The Stubborn Kind of Hope

Gospel: Jn 11:21-27

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

Sermon: The Rev. Dr. Maryann Amor

“Hope isn’t the same as optimism. It isn’t about denying reality or pretending everything will work out. Hope is the stubborn insistence that even if the ending isn’t happy, there can still be meaning.”

Scholar Kate Bowler, whose work is the focus of our upcoming Advent series, has written extensively on hope. Having come face to face with her own mortality following a diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer, she is very real about what hope is — and what it is not. As she writes, hope doesn’t mean we deny the reality of what is going on around us: the terrible things we see in the news, or the pain we experience in our own lives.

Hope isn’t living with rose-coloured glasses, where everything is always bunnies, flowers, and rainbows. Instead, hope is something stubborn. It is a firm insistence that even if things don’t work out the way we would want them to, there is still meaning. There is still something more. This is hope.

When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha faced that same stark reality — the limits of human life and the deep pain of grief. Like all who have lost someone they love, they struggled to see where hope could possibly be found. They had to keep going without Lazarus. They had to find a way to live in the shadow of loss, to hold on to that stubborn belief that even in pain, there could still be meaning.

And for them, that meaning was found in Jesus and the promise of resurrection. As Jesus tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” Jesus is saying that even in the face of death, there is something more — that love and life are not defeated. And Martha, in her grief, still finds the courage to say, “Yes, Lord, I believe.”

That is the voice of hope — not naïve or easy, but persistent, faithful, and stubborn.

And today, as we mark Remembrance Sunday, we are invited to embody that same kind of hope. We remember those whose lives were cut short by war — sons and daughters, friends and loved ones — and we face again the stark reality of human conflict and loss. Like Mary and Martha, we grieve. Like them, we also search for meaning.

And so we hold on with a stubborn hope — the hope that their lives, like Lazarus’ life, like all of our lives, do not end in death. The hope that love and sacrifice are not forgotten. The hope that even in a world still torn by violence, peace is possible. That resurrection will come. That death is not the end.

Hope does not mean pretending that the world is fine, or that everything will work out as we wish. Instead, it is insisting that even in its brokenness, there can still be redemption — that life, in all its beauty and fragility, still has meaning.

So as we move on in our service to our act of remembrance, and as you mark Remembrance Day this Tuesday, be people of hope — not naïve hope, but the stubborn hope that Bowler speaks of:

“Hope isn’t the same as optimism. It isn’t about denying reality or pretending everything will work out. Hope is the stubborn insistence that even if the ending isn’t happy, there can still be meaning.”