A five-year-old boy and his father detained in Minneapolis and sent to a Texas ICE facility… An observer shot dead yesterday when he was already subdued by multiple ICE agents… 100 clergy of all faiths arrested for blocking a road while protesting the airlines that were flying people to ICE facilities….

It’s enough to make you almost give up… give up on the goodness of people, give up on God… and perhaps what I find the most difficult, give up on the idea that we can make a difference. How can we say hallelujah!

This hangs on my office door… one side says hallelujah and one side says hallelujah anyhow! I’ve warned people that if it’s turned to Hallelujah Anyhow, it’s not been a great day. Hallelujah anyhow is a phrase I picked up my ministry mentor, the Rev. Stew Clarke, who said he picked up from the Rev. Lois Wilson, the first woman Moderator of the United Church. The story goes that she was preaching one day and it totally bombed… fell flat… as a preacher, not only can I sympathize, but can totally understand! I can tell when I’m reaching people and when I’m not… Sometimes what looks good on paper, doesn’t take flight in the sanctuary. The story goes that after that kind of sermon, she went back to her office, sat down and said, “Hallelujah Anyhow.” That phrase has come to speak to me of deep faith even in the midst of setbacks and the world not as we would wish.

The writers of many of the psalms were familiar with adversity, with God feeling absent, when all around is death and destruction and hope seems hard to find. Hear these words from Psalm 88: 13-18

But I, O Lord, cry out to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 O Lord, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Wretched and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your dread assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
from all sides they close in on me.
18 You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me;
my companions are in darkness.

This is not unlike what Leonard Cohen sings of in Everybody Knows, thank you Graham for singing it for us. I’m just going to focus on the first verse.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows.

While this wasn’t in my mind when I chose the songs a couple of weeks ago, what this verse reminded me of was Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum last week. And before anyone gets their knickers in a knot about me bringing politics into the pulpit, politics is simply the way we organize and make decisions and its appropriate for ministers to comment on what’s going on in the world. In fact, if I don’t relate the biblical story to what is going on now, what’s the point of preaching? What I can’t do is be partisan, I can’t tell you to support one party over another, especially during election time. 😉

Mark Carney said some things out loud that ‘everybody knows.’ But nobody had had the courage to say. And just as importantly, he gave many of us a reason for hope. There is power in saying something out loud. Some of what he said could just as easily be applied to churches.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. (Mark Carney – WEF January 2026)

Nostalgia is not a strategy… In my three years with you, you have heard me say more than once, that the world in which most of us grew up in where most people attended church, where many families were large and filled Sunday Schools and communities shut down on Sundays is gone. We can lament their passing, or we can build something different on the foundations of the faith that we have. Or, as is written in Psalm 89: 1-2:

I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever;
with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.
2 I declare that your steadfast love is established forever;
your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,[b]
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

They are new every morning! Which means that yesterday’s despair does not get the final word. Which means that what broke our hearts yesterday does not exhaust God’s imagination today. Which means that even when everybody knows how the story usually goes, God keeps writing new verses.

This is where I think Leonard Cohen helps us more than we might expect. Cohen never pretends the world is better than it is. He does not sugarcoat suffering or dress injustice up as destiny. Cohen’s Hallelujah is not a victory anthem. It is not a denial of pain. It is a cracked, honest, hard-won song. This is one verse of Hallelujah that Poppy is going to play shortly:

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

“I did my best, it wasn’t much.”

That line alone is a prayer many of us have whispered. We show up. We try. We give what we have. And sometimes it feels like it changes nothing. But faith, biblical faith, has never been about pretending we are winning. Faith is about refusing to let despair be the last word. Faith is about standing, as Cohen puts it, “before the Lord of Song,” not with polished answers or easy optimism, but with truth. With honesty. With whatever we have left. This is where hope becomes a discipline, not a feeling. Hope is not something we wait to feel before we act. Hope is something we practice, even when the evidence feels thin.

The ones who speak truth out loud even when it is costly… they are not naïve. They know exactly how the dice are loaded. But they refuse to accept that injustice is inevitable or that cruelty is normal. And here is the quiet, stubborn truth of the gospel: God’s faithfulness does not depend on our circumstances. God’s mercy does not run out when the news gets worse. God does not abandon the world when we feel overwhelmed by it. “They are new every morning.” Not someday. Not when things improve. Every morning. Which means that even small acts matter. Even imperfect efforts matter. Even churches that no longer look like they did fifty years ago matter. Especially those churches. Because when nostalgia is not our strategy, faith becomes our practice. We stop asking how to get back to what was, and we start asking how to be faithful now.

What does it look like to sing hallelujah anyhow in this place, at this time? It looks like choosing compassion over cynicism. It looks like telling the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. It looks like showing up for one another, again and again. It looks like trusting that God is still at work, even when we cannot yet see the outcome.

The psalms give us permission to lament. Cohen gives us language for complexity.
And the gospel gives us courage to keep going. We do not sing hallelujah because everything is fine.

We sing hallelujah because love is stronger than despair.
We sing hallelujah because mercy keeps showing up.
We sing hallelujah because God has not given up on the world.

And, by grace, God has not given up on us.
So we stand.
We tell the truth.
We do our best.
And with nothing on our tongues but hallelujah!

Thanks be to God for the challenge and the opportunity, amen.

Psalm 88: 13-18
Psalm 89: 1-2
January 25, 2026 – SJ