The Buoyancy of Hope: A Sermon for MLK Day
A post by the Very Rev. Dr. Michael Sniffen
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.
This morning, as we celebrate the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we find ourselves at a wedding with Jesus and his mother. The wedding is filled with laughter, dancing, and celebration. But then, disaster: the wine runs out. The joy falters, the celebration teeters on the edge of embarrassment.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, turns to her son and says, “They have no wine.” Jesus, with quiet and miraculous power, transforms water into the best wine anyone has ever tasted – even the sommelier thinks so! Not just enough wine to scrape by through the end of the party, but gallons of it—overflowing and abundant.
Of course, the story isn’t about wine. It’s about hope—hope that doesn’t just help us get by – but hope that allows us to thrive: lifting us when the weight of the world feels unbearable. Enlivening us, when we fear the end is near.
Dr. King described this as “the buoyancy of hope.” Not a shallow optimism, but something substantial, rooted in God who can transform despair into joy and scarcity into abundance.
In a eulogy for Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Diane Wesley and (at a separate service) Carole Robertson - the four girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham; Dr. King stood before a grieving community. In that moment of unspeakable pain and loss, he offered a vision of hope. He said:
"God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. God has a way of making a way out of no way."
He went on:
"God is able to transform the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads [humanity] into eternal life."
For King, hope wasn’t the absence of pain, suffering and loss. It was the power to rise from it. It is the buoyancy of God that keeps us afloat when life feels like too much and we fear we are sinking.
That rings true for me. When I consider the highs and lows of my own life – I can certainly appreciate God’s presence in wonderful moments like the day I met my wife; the day of my ordination to the priesthood; and at celebrations with friends in moments of joy in their lives. And yet, I am more profoundly aware of God’s help in times of trouble: Following the murder of a beloved parishioner; After the bitter end of an important relationship in my life; And in the days following the death of my grandfather and my beloved dog Millie. I bet the same is true for you. It is in the moments when despair may grip us that the love of Christ lifts us.
Hope lives at the bottom of life, not the top. Hope is most needed when the wine runs out.
That was true in Cana and it is true right here, today. Jesus comes to transform what is lost into something new. He fashions us into a holy people, a new creation. He meets our scarcity with abundance and shows us that God’s love is never just enough, it overflows.
Our brother in Christ, Dr. King, understood that hope is found at the bottom of life. He called this discovery Beloved Community—a world where we recognize our deep connection to one another. A place where we discover our need for one another and for God. He said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
This is the manner of community we aim to be at the Cathedral of the Incarnation: A community not focused on grandiose statements, performative gestures, and virtue signaling. But rather, a community focused on the sacrificial work of building real relationships of reconciliation and love.
It is by this work and in places like this that water becomes wine today. Scarcity becomes abundance, today. The outcast is welcomed in, today. Death becomes a door to Eternal Life, right now.
King believed that this kind of transformation was not only possible but inevitable when communities commit to Gospel work. He famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
This kind of transformation requires our participation. At Cana, the servants were asked to fill the jars with water. It was ordinary work, but it was essential to the miracle.
In the same way, we are called to show up and bring what we have—even if it feels small or ordinary—and to trust that God can transform it and us into something extraordinary.
The hope we celebrate today is not fragile or fleeting. It is not a way of ease, but a way of peace that includes hardship and suffering. The suffering of the Cross. The suffering of the innocents. The suffering of our ancestors who stood against the powers and principalities in their day. The suffering that we experience when we choose what is right in this world over what is easy.
This year, as we mark the memory of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Inauguration Day at the same time - we are reminded of the interplay between earthly leadership and God’s kingdom.
Political transitions bring both hope for change and fear of loss.
We do well to remember, as Dr. King did, that all earthly powers—no matter how well-intentioned—will always fall short of the glory of God.
This is not cause for despair. It is a call to hope—hope rooted not in politics but in the kingdom of God, where the wine never runs out and the resurrected Christ lifts all of us from death into fullness of life.
On Christ the solid rock we stand, all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand…
The Very Rev. Dr. Michael Sniffen is a co-founder of the Center for Spiritual Imagination and serves concurrently as Dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation and Dean of the Mercer School of Theology. An expert in ritual theory and the role of pilgrimage in spiritual life, he teaches worship, preaching and the arts in several graduate programs. He has served as a fellow of the Center for Christianity in Global Contexts at Drew University and as a founding member of the Racial Justice Advisory Council of the Brooklyn Community Foundation. Michael was a lead organizer in the Occupy Sandy mutual aid movement. He was commissioned in 2021 as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy Chaplain Corps. Michael has a particular interest in building community among those who consider themselves 'spiritual but not religious.'