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Welcome to 2026 with a Cup of Joseph! I hope you all had a wonderful Advent and Christmastide – whether you’re a current student, current parent, an alumnus, or just a friend of St. Joseph’s Chapel. At the time of writing, we are three days into classes, and in the loveliest way it feels like we never left. As always, we covet your prayers for this place, for the learning and ministry that happens here.
As we’ve come back to school, I’ve been thinking a lot about hope. Where you get it from and what you need it for.
Maybe you’ve heard the name Ernest Gordon before. He spent many years as the Dean of Chapel at Princeton. He famously hosted the meeting of Martin Luther King Jr and the great theologian Karl Barth at the university chapel. He’s the beaming Scot there on the right, shaking MLK’s hand.
He was a good friend of my father, as it happens, who was a young college minister in the late 1980s. He mentored a generation of Princeton undergraduates, many of whom still have his slim books in their offices all over the world.
But Ernest is most famous for writing a memoir called Miracle on the River Kwai. It was part of the inspiration for the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, though it tells a rather different story.
Ernest was captured in 1942 by Japanese forces and sent to the death camp to the river Kwai. There he was among many men who contracted a set of tropical diseases against which Gordon and others had practically no defenses. Men who began to show symptoms – sores on their legs, loss of sensation, fever – were routinely sent to what he calls “the Death House” to pass their last few weeks languishingly.
But everything changed for Ernest when two of his camp mates decided that they would not let him die. If he would not hope for himself, they would hold out hope for him. Through rationing their own food to him, providing him basic medical care, and simply giving him attention – these men restored Ernest’s hope in his own life.
It was that small act of borrowed hope that would eventually lead to something of a revival in that camp. The Allied prisoners decided to keep hope alive. By the end of the war, Gordon recounts, they had set up a small university where he was teaching classics, a church of which he was the vicar, and a music group to offer some entertainment on makeshift instruments.
Miracle on the River Kwai is a powerful story of hope in desperate situations. But the dynamics of hope that Ernest Gordon talked about are no less true in our everyday lives than they were in the Death House. Hope is what keeps us going, a belief that there is good ready for us. For Christians, this good is the salvation of God in Jesus Christ both in this transitory life and also in the Kingdom-soon-to-come. We have hope that we borrow from Jesus – a confidence based upon his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecostal Spirit.
As we begin this semester at Ol’ Christ School, we all need a bit of hope. We can find that hope in Jesus Christ. If you need some words to pray today, you might try these.
Almighty and merciful Father –
You gave us hope through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I stand in the light of that hope today, and I offer myself as a partner in your mission to save the world. Make my spirit sensitive to your Holy Spirit, so that I can join you in what you are doing today. Open the eyes of my heart so I can see your work. Take these hands and these feet, Lord Jesus. Let them be the cause of hope to others as well.
Amen.