Hope Isn’t Easy

Hope won’t be easy to hang on to, but that will be what sustains us and gives us the resilience we will need in these critical years ahead.

Jan 24, 2025

If you are like me, there are times when you really would like to talk to an old mentor role model for you who has passed away. That’s the way I felt at the end of inauguration day on Monday–that was also MLK day. The juxtaposition was almost too much to bear.

Many of you have read or heard me telling stories about a tutor for me, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who taught me the difference between optimism and hope. Hope, my mentor told me and many others, is not a feeling or a mood, like optimism, but rather that hope is a choice, a decision, that we make because of what we call faith.

But I went to bed Monday night, after watching President Trump pardon the convicted January 6th rioters who desecrated the very space in which just hours before he had been sworn in, quite hopeless.

The 1,500 pardons and commuted sentences included those who were prosecuted and imprisoned for violently assaulting police officers that day. Some of whom even organized and coordinated the insurrection. Such pardons are dangerous and condone those who break the law and commit violence against national institutions and even law enforcement.

Will the now released and emboldened former and unrepentant insurrectionists now reload their rifles and become private militias for Trump going forward? Will a president who used and excused mob violence in an attempted coup now be prepared to condone and accept it again when he feels he would benefit from it?

The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was not only thankful for his release from jail, but enthusiastically proclaimed that those behind the arrests of the January attackers should “feel the heat,” and called on the new Trump Justice Department to exact retribution.

In the sharpest contrast, on Monday, the nation also celebrated the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who practiced and lived non-violence for the sake of justice and peace. King respected the law even when he called for non-violent civil disobedience against legal injustice. Throughout the weekend, MLK birthday celebrations around the country instilled hope that refused to dim as Trump took office.

Also on Monday, a New York Times op-ed by Dr. Esau McCaulley was published, titled “This Day Calls for Martin Luther King’s Vision.” Dr. McCaulley described the inauguration of Trump with his “indifference to matters of injustice,” and MLK’s birthday as an “odd pairing.” He went on to say, ”But if Dr. King’s life taught us anything , it is that hope is most useful when the evidence runs the other way toward despair. Set against dark times, hope points us to something better.” McCaulley then quoted King from his 1964 acceptance speech for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.”

Many of Trump's executive orders on Monday also quelled any optimism people might have had for controlling or containing Donald Trump’s worst instincts. We heard more lies and threats against immigrants, to fulfill his campaign promises of mass deportations of “millions and millions” of undocumented people who are now living in fear of the raids to come that will shatter families– in some cases separating parents from their children.

Trump also issued an order to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants– though gratefully a nationwide injunction is in place following the filing of a lawsuit against it. And on Tuesday the Department of Homeland Security rescinded its “sensitive locations” policy which protects schools, hospitals, and houses of worship from being subject to ICE raids.

We will all need to remember that defending the vulnerable is a fundamental principle in all our faith traditions. That gospel truth was spoken by Bishop Mariann Budde at the Washington National Cathedral’s traditional service the morning after inauguration day.

With President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance seated in the front row, of the historic “House of Prayer for All People,” Bishop Budde said:

"Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Then she got specific in naming those vulnerable people, "There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives." In the National Cathedral’s service of “unity,” Budde had the courage to gently but prophetically challenge the President’s new orders and the strong attack rhetoric around them.

"The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors," said the Bishop.

"I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land."

Speaking the truth to power, as our friend Bishop Mariann Budde just did, is a central way to hold onto hope.

The press asked Trump what he thought of the sermon, and he made clear that he didn’t like it. But he had to listen. Despite the respectful tone in her sermon, the day after the service, Trump went to his social media to scream his usual and disrespectful bombast against the Bishop and called for both the Cathedral and the Episcopal Church to issue an apology for her sermon.

I wouldn’t expect that, and the message of Mariann’s gospel sermon remains on the airwaves. Her example will be an important part of our courage going forward–to keep returning to the commitments of our faith so the rest of the nation must keep listening to us, despite how bad the nation’s politics get.

Like many of you, I am really struggling to hang onto hope at the beginning of an energized and organized Trump administration. The ones Jesus calls the “least of these” will likely be targeted the most, along with massive setbacks for protecting God’s creation with his aggressive policies of “drill baby drill.”

But in my new Ethics class at Georgetown this week, my spirits were lifted. I was surprised to hear a new generation of young people, who often feel distanced from the hypocrisies of religion, but were morally appalled by what they saw as Trump’s betrayal of true faith and the teachings of Jesus in particular.

I think I have figured out what Desmond Tutu might have to say to me if I was able to get through to him with a phone call. I believe he might say to me and all of us, “Hope won’t be easy.” But it is still the choice and the decision we will need to make each and every day in the days going forward. So let’s get ready to hang on to each other as we hang onto hope.

King also once said, “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all.” And perhaps speaking to the emotions that many of us are now feeling, King once also said, “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.”

So for us, the remembrance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. again this week is more important than the violation of his vision we have witnessed this week.

Hope won’t be easy to hang on to, but that will be what sustains us and gives us the resilience we will need in these critical years ahead.