The limits of hope and the promise of joy

Ancestral Rendezvous

I am very big and very Black. My presence implicates. It stirs up ancestral angst in those committed to America as it is. My thinking and words remove all doubt as to where I stand and whom I represent. We come not to lacerate for laceration’s sake. We do not believe in flagellation. And why receive truth as a beating? Why receive history as flogging? We come so that the surgery necessary to remove the cancer can begin. No cancer patient has ever survived who would not hear their diagnosis. We want healing together — for all of us. But those who deny cancer embrace death. Always and everywhere.

I turn to one of the empire’s own to make the case. Samuel P. Huntington emerged from imperial central casting. He was educated at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard. He ascended the heights of the foreign affairs professoriate. He began teaching at Harvard at the age of twenty-three. Huntington coached the apartheid regime of South Africa that police violence and torture could be necessary to effect reform as he did not advocate the outright elimination of their inhumane system toward non-whites. For those who believe that Democrats are the font of domestic and global justice: be forewarned, Huntington was a card-carrying member of that political party and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council.

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington spoke truth when he said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

As I explore in my book, Ancestors, those who will not hear my ancestors nor me, listen to your own.

Climbing up and out is the only option. Jesus led Peter, James, and John up a high mountain, as told by two gospels. Jesus’s ascent, and ours, is not religious activity to be cordoned off and locked up in churches, bibles, and sermons about G-d’s glory. This is human activity that is divine and divine activity that is human. Climbing is as political as it is religious. Those who would separate religion and politics cannot be trusted. Religion speaks to our ultimate concern and politics must be shaped by this concern — or it is farce. There has never been a separation of church and state in America’s ethics. America’s church has always stamped its imprimatur on America’s politics. The church of my ancestors and many other traditions did not.

Those who claim that politics has no place in the church know that their politics are at loggerheads with Jesus’s revolutionary gospel. What I believe, preach, and pray are profoundly political because G-d’s reign rearranges every facet of human life. No part of our existence goes untouched by G-d’s radical identification with humanity and G-d’s will that all live as children of the Holy One.

This is the climb before us, to integrate the physical and spiritual. To claim the human body, every human body, as G-d’s residence and playground. To exert ourselves in sweating our way onto new terrifying and terrific terrain. Jesus, the integrated one, led three disciples up a high mountain. High.

This is a climb worth taking. A climb that fuses the sweat of our brows with the deep yearnings of our souls. A climb that will not leave bodies at the base of the mountain, as much American religion does, and refuses to separate flesh from spirit. Through ascent we discover ancestors are indeed divine coconspirators as we climb. I am invested in ascent because the ancestors rooted me in mystery, and I know that something more is calling me. I am not sure where I am called to go. I do know that I am not called to stay here, at the foot of the mountain. None of us are called to stay here.

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In 1997, I made my first international journey to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Greece, and Israel. We landed in Damascus, where I was accosted by the following ubiquitous American exports: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I also heard hip-hop music. That caused my smile to widen and my head to bob. Beautiful little brown children greeted me shouting, “Michael Jordan! Michael Jordan!” They would sing a song to me as I walked through villages and markets, “Abu Samara Sukhara!” I was told that I was being serenaded as the “sweet Black man.” Damn sure different than the songs I hear at home.

We spent a lovely evening in Egypt preparing to ride camels up Mount Sinai and watch the sun rise from that storied vista. It may have been two or three o’clock in the morning. I mounted my camel along with a fellow traveler. Our comrades moved slowly ahead of us and began to ascend. Our camels danced a little to the left and a little to the right, made a painful noise, and threw us off their backs. They refused to carry the two Americans whose weight hovered at or over the 260-pound mark for three or four hours. The camels knew the cost of climbing with added weight. The two of us stayed on the ground. Our companions ascended and returned with new stories and new songs. They found us where they had left us.

Those who go up come down differently. Those weighed down don’t make it very far.

Where are you taking us, Jesus? And why? Something lies at the summit of that mountain, but not without our climbing and not without the intentional loss of the weight that keeps us back — the weight of orthodoxy, of national identity, of narratives that anchor and define us. Jesus may be taking us up because he knows that without our having seen the summit, we will not embrace our destinies upon return. We must see and hear what must be seen and heard on the mountain’s peak.

The world as we know it cannot survive much longer without our making a sweaty climb up a different mountain. We must follow ancestors unknown, or ancestors willfully silenced by the violent who hoard the power they avariciously accumulated to head in a new direction.

Once I was consumed by a naïve hope. I encountered many like me. We believed that electing Black people to office would change things. We believed that keeping Democrats in power would change things. We believed that church attendance, praying, and preaching would change things. Coming to terms with the stubbornness of the systems of this world breaks bodies and spirits. Nihilism is not an option. Neither is naïveté.

I have had to become honest about what hope means for people formed in traditions like my own.

I know what theologians I do not trust say about hope. I know what theologians I admire say. The truth is that people in communities of faith like my own experience and enact hope as waiting for G-d to do something.

People have been so theologically malnourished as to push back when human agency, responsibility, and partnership with G-d are introduced. We cannot wait on G-d to change things any more than G-d can wait on us. G-d made G-d’s move toward us in the incarnation. It is our turn to move toward G-d and to confront the forces of death Jesus confronted in the gospels. Those forces find their fiercest articulation in the church and the state, in organized religion and imperial power. The collusion of these powers lynched Jesus.

We cannot hope that those who follow shadow ancestors and shadow systems will change, especially if hope means waiting for G-d to change them. We must be willing to sweat for change. Professor of constructive theology and African American religion Anthony Pinn has helped me by sharing a new grammar for the struggle ahead. Pinn deftly and correctly calls the traditional Christian language of hope to task in a conversation he had with Brad Braxton. Hope in our culturally Christian context requires no mountain climbing, no perspiration, and no exertion. Pinn prefers the language of perpetual rebellion against the forces of death. What Pinn offers is the language of perseverance. These words summon ongoing human effort in raging against the machinations of oppression and injustice.

Our struggle cannot be outcome driven, Pinn also says. We must make peace with the fact that the war against these forces will never cease. It has not stopped, nor will it. We live in an era where legislative, jurisprudential, and economic gains have been thwarted, defeated, and rolled back. Many have acted as if victories for justice would be permanent because they were morally right. This is not so. It never will be. The fight will not stop, even if there are victories. We need language that will not obfuscate this truth. Hope, I’m afraid, may not be able to carry this freight.

The text in Revelation that describes war breaking out in heaven speaks to this reality. There is no place where these shadow powers do not angle for more. Even proximity to G-d’s throne does not stop them. They fight, kill, eat, and gorge themselves. We are suffering from their insatiable hunger now. That insatiable hunger must be met by our insatiable desire for Mystery to reveal in our hour what those who are motivated by being human together must know. We must fight and lament and rage while holding tightly to joy. We must hold on to joy like parents hold on to their children amid raging storms. We must hold on to joy and sing and love our way into taking our next steps up the mountain before us.

Then we rest, breathe, and climb some more.

Excerpted from “Ancestors: Those Who Bless Us, Curse Us, and Hold Us” by William H. Lamar IV. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books. Reproduced with permission.