Please allow me to take a break from my educational journey to offer a post of hopeful expectation for 2023 (a day early, no less). We’ve been through a lot these past few years, my friends. These past years have made us evaluate the progress and pace that has marked our collective life. But, alas, it has revealed that we believe that progress and accomplishment will deliver us from the quagmires in which we find ourselves. The very tool of our self-salvation ends up becoming the very tool of our self-execution. Something is wrong…we know it, and hope may be the most courageous virtue of the day, it we have the courage to follows its leading.
In 2015, David Brooks, op-ed contributor to The New York Times, wrote a spectacular book entitled, The Road to Character. In an April op-ed piece of that same year, he spelled out the main tension of the book, the very tension of character, as one that vacillates between resume and eulogy virtues:
It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
Progress has simultaneously given us the greatest achievements in science and technology while also allowing for the ethnic cleansing and/or displacement of entire people groups. Absent a moral compass, progress moves forward in any direction—and often not towards the ways of God.
Progress wed with the pervasive pragmatism of a western culture mired in individualism, consumerism, and materialism slowly erodes the souls of Jesus followers. The appeal of “resume virtues” rewards us more instantaneously than “eulogy virtues.” We fear that if we don’t devote ourselves to the former, then the world will pass us by. A spiritual FOMO (fear of missing out) grips us. Anxiety wins the day and produces knee jerk reactions absent the spiritual/moral fortitude of critical reflection.
But the grand goal for Christians is not an easier life, a selfish life, or simply getting ahead. We live lives that should mean something to others—we should embody hope. After all, we are to live lives that matter long after the person who embodied the life is gone.
And if hope can penetrate war bunkers and prison walls, how much more can it create a people who are merciful and shrewd in their engagement with the world around them. To a world of progress, we live by the challenge of Jesus when he sent out the first disciples: “Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16, NIV). We are a people of continual Advent in a world that has forgotten the risen Christ. Advent calls us away from the pack of “resume virtues” into the sanctity of lives devoted to “eulogy virtues.” The latter virtues reveal where we placed our hope. The former reveal where we got out money. Advent reminded us of a different story that marks our lives. The new year is our opportunity to put what we have learned into practice.
Now when I mention “hope” I fear you think I mean “optimism.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Optimism claims everything will be all right by not facing the insidious nature of reality around us. We DO live in a world of pandemics, wars, violence, sickness, death, decay, and the potential of annihilation. Our universe is speeding towards its own decline and destruction. One day the sun will burn out all of its hydrogen fuel, turn into a red giant, and collapse. Then our cosmos will cease to be capable of producing life. Progress is great so long as we realize that our progress is contained within a meta-progress of which we have no control.
Hope (surprisingly) accepts [this] reality, the poverty of spirit that underlies all fear and instigates all tragedies…and looks to something larger—hope always tries to piece together meaning in a world searching for understanding. Hope is tethered to a narrative far bigger than our brief recorded history—a history that is very short (a few thousand years) in relation to the timespan of our universe (14 billion years). Before you believe in God, you must reckon with the multi-billion year history in which you find your individual, highly localized life. The late physicist/theologian John Polkinghorne offered remarkable vistas of hope from the intersection of quantum physics and theology. In an Advent devotional he once wrote:
Religion has to take these gloomy predictions with absolute seriousness. To do so raises the question of what God is actually up to in creation, if eventually it is all to end so miserably. The only answer – but a totally sufficient answer – is that science cannot tell us the whole story, for it does not know about the everlasting faithfulness of God. In that steadfast love of the creator for creatures lies the only possible ground for the hope of a destiny beyond death, either for ourselves, who are condemned to futility on a timescale of tens of years, or for the universe that is condemned to futility on a timescale of many tens of billions of years. We shall die, and the cosmos will die, but the final word does not lie with death but with God. This does not mean that death is not real, but it does mean that it is not the ultimate reality. Only God is ultimate, and that is a sufficient basis to enable us to embrace the Advent hope.
God is ultimate, progress is not. The final world is God’s, not our latest invention. Progress is amoral and western society is indebted, entrenched, and, often times, enslaved to it. Hope—not the optimism of progress that claims bigger, better—provides the framework, the bumpers, for how Christians engage the cultures around them.
Hope believes in the ridiculous story that amid a cosmos in perpetual decay, a God of life has a plan. Optimism attempts to take that grand story and in the spirit of resume virtues make it coincide with a made-up narrative of everything will be better if all seven billion people on the planet just loved one another. Such drivel is naive and foolish. That will never happen…if that is your plan, then you are a fool.
Hope is the counter-cultural in-breaking of the end into the present. Hope allows us to be humble—we don’t make up the world. Hope allows us to be winsome—we know how the story ends. Hope allows us to be empowering—we don’t have to win. Hope allows us to be servants—we know the Author. Hope comes out in the funeral eulogy and never in the resume. We always think more fondly of someone at a funeral. In the end, their list of accomplishments presented on a resume may show success, but does it tell us who they actually were/are?
The late Brethren pastor-theologian, Brian Moore described the role of Jesus in Brethren spirituality in a paper delivered to the fifth Brethren World Assembly. In closing, he offered several considerations, the sixth of which was a calling for a "joyful obedience" to the work the Lord has called us. He wrote:
The Brethren sought to follow Jesus in the spirit of the psalmist whose “delight (was) in the law of the Lord” (Psalm 1:2, NIV). Theirs was not the spirit of a reluctant obedience to a tyrannical overlord; theirs was the joy of being counted worthy to be his followers and even to suffer in his name. They could even liken it to a delicious repast: “The food of the new creation…is true obedience to the Lord Jesus.”
Their study of Jesus, i.e., Christology, was not an abstract approach but rather it was Jesus for “edification, enjoyment of salvation, godliness”. A modern writer concurs when she said, “So here is where I finish my rough Christology, by reminding myself and us together that Christ is a mystery best approached with humility and by way of participation and experience, poetry and song, communion and love-creating, and only secondarily approached with reason and words.”
Joyful obedience needs to be the spirit of the Brethren these days. We need to recover the hardiness of discipleship combined with a joyful countenance! Let our eyes and faces tell the world that there is joy in the journey of following Jesus! We are told that the new generation of believers wants to “feel its faith”, rather than just “know” it. If so, I believe the Brethren have an opportunity here because we offer both experience and information.
I find Brian's words to be a fitting challenge as we look ahead to a new year. The world will continue its march of progress towards its own end (an end marked by an exhaustion of resources and time). We can continue to primarily beat the drum of its march (resume virtues) or we can testify to a story more beautiful, counter-cultural, and hopeful (eulogy virtues). May 2023 mark our lives with a “joyful obedience,” marked by “experience and information,” that finds the wisdom of eulogy virtues. Progress will come to an end, eternity will not!
In a semi-morbid way, may 2023 be a year when you ponder your funeral. May you think about the end of the universe. May you step off the treadmill of progress, ever so briefly. And then, may the Spirit invite you to look back to begin the backfill of a life of meaning, winsomeness, and hope. If we are a people in which the end breaks into the present, may the eulogy break in and interrupt your resume. The world will better (your life will be more beautiful) for the disruption!
In closing this plea-filled reflection, as that is what it is, I offer a benediction from William Knepper, an 18th century Brethren who was imprisoned in a Jülich, Germany prison for nearly four years who eventually emigrated to America. On his deathbed (1755) he wrote a testament to his family. It begins like this:
[May] Jesus Christ, the bright-shining morning star, the root and offspring of David, enlighten and penetrate the foundation of your hearts, that we may be a light in the Lord, and be filled with the spirit. Amen.