed. What would it mean for you to allow your whole being to quiver with pathos? Have these days changed you in some way?

I believe hope is a practice of God’s creative freedom at play in human creativity and freedom.

I believe hope knows the present is held with a comma, and that God’s word is always breaking in for good. We as the church may be smaller than we once were, but I believe we are not too small to steward the moral imagination of Jesus.

I believe that as long as we have a relationship with Jesus Christ, we have a relationship with hope. May these days of Advent open you, lead you to be changed, and may we quiver with pathos until we make music with hope. I wish you a blessed Advent, one that allows us to be changed by our suffering until we sing.

Bishop Dan Schwerin is episcopal leader of the Northern Illinois-Wisconsin Area of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished from the Northern Illinois Conference website.