Television anchor Keith Olbermann grew frustrated when his bosses at cable channel MSNBC told him to cover only the scandals of President Bill Clinton in his nightly news show. The show had to feature nothing but analysis and speculation about the president, so that it could be re-broadcast later each night with the title “White House in Crisis.” The network designed a special computer graphic with this new title surrounding a picture of the White House, and wrote special theme music. 

Soon, though, when Olbermann had the sense that nothing new or worthwhile was going in scandal news, his exasperation spilled over onto the air. Some nights he would introduce the show by saying, “Welcome to ‘The White House That Really Isn’t In Crisis, But We’ll Say It Is Because We Have A Graphic.’”

Olbermann is right to suggest that news stations throw the word “crisis” around too easily. They hype ordinary, irrelevant, or unimportant events as crises. They devote hours of coverage, and, like MSNBC, design special graphics and theme music to make an event feel like a “crisis” of urgent importance that requires you to keep watching.

Unfortunately, news stations’ careless use of the term “crisis” takes away from its power when we need to use it elsewhere. And I want to use it now. For as I see it, there is a crisis in modern religious life, a crisis whose severity transcends the hype of broadcast news. 

In religious life today, hope is in crisis. 

Simply put, we do not have enough hope. We may have desires and cravings for material goods and pleasures. We have allegiances to sports teams and would like them to win a championship. We may have optimism about our future at school or the office. We have some have anticipation of future events in our lives. 

But, too often, we do not have hope, in its deepest, purest, richest sense – the combination of the assurance of God’s ultimate triumph over evil, the comfort of an eventual eternal sin- and pain-free existence, and the longing for Christ to come again. We are not filled with clear, refreshing, revitalizing hope for heaven. 

Instead, we typically are content to go about our business rather myopically in our daily lives, wearing blinders to these larger truths, focusing only on what is immediately in front of us. Sunday morning may jolt us into a larger awareness about heaven once in a while, but we tend to have no trouble returning comfortably to our own mini-universe, our work, school, or family. Seldom can we say that we live in the constant context of hope, marinated in a longing for Christ’s return. We do not live with a constant sense of anticipation, the gripping idea that this world is only a brief prologue to the one to come.

I think this is true of most middle class North American Christians and others who lead comfortable lives. It is worth noting that this may not be true of the whole church. Certainly, persecuted Christians have always hoped for relief from their suffering. Dying believers long to be taken to a better place. African slaves sang songs full of hope for a blessed future, a release from their wretched present. 

But perhaps even in these cases, we can sometimes observe more of a simple desire for relief from trying circumstances, or a longing for the immediate presence of God, rather than a true sense of hope for the next world to be ushered in, for God’s triumph to be made complete with the establishment of his heavenly kingdom. 

At any rate, my gravest concern is for the majority of the church that is affluent or at least comfortable, that has an alarming deficit of hope for heaven.
 

Stop any ten people in a busy street, as they march, head down, toward their office or an errand, and ask them if they live daily in the hope of heaven. You may get strange looks, or a curt negative response.

At some point you have to ask yourself: Wait a minute, isn’t the idea of hoping for the afterlife rather important? Shouldn’t we find it odd to mostly ignore eternity, to live as though it isn’t coming anytime soon, or that it isn’t all that important?

Think of it, to begin with, on a mathematical level. Suppose we say that 99 percent of our existence in cosmic history will come in the afterlife. Actually, the percentage is higher, since this era is temporary and the afterlife is infinite. Isn’t it bizarre, then how much we worry about our current measly little one percent? Shouldn’t eternal life occupy a little bigger chunk of our minds? 

If I sound high-and-mighty here, as though I have eternity firmly etched in my mind, that would be unfortunate. As I reflect on growing up in a strong Christian home, I believe I came to the faith with little to no sense of the daily relevance of the coming kingdom to daily life, much less any strong sensation of hope for what lies beyond. A few years after I made profession of faith in my church, I read the last two chapters of Revelation, which portray the afterlife, with new eyes and with wise guidance. And I was blown away. My whole perspective on life, vocation, pain, and redemption took new form. But even now, I still catch myself each day just going about my business in my own mini-universe without taking hold of hope for heaven. And I try to zoom out, to remember what Revelation 21 is all about.

By now, I have become so convinced of the deeply human need to long for eternal fulfillment, and the broad implications the coming kingdom has (beyond simply the need to repent and be saved) that I wish to raise the issue to others like me whose tendency is to speed-walk from one errand to another without a sense of the bigger picture.

I do not mean to suggest that it is natural, obvious, or inevitable to hope for heaven. Rather, I believe a lack of hope makes sense given certain qualifiers, which I will go on to describe. 

Indeed, there are some very good reasons why we don’t hope for heaven. There are even better reasons why we should.

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