My journey today led me into a good discussion of Jurgen Multmann's "theology of hope". It didn't happen along the trail, as is often the case, but in the upper room of a brew pub where I meet with kindred spirits every other week. At our last gathering, we sipped on Reinhold Niebuhr's profound "realism" when it comes to the question of how capable human beings are of making progress in our pilgrimage here on earth. Our friend Andrew shared an article about Niebuhr that he had written for the Christian Century called "This American Mess". In it, he starts out by saying: "As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, the U.S. finds itself in a mess of historic proportions." And then he adds: "This mess is profoundly embarrassing because it is of our own making and therefore one that could have been avoided." I went home thinking of my friend Marty's blog, which is called "The Progress of Pilgrimage" and I remembered why I liked that name. If she had called it "The Pilgrim's Progress", followers of Niebuhr would cringe, and rightly so! There is simply no evidence that we, as human beings, are progressing when it comes to overcoming our sinful nature and putting ourselves on the right path. But that does not give justice to despair. Nor does it bind us to this present darkness. In our daily pilgrimage, we are pulled into the future by a force beyond our own. Call it what you may. For me, it is the power of God to make all things new. In God, who journeyed through death into resurrected life, our pilgrimage is one that is always "forward moving and forward looking", as Jurgen Moltmann says in the book of his that we discussed tonight called "Theology of Hope". "Hope does not take things as they happen to stand or lie," Moltmann says,"but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change." I think this is why I have become so drawn to the metaphor and to the experience of pilgrimage in recent years. Pilgrimage is, by nature, forward looking. And it is, by the grace of God, always progressing! My favorite words of Moltmann come in the introduction to the book. "The believer is not set at the high noon of life," he says, "but at the dawn of a new day at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come, grapple with each other. Hence the believer does not simply take the day as it comes, but looks beyond the day to the things which according to the promise of the One who is the creator ex nihilo and raiser of the dead are still to come." The progress of pilgrimage, indeed!
