Raise Your Expectations - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

What we look to as a Christian community is hope and joy. Hope being the foundation of belief in resurrection. The belief that something dead and lost and broken can live and be found healed and restored and renewed. This is not just about being the kind of people who see a glass half full. It's about pressing forward in desert places, confident that water will be there for you when you need it most. Believing in resurrection, it's about being counter-cultural. Not getting swept up in the 24 hour news cycle that obsesses over destruction and violence that promotes rightness over righteousness and upholds a system of punitive retribution rather than restorative justice. Cynicism tells us that people will always choose their own self-interests, but hope tells us that there are those who would lay down their life for one's friends like Jesus did. We are not talking about a shallow optimism. It's so much bigger than that. What we are talking about is a radical kind of love that insists that we be in reconciled relationship with God and neighbor, and that this sort of reconciliation is the ultimate kind of joy and always to be the thing that we seek.