4/19/26 Sermon

The letter we call First Peter is addressed to a group of early Christians scattered across what is now modern-day Turkey—small communities trying to find their footing in a world that didn’t quite know what to do with them.

They weren’t powerful.
They weren’t culturally dominant.
And they weren’t being violently persecuted in any widespread, systematic way—at least not yet.

But they were experiencing something more subtle, and in some ways more disorienting.

They were beginning to feel out of place.

Their commitments—their way of life, their refusal to participate in certain social and religious norms—meant that they no longer fit neatly into the world around them. They were misunderstood. Sometimes maligned. Often on the margins.

And so this letter is written to people living in that tension - not fully rejected, but no longer fully at home.

The word the author uses for them is exiles.

Not because they had all left their homes, but because their identity had shifted in such a way that the world around them no longer felt like it quite belonged to them.

And what follows is not a call to withdraw,
and not a call to fight back—

but a call to remember who they are,
and to live out of that identity, even in the midst of uncertainty.

So listen now for a word spoken to people learning how to live faithfully
when they don’t quite fit anymore as we read 1 Peter 1:3-9

May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ be blessed! On account of his vast mercy, he has given us new birth. You have been born anew into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. You have a pure and enduring inheritance that cannot perish—an inheritance that is presently kept safe in heaven for you. Through his faithfulness, you are guarded by God’s power so that you can receive the salvation he is ready to reveal in the last time.

You now rejoice in this hope, even if it’s necessary for you to be distressed for a short time by various trials. This is necessary so that your faith may be found genuine. (Your faith is more valuable than gold, which will be destroyed even though it is itself tested by fire.) Your genuine faith will result in praise, glory, and honor for you when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you’ve never seen him, you love him. Even though you don’t see him now, you trust him and so rejoice with a glorious joy that is too much for words. You are receiving the goal of your faith: your salvation.

WORD OF LORD

A lot of you know my best friend Lucas. He's the pastor over at North Shore UU, and some of you met him at our joint Good Friday service just a few weeks ago. One of the things I really love and value about our friendship is that Lucas is a brilliant theologian, and we have these conversations that start while we're getting coffee and somehow eat up entire afternoons and sometimes even stretch deep into the night before either of us notice what time it is.

Lately we've been talking about hope… or the lack thereof… Because Lucas has given up on it. He told me he doesn't have any hope anymore. When he first told me that, it broke my heart because I've always believed we need hope. That when we give up on hope, we give up on life. The psychologist Viktor Frankl talks about the necessity of meaning in order to survive and thrive in life and I've always felt hope was the same way. But the more Lucas kept talking and the more he explained why he's given up on hope, the more I realized that giving up on hope hasn't left him feeling empty. It's actually left him feeling liberated — like he was free.

And it turns out Lucas isn't alone in this. There are serious theologians who argue that hope isn't just naive — it's actually harmful. That hope plasters over present suffering with a future that never quite arrives for everyone equally. That for a lot of people, hope isn't liberating at all — it's an anesthetic.

And I've been sitting with that ever since. Because I couldn't tell him he was wrong. And I'm not sure I can tell you he's wrong either. Here's what makes this hard for me — I've always believed that you can't preach the gospel without hope. It's called Good News, and I've always believed that there needs to be hope in order for it to be good news. But Lucas is challenging that basic assumption and I can understand why. I mean, let's be honest with each other. It's hard to find and hold onto hope these days.

I'm only 45 but this seems like the most troubling, confusing, and fragile time I can remember in life. Every day seems to bring something new — some new crisis, some new outrage, some new heartache where life itself seems precarious. I think we're all living with that same quiet sense of dread… like we’re not sure how this turns out.

And of course, because everything seems to be partisan these days, it's easy to try to read into what I'm saying. But I'm finding that when we gather around tables, when we try to really listen in order to understand where someone is coming from, when I pay attention to those who would maybe disagree with me or have a very different perception of the political situation in this country, what I'm finding is that we're all sharing that same dread, that same feeling of hopelessness, that same concern that the divide is growing into too large of a chasm to cross. But we're feeling that way for different reasons.

Some of us look at the world right now and feel like everything we've worked for, everything we believed was progress, is being systematically dismantled. That the most vulnerable people among us are being abandoned. That we are sliding backwards and the slide is accelerating. And some of us look at the same world and feel like everything we loved, everything that made this country feel like home — the values and the traditions and the way of life that we built our families around — we feel like all of that is being mocked and discarded like it never mattered. Like we don't matter.

And here's what strikes me about that. Both of those feelings are real. I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that one side is right and the other is wrong about what they're feeling. Because what I'm finding is that underneath the anger and the outrage and the finger pointing, we’re all feeling the same thing. We’re all afraid. We’re all grieving something. We’re all wondering if it's going to be okay.

And maybe that's exactly what Lucas is talking about. Because if hope just means things are going to go the way I want them to go politically, my side is going to win, the arc is going to bend the way I think it should bend then maybe Lucas is right. Maybe that kind of hope deserves to die.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham in 1963 — to a group of white clergymen who told him to be patient, to wait, that change would come. And he said: "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration."

A tranquilizing drug. That's what he called it. And sixty years later, a theologian named Miguel de la Torre wrote something that lands in exactly the same place — that hope is only possible when privilege allows for a future. That for people who’ve been told to wait their whole lives, hope isn't good news. It's an anesthetic that keeps them patient while the present keeps taking from them.

William Sloane Coffin once put it this way: “Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts.”

And that may be the difference.

Because if what we mean by hope is something that teaches us to accept now what should never be accepted… then yes — let it die. Because that's not hope at all. That's just wishing.

And there’s a difference between hoping and wishing. Wishing is passive. Wishing is what we do when we want something but aren't willing to do anything about it. I wish I was in better shape. I wish my relationships were healthier. I wish the world was more just. But wishing doesn't get you to the gym. Wishing doesn't repair a relationship. Wishing doesn't change anything. It just makes us feel slightly better about wanting something we're not actually pursuing.

Real hope — the kind worth holding onto — looks more like wanting. And wanting moves. Wanting gets out of bed. Wanting makes a plan. Wanting absorbs the setbacks without giving up because it's oriented toward something real, something worth working for.

So maybe the question isn't whether we should give up on hope. Maybe the question is whether what we've been calling hope was ever really hope at all.

Peter is writing to people who have every reason to ask that same question. He’s writing to scattered communities of early Christians living across what is now modern Turkey. And Peter calls them something that would have stopped his readers cold. He calls them exiles. Not metaphorically. Not as a theological concept. These were people who’d lost standing in their communities, who were regarded with suspicion by their neighbors, who no longer quite fit in the world they were living in. They’re tired. And they’re wondering whether any of this is worth it.

And Peter doesn't tell them to wait. He doesn't offer them a tranquilizer. He says: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — who has given us a living hope.

A living hope. Notice what Peter doesn't say. He doesn't point them toward a feeling or an attitude or a better political season coming around the corner. He points them toward an event. A specific, historical, already-happened event — the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The tomb is already empty. Which means the very worst thing that can happen — death itself — has already been walked through and survived. The hope isn't coming. It came. And because it came, everything about what hope is and what it makes possible changes.

Because here is what it means to be an exile — it means your worth, your identity, your future, isn’t dependent on this present order delivering for you. Peter's people didn't need Rome to validate them. They didn't need the empire to approve of them or the culture to include them. And that freedom — that’s not escapism. That’s not some spiritualized version of giving up on the world. That’s precisely what made it possible for them to act with courage in the present. When your belonging is already secured in something the world can’t give and can’t take away — you’re free. Free to work for justice without needing the system to justify you. Free to love your neighbor without needing your neighbor to love you back. Free to refuse to conform without needing the crowd's approval.

That's what makes this hope categorically different from the anesthetic. Peter's exiles weren't sitting quietly waiting for Rome to fall. They were already living differently — already caring for the poor, welcoming the stranger, loving their enemies — not because they thought it would fix the empire, but because the resurrection had already reoriented everything they were living for. The hope wasn't keeping them passive. It was what made their present courage sustainable.

That's wanting. Not wishing.

And now I want to tell you something about Lucas.

He grew up knowing he was gay in the 1990s — a decade when that was still a sentence with very uncertain endings. He loved someone. Married him, and then lost him — suddenly, senselessly, in the kind of accident that makes you want to interrogate every assumption you've ever held about the goodness of the world. He’s faced things I won't speak about here because they are his to carry and his to tell. He’s had every reason — personal, intellectual, theological — to stop. To close the door. To decide that the cost of continuing to care is simply too high.

And yet.

He holds a doctorate in homiletics — the study of preaching. He literally wrote the book on it. It's called Impassioned.And in between pastoring his congregation and writing academic papers about why hope has no place in the pulpit, he still shows up for people - relentlessly. When people are hurting, when communities are struggling, when the work is hard and the outcome is uncertain, when it costs more than we can ever know - Lucas shows up.  Not because he’s guaranteed it matters.  And not because he’s confident the arc is bending anywhere good.  But because something in him refuses to leave people alone in the dark. Because something in him refuses to let go of the work of making things more whole.

I read his paper on giving up hope. The whole thing. It’s rigorous and honest and clear-eyed in a way that most of us don't have the courage to be. And at the very end — after all of it — he writes that maybe the point isn't a future that will save us. Maybe the point is that the struggle itself is what defines the present. That the work is worth doing not because it will save us- but because its the truest way of being human right now despite what it may cost us. Crosses lead to crucifixions.

He called that hopelessness.

I want to suggest — gently, as his friend — that he has another word for it and hasn't found it yet.

Because what I see when I watch Lucas is not a man without hope. What I see is a man who refused to let the worst things that happened to him become the final word. Who gets up and teaches young ministers how to preach even when he's not sure preaching can save anything. Who shows up for Good Friday even when resurrection is not his theology — because something in him keeps insisting that presence matters, that love matters, that the work matters even without a guarantee. Because crosses also lead to resurrections.

That’s not wishing. That’s not waiting. That’s not an anesthetic.

That’s wanting. That’s a living hope — even in a man who would argue strenuously that he doesn't have any hope.

Peter wrote to people who were exhausted and displaced and wondering if any of it was worth it. And he didn't give them a program or a platform or a promise that things would get better. He pointed them to an empty tomb and said — the worst thing that can happen has already happened. And it didn’t win. So get up. Love anyway. Work anyway. Refuse anyway.

That's the only hope I know that's worth holding. Not the kind that waits for the world to come around. But the kind that gets up in a Good Friday world when everything feels like it's dying — and shows up anyway.

Even now. Especially now.

Amen