The God to whom we turn is that faithful God who has acted throughout history to establish and maintain God's world and people. We turn - we can turn - because God has first turned to us. Not our own faithfulness, but God's faithfulness, is the bedrock of our hope and the source of our life. Indeed God remains faithful, even if we are not faithful (Gen. 9:11; Deut. 4:25-31).

To turn to God is to remember the mighty and loving acts of God and confess that we are called to obedience by God.

In our individualistic age it is crucial to note that such "remembering" so often takes place in a liturgical setting in the presence of the community or its representatives.

Responding in active love

Turning to God and God alone is inevitably, also, a turning away from certain other things, from all the "idols" which clamour for our allegiance today. The idols of wood and stone denounced by the prophet Isaiah (40:19-20; 44:9-20) have been supplanted by things far more pervasive and seductive: by systems of material and social gain which reward greed rather than generosity; by political and economic systems which reward those who already have, at the expense of those who have not; by cultural and psychological systems which reward habits of domination and control rather than those of cooperation, sharing and solidarity.

Living within a cultural and social context we inevitably participate in its systems of value, control and reward: we have a stake in our own oppression by sin. Thus the call to "turn to God" is always a call to repentance, to a deliberate turning away from the dominant values of our society.

This "turning to God" affects every aspect of our lives and all of our relationships. So it calls us to a new spirituality, expressed not just in particular devotional acts but in a whole way of life oriented to the living God.

Through such "repentance", through letting go of ourselves as the centre of our own life, we establish a new relationship not only with ourselves but also with our neighbours.

How are we to "turn to" our neighbours? In the way in which God has turned to us, in the way of loving kindness.

"Turning to" our neighbour means we seek to establish justice for him, or her, or them. God has acted for our salvation, so we must act for the good of the neighbour, the community and the whole created order.

Justice is not basically a matter of calculating rights and wrongs, nor of establishing social programmes; it is fundamentally about relationship. It seeks to restore a right relationship where this has been distorted, or destroyed, by abuse of personal or communal power, or by inequalities in economic, cultural or social opportunity.

At its extreme, justice goes altogether beyond the calculation of rights and wrongs; indeed, it often appears to contradict common-sense notions of fairness or even good sense, as when Jesus demands that his disciples practise a love which goes the second - and not only the second! - mile (Matt. 5:41; cf 5:43-48, and Matt. 20:1-16).

Because justice seeks the good of the neighbour, and because it works to redress grievances and correct imbalances within the community, its final goal is reconciliation. Indeed, because estrangement grows from injustice and imbalances of opportunity or understanding, the establishment of justice is a precondition for true reconciliation. The Psalmist looks for a time when "righteousness and peace will kiss each other" (Ps. 85:10).

This means churches will be engaged in struggles for justice. It means, too, that churches need to consider how far their own lives - as institutions composed of fallible human beings - actually reflect the biblical understanding of God's

As a concrete sign of their engagement in struggles for justice, some churches - like this one in San Salvador - have offered sanctuary to the victims of civil strife. (El Salvador, 1986)

merciful justice, and the biblical vision of life in community, a community free from domination and coercion, where each person may freely exercise his or her gifts to the glory of God and for the good of the community as a whole.

REJOICE IN HOPE!
Living in and by the promises of God

Christian "joy" is not a superficial "positive feeling", nor is Christian hope a facile optimism; both notions emerged from the experience of the early Christian communities confronting impossibilities, hardships and persecutions and discovering that they had, in their life together in Christ, resources sufficient unto the day (cf. Matt. 10:19).

Several qualities of Christian hope are especially helpful when considering the assembly theme.

Radical Hope
The hope to which we are called is a radical hope. It is, after all, rooted in God's raising Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, from the dead (Rom. 1:4). Such an act is the opposite of something to be predicted by clever analysis of the present, or "present trends": it makes a radical disjunction with the present order, offending common sense and reversing this world's values (cf Mark 8:31-38; 9:30-41; 10:32-45; 1Cor. 1:22-25). It proclaims God's "no!" to the fundamental power of the cycle of nature, the power of death itself.

The resurrection is God's "yes!" to Jesus of Nazareth and to the kind of Messiah he understood himself to be: not an imperious ruler, but a servant who suffered for others.

The power of the hope to which we are called is the power of Christ's self-offering love; and such a hope, rooted in suffering, can be neither triumphalist, nor coercive, nor utopian and sentimental.

Inclusive Hope
This hope to which we are called is an inclusive hope. Biblically it is rooted in the vision of Christ as the one who will "gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph.1:10).

This inclusive hope insists that all persons are within the scope of God's love and care and within the scope of Christ's concern (Luke 14:15-35; 14-13). Certainly the Church itself is called to live out an inclusive love that values all persons and welcomes their gifts. And if indeed it is the body of Christ - Christ who reached out to all - how can the Church exclude any of those for whom Christ died, that is: any human being?

This inclusive love should embrace all those in need. It should embrace even the "other", even the offensively and threateningly other. It must reach out both to our victims and to our enemies, to those linked to us through the memories of wrongs done, and hurts inflicted, on one side or the other.

Palestinian and Israeli women gathered for a joint peace demonstration in 1990.

Expectant Hope
The vision of God "gathering up all things" into Christ looks to a time when God shall inaugurate "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:5). We live in the "time between": the promised age has entered history but it is not presently experienced in its fullness (Acts 2:17; 1Cor. 13:12).

That is an understatement. For make no mistake about it: redemption is necessary, for human beings and for all the rest of creation. Humanity is marked by sin, as any newspaper's woeful catalogue of social catastrophes makes clear. And for all its unfathomable joy and beauty, the natural order is a also place of waste and great suffering, where life exists from life, where animals kill and eat one other - must kill and eat one another - in order to survive.

The measure of our Christian hope is that it was born, and has flourished, in the face of rejection and death. This was possible because hope knows to whom it - to whom we - belong, to the God who has acted in Christ Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, and who has promised that we will not finally be abandoned nor given over to destruction.

Rev. Dr Thomas F. Best is a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the USA, and executive secretary of the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Secretariat.