“We hope for what we do not see,” said the Apostle Paul, meaning our hope is against all evidence to the contrary.  And as Bill McKibben and Diana Butler Bass say in her meditation today, it amounts to saying. “I told you so,” with a sense of despair. [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/diana+butler+bass/FMfcgzGtwMWhTCVFXqdglHsWkXgTFRQZ]. The result of all the writing and preaching they did was exactly what they warned against. But there is no satisfaction in saying, “I told you so.”  The climate is hotter. The churches are hemorrhaging membership.  It only means your hope for a change was dashed.

Is this what Jesus was saying in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prayed, “if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”? Was it the suffering or rather the actual despair that all he had gained would be lost. The approving crowds would turn against him, the religious establishment would carry out their betrayal, the disciples would scatter, he would be alone. Weren’t his final words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It was the loss of all he had achieved that was symbolized in the “cup” that would “pass from me.”

It is much easier to read this story backwards and say,” Jesus, you’re going to triumph in the end,” but Jesus had only the human perspective in that moment. Maybe he had hope, but it was the “hope for what we do not see.” It was hope against all evidence of failure. Jesus faced the specter of failure in his final days, as many of us do. We hope only for what we do not see.

Luke says, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). That was true despair. So much like the world, as Paul says, “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains till now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies ( Romans 8: 23).

Jesus knew failure, so do we.

We hope for what we do not see.

I made a career of recruiting and inspiring young people to teach literacy. During my 25-year career as a teacher educator, many of them inspired me with their determination to “make a difference.”   But the beginning of a teaching career is usually fraught with disappointment, because somehow kids are not as taken with Robert Browning or Langston Hughes as you were. And the principal packs your classroom with students, too many to personally attend to them. And kids disappear for a month and return to your classroom saying, “Did I miss anything?”  And the book you thought would make a difference, The Absolutely True Story of a Part-time Indian (Sherman Alexie) was removed from the curriculum, because of the chapter on masturbation. And suddenly Co-vid.

It is all too much for too little. In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon revealed, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

All the hallmarks of this failure have followed me into retirement. The cause I believed in has become a lost cause.  It is not even the doom this pronounces on public education that disturbs me, it is the loss of the desire “to make a difference.” So few dream the dream. So few hope.

I am still far from Gethsemane, but there is a feeling of wheels falling off, dreams de-railed.

Jesus knew failure, so do we.

We hope for what we do not see.