Preaching Hope: Lessons from Friedrich Schleiermacher

In the First Epistle of Peter, the author exhorts Christians to “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you ...” (1 Pet 3:15) Giving an account of one’s hope is a challenging task in the best of times. Yet, in moments of tragedy and extreme loss, this task can seem impossible, if not cruel. Demanding expressions of hope can inadvertently (or quite intentionally) shame people in moments of shaken faith. Is doubt in the face of tragedy a moral failure? Are fear and uncertainty manifestations of a weak faith? One might hope that familiarity with the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane would suffice to disabuse any Christian of such thoughts. Yet, it is a common occurrence to hear hope juxtaposed to fear and uncertainty as poles in a zero-sum game. It is an unfortunate reality that many Christians have been taught that having hope is synonymous with having certainty. In moments of tragedy, pastors and liturgical ministers are tasked with facilitating liturgies that defend and proclaim Christian hope. The purpose of this essay is to introduce a resource to help those charged with this daunting task. A sermon written by the nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian and pastor, Friedrich Schleiermacher, offers us a provocative example of how to preach hope in the face of tragedy. The sermon was published for the first time in English in 1977 in the Journal of Religion with translation and commentary by Albert Blackwell. This brief sermon can serve as a guide in how to avoid callously imputing emotions and using idolatry as a form of consolation. In what follows, I will show how the sermon deconstructs potentially harmful forms of hope and reconstructs a Christian hope that is pastorally and theologically fruitful. By integrating our pain, fear, and uncertainty into our worldview, we begin to construct a Christian hope that refuses to denigrate this world and commits us to our Christian vocation of divinizing this world.