Grace United Methodist Church is big. The crowd that filled its pews on the evening of April 2, 1998 came to hear Walter Brueggemann, one of the nation's most imaginative scripture scholars and one of its most gifted orators. His charge was to explore the anatomy of biblical hope, and in these dispiriting times of presidential scandal, school shootings, and embassy bombings, I only wish that the sanctuary had been big enough to hold the country in its embrace.

The occasion for Dr. Brueggemann's powerful presentation was the second Dr. A. Vanlier Hunter, Jr. Memorial Lecture. The evening's events began with moving tributes to Dr. Hunter from Dr. Christopher M. Leighton, Executive Director of the ICJS, and Dr. Rosann M. Catalano, ICJS Christian Scholar and a former colleague and close friend of Dr. Hunter. This man of great learning and great humility, whose memory is cherished by everyone whose life he touched, was celebrated especially for his quiet passion for the Scriptures and for Israel, and for his commitment to reading and interpreting scripture through the lens of Jewish-Christian relations.

When the proceedings were turned over to Dr. Brueggemann, he treated the assembled gathering to a spellbinding demon-stration of the depth of his own passion for the Scriptures, the height of his imaginative power, the breadth of his scholarship, and the strength of his convictions. Acknowledging but not dwelling on the sorry past of Jewish-Christian relations, he cogently outlined his understanding of the present relationship between the Jewish and Christian communities and his vision of our shared agenda for the future.

Dr. Brueggemann depicted our society as a culture that has deceived itself into believing that it has everything and has, therefore, no need to hope for anything. In pursuit of the elusive American dream, we fail to see the depth of our loss and the hopelessness into which the nation has drifted. We are, he said, a culture defined by loss -- the loss of our tra-ditional social fabric, of our former intellectual consensus, of our economic underpinnings,

Our peculiar and shared traditions of loss are a huge resource for faith and life in our time.

of the very way of life in which we have trusted for so long. We are incapable of recognizing our sorry state because television consumerism has drugged us in-to amnesia. Everything in American life is reduced to the present moment, to personal gain, and to individual comfort. Engulfed in a world of consum-erism, we have abandoned community, have allowed our-selves to become separated from our neighbors, and have all but eliminated God from our lives. The fruits of our idolatry and atheism are the greed, brutality, and violence that everyone acknowledges and deplores, and from which we would rescue ourselves if only we knew how.

Walter Brueggemann believes that the Bible holds powerful promises for Christians and Jews who dare to hear its sub-versive challenge. He points out that the defining reality in both the Jewish and Christian communities, as in American society today, is the reality of loss. Yet the responses shared by both the Jewish and Christian traditions stand in radical contrast to the reflexes of denial that characterize our con-temporary culture. In the destruction of Jerusalem and in the death of Jesus, Jews and Christians respectively are stripped of their most treasured gifts. What for each constituted the embodiment of God's goodness is taken away. After losing so much, each community set about recovering its past in its own intense and disciplined way in order to sustain its faith. Jews remembered God's mighty deeds; Christians remembered Jesus' acts of forgiving, healing, and feeding. In remembering, both communities discovered that, even in the face of profound grief, God's steadfast love, compassion, and faithfulness en-dure. This discovery gave birth to the hope that the new things God would do in the future would be congruent with the things God had done in the past. This hope manifested itself in a recommitment by Jews and Christians alike to God's future shalom -- God's perfect reign of peace, justice, order, and abundance.

The capacity to turn memory to hope in the midst of loss -- a capacity that is defining for Jews and Christians alike -- is not a psychological trick. It is a massive theological act that is not about optimism or even about signs of newness. It is rather a statement about the fidelity of God, who is the key player in our past and in our future.

Jewish and Christian traditions of loss, recovery, and hope, Dr. Brueggemann affirms, can serve as a tremendous resource for faith and life in America today. Jews and Christians can lead the way for the rest of society, rousing it from its amnesia by teaching it to face its loss, to remember its past, and in so doing, to move beyond despair and cynicism to hope and a recommitment to the future. Jews and Christians share the task, moreover, of demonstrating to American society and to the world that the future to which we need to be recommitted is God's future because God's promises made to us are not ours alone; they are for everyone. We can work toward the fulfillment of this task by remembering together and hoping together, and by enacting God's future now in practices of steadfast love, compassion, and faithfulness as we wait, patiently and confidently, for the coming of God's shalom.

On an otherwise unremarkable Thursday night in April, Walter Brueggemann summoned those of us fortunate enough to be in attendance to ponder our loss. He stirred our memories with scripture, and with passion and conviction he made hope so vivid that we could almost glimpse God's shalom. If only the church had been a little bigger ...