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The Right Reverend Munib Younan,Bishop Emeritus of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (2020.09.27) | |
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Date created : 2020-10-23/ Views : 1876 |
The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God the Father and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all evermore. Amen.
St Paul writes: “For through the Spirit, by faith, we
eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.” (Galatians 5:5)
Dear
friends all over the world,
First
of all, I thank the Universal Peace Federation (UPF) and its chairperson Dr.
Thomas Walsh for organizing this “Rally of Hope”. My thanks also extend to the
founder of “UPF”, Dr Hak Ja Han Moon for initiating and hosting this important
rally.
The
Christian hope is founded on Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and opens a
life in the light of God’s world. Christian ethics of hope anticipates the
universal coming of God in the potentialities of history. This is the reason
that the Biblical story both in the Old and New Testaments is always a renewed
message of hope in a hopeless situation as God works in history. The Reformer
Dr. Martin Luther said: “Faith is the dialectic, which conceives the idea of
all things that are to be believed; and hope is like rhetoric, which develops,
urges, persuades, and exhorts to steadiness, so that faith does not collapse in
temptation but keeps the Word and holds firmly to it.”
Dear friends, God does not want us to stay idle and
only hope for the end times and create unrealistic eschatological scenarios. God wants us to keep our living faith in Him in
this broken world. God also asks us to heed to His promises, trust Him
wholeheartedly and to boldly work in the power of His hope to transform our
world to become a safe haven of justice, dignity, equality, freedom,
reconciliation, harmony and peace. God calls us as states, nations, religious
followers and agnostics to be a beacon of hope and work together to implement
God’s agenda of justice and dignity in our broken world.
As
we celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary for the establishment of the United
Nations (UN), we are called to work together that this organization will not be
a platform for the powerful but a platform for the power of truth, justice and
equality for all. God also calls all Faith Based Organizations and the
different religions’ followers to more work together for our common equal
humanity and find the common values of love, hope, dignity and sustainability.
God calls us today to behave responsibly in caring for His creation and for the
suffering environment. Our nations are looking for signs of hope at this
crucial time of history. Do we dare to work together for these signs of hope? I
always say: “A human being can live three weeks without food, three days
without water, and three minutes without air, but human being cannot live three
seconds without hope.” God calls us to be prophetic today at this time in
history in being agents of hope in a hopeless world.
PRAYER
Let
us Pray:
Our
God of hope, we are living in fear and hopelessness. Thank you that in the
resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you created hope in us in the
midst of hopelessness. Send us Your Holy Spirit to implant Your hope in us.
Send us Your Holy Spirit to mold us, change us and transform us. Send us Your
Holy Spirit to transform the darkness into light, the injustice into justice,
oppression into freedom, hatred into love, the culture of fear and anxiety into
culture of trust, hatred into love, tensions among religious groups to harmony,
inequality to equality and equal opportunities, racism into seeing God’s image
in every human being regardless of their gender, color, ethnicity, political or
religious affiliation.
Make us to be your agents of hope in a
hopeless situation. Empower us with your Spirit so that with St Paul we can
pray: “May the God of Hope fill (us) with all joy and peace in believing, so
that (we) may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen.
God bless you and make you agents of hope wherever you
are. Amen.