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Good morning, saints. Let's pray together this morning. Jesus, the word who became flesh and dwelt among us, Spirit of the Living God, who came to dwell in us, God the Father who desires to dwell with us again. We ask that you would make your presence known to us. That through your word, through the sacraments, through songs, through the saints, that we would have eyes to see you among us, working among us, moving among us. Would you help us to hear your voice and to follow your ways in Jesus' name? And all God's people said, Amen. Well, once again, if you're new or newer, welcome. We're glad that you're here, as Jay said. My name is Jason. I'm one of the pastors here. We're absolutely delighted that you're here. If you're watching online or watching later, thank you so much for tuning in. Hope. Just even the sound of that word can evoke emotions for us. It's a dense kind of word, a word that has a kind of gravity toward it, that even hearing or saying the word hope can cause us to have sort of a pull or a longing toward it, or in some cases, maybe resistance to it in some way. In that 1990s classic film Shawshank Redemption, there's this beautiful scene uh set in the state penitentiary where Morgan Freeman's character, Red, tells uh Tim Robbins' character, Andy Dufresne, who's 10 years into serving two consecutive life sentences, he tells him at the dinner table, the lunch table, as the topic of hope comes up. He looks at him, he says, hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. It's got no use on the inside. But at the end of the film, after Andy's escape and Red's release, I know that's a spoiler alert, but it's been 30 years, okay? Uh so don't come up to me after the service and say, I was planning on watching it tonight. Um, this is how it ends. Um Red finds this letter from Andy, and in that letter, Andy writes to him and says, Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. And so is hope a dangerous thing, or is hope a good thing, or is it some other kind of thing? It may be dependent upon how we define it. Emily Dickinson describes hope as the thing with feathers. But how would you define it? If someone were to come up at you to you today and ask you, what is hope, what are you hoping for, what answer would you give? If they were to ask you what is your experience with hope, or your experience with a lack of hope, how would you answer? For some, hope is desire. I hope it rains. I hope she likes me. I hope he asked me to the prom. I hope my pellet smoker is still running while we're here in service and you're checking your smartphone app. For some, hope is wishful thinking. This is what happens to me every spring or for just a moment. I think maybe this is the year the Minnesota Twins win the World Series. It has been 35 years since they won the last time, and they already have a losing record. The scriptures say hope deferred makes the heart sick, but hope deferred also makes a fan genuine. Um, right, Broncos fans, like, are you with me? For some, hope is optimism. It's the expectation that everything is going to be all right. This is often sort of seen as a temperament or as a personality trait that some people possess and some people don't. An optimist and a pessimist met for coffee and they were having a conversation, and the pessimist began to recount just all the things that were going wrong in life and at work and family and relationships and in the country and the nation and the world, and just going on and on and got to the end of kind of their rant and said, things cannot get any worse. And then the optimist leaned in and said, Oh, yes, they can. For some, hope is a matter of probability. It's purely the result of assessing the situation, weighing the evidence, considering the likelihood of an outcome. This version of hope is Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber looking at the girl and saying, So you're telling me there's a chance. Hope in the world of psychology is defined by C.R. Snyder as a person's perception of their own ability to achieve their goals through their own agency and known pathways. In other words, where there's a will and there's a way, there is hope. In the world of medicine, Dr. Kay Hirth developed what's called the hope index. It's used to measure a patient's capacity to cope with a diagnosis or a treatment. She defines hope as a multidimensional life force characterized by a confident yet uncertain expectation of achieving a future good. In the world of sociology and political science, hope is seen as a resource for societal change. It's the ability to believe that things can be different and the capacity to act on that belief. In other words, it is Cassian Andor and Jin Urso and Rogue One, the best Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back, saying rebellions are built on hope. But what all of these versions share in common is that for the most part, their conception of hope lives within human power and human promise. But what happens when we reach the end of human potentiality? What happens when the odds are not in our favor? What happens when there are no options, there are no possibilities, there are no resources, there are no ideas or no other options to try? Where is our hope then? Is there more to hope? Is there more to hope than just a belief in ourselves and the belief in the possibility of a good outcome? There's a story in Luke chapter 24 where two of Jesus' disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, where they had just witnessed Jesus, Jesus crucified, died, and buried, and they're trying to make sense of all of this. And as they were walking and talking, the once dead but now alive risen Jesus joins them on the journey, but they're kept from recognizing him, which is a great party trick if you can pull it off this afternoon at your Easter gathering. But Jesus walks up to them and he says, in a rather kind of like cheeky manner, if you ask me, he says, What are you all talking about as you walk along? And they stopped and their faces are downcast. And the one named Cleopus replied, like, Where are you from? Like, are you only a visitor to Jerusalem who's unaware of the things that have taken place over the last few days? And then Jesus says, What things? And they said to him, The things about Jesus of Nazareth. Because of his powerful deeds and words, he was recognized by God and all the people as a prophet. But our chief priests and our leaders handed him over, they censored him to death, they crucified him. And we had hope. We had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel. And all these things happened three days ago. But there's more. They had hope that he was the one who would change everything, change everything for them, change everything for Israel, change everything for the world. But now he's gone, and their hope went with him. But there's more. As the story goes on, they begin to recount the women's discovery of the empty tomb, and they're trying to make sense of it all. And so then Jesus interrupts and starts opening the scriptures for them, starts telling them the story of the Old Testament, the story of the Messiah. Finally, they sat down and they shared a meal together, and their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and immediately he disappeared. Another party trick you can try a little bit later on, especially after you've overstayed your welcome at whatever place you're visiting. But immediately he disappears, and what did they do? They got up and they returned to Jerusalem, and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together and they were saying to each other, The Lord really has risen. He has appeared to Simon, but there was more. They got up, they turned around, they headed back to Jerusalem, back to the place of suffering, back to the place of death, back to the place of fear. But this time they headed back filled with hope. Because the revelation and reality of Jesus's bodily resurrection changed everything for the disciples, including their understanding of hope. See, what we find within the Easter story is an entirely different conception of hope than we find anywhere else. It is a hope that is shaped by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. It's a hope that's shaped by Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. It's a hope that Peter describes as a living hope. You have been born anew, born again, entered into a new world, a new reality that is defined as a living hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This is a different kind of hope. There is more to it than any other version available. It's different in many ways. One of them is this is that resurrection hope begins in suffering and death. Resurrection hope begins where everything else ends. Many of us know what it's like to be in that place. Jesus suffered immense physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual pain. His torture was cruel and excruciating. And then he died and he was buried. And the disciples said to Jesus on the road that it's been three days, which in Jewish understanding meant there was no coming back from this. Jesus was dead in every sense of the word. And no amount of wishful thinking or positive outlook or human potential or human progress or human power was going to change this situation for the better. This was the end. But there was more. There was resurrection power. See, our hope is not something that's just this pie in the sky dream, wishful thinking, disconnected from reality, unaware from the problems in our life or the challenges of our world. No, our hope is not the denial of sin and suffering and evil and injustice and death. Our hope is not a denial or a failure to look at our own failures and our own limitations. No, our hope is a radical acceptance of reality that allows us to tell the truth about our lives and our world and anchor our hope somewhere else. Anchor our hope somewhere other than within ourselves. For our hope as followers of Jesus is anchored in our God and in the worlds to come. And so this changes our view of everything, including our view of suffering. In his letter to the Romans, Paul said, we can take pride, or he says, in another way, we can rejoice in our problems, in our troubles, in our difficulties, in our trials, and our suffering, in our tears, because we know that suffering or trouble produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. In other words, for the Christian, suffering and hope can coexist. Joy and sadness and anger and confusion and difficult emotions can coexist for one for us because there is a direct correlation, a direct connection between suffering and hope. See, suffering is meant to lead us into and not away from resurrection hope. If it leads us away, then perhaps our hope is being anchored in the wrong place. And there's an invitation for us to reconsider what is it that we're really hoping for. So resurrection hope begins in suffering and death, and then resurrection hope holds grief, but also resists despair. Throughout Lent, we read the Lament Psalms together. These are psalms of critique, psalms of complaint, our desperate guttural cries for help, for salvation, for rescue, for justice, for mercy, for God to show up and do something. Walter Brugemann, the Old Testament scholar, refers to these as holy Saturday Psalms. And we pray them with hope because Jesus' life doesn't end in the grave. And the promises is that neither will ours. See, resurrection hope allows us to name what we're going through, allows us to speak it, to say what it is. We don't have to hide it, we don't have to pretend that it's not happening, but allows us to name what it is and to grieve it, to weep, to mourn, to scream, to cry out, to sit in silence, to sit with one another while at the same time without falling into a despair that we never recover from. It allows us to hold all of the pain of our lives and our world in the healing presence of Jesus and one another with the hope that someday this will all be transformed. Paul put it this way: he says, brothers and sisters, we don't want we want you to know about people who have died so that you won't mourn like others who don't have any hope. Since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so we also believe that God will bring with him those who have died in Jesus. So according to Paul, we can grieve with hope because we believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and someday so will we, and someday so will all those we love who have gone before us. Someday every wrong will be made right, someday every loss will be recovered, someday every wound will become a scar with a restoration story. Someday resurrection power will grip all of us. And this is the fundamental difference between resurrection hope and every other conception of it. For Christians, hope does not live within human promise or human power. There is way more to it than that. As Ronald Rollheiser put it, resurrection hope lives within the promises and the power of God. That's where our hope rests. Our hope lives within the promises and within the power of our God. Our hope does not reside in the power of the market, the promises of a politician, the potential of an innovation, the prospect of a new discovery, the possibility of a new relationship, the posity of our own thoughts, the pursuit of our goals, the persistence of our efforts, the progress of society, or the performance of our AI models. It doesn't live there. There's more to it. There has to be, for none of those things, none of those things can reach into the grave and raise a dead person to new life. None of those things can set us free from sin and death. None of those things can bring about new creation. None of those things can rewrite our stories. For resurrection hope is where we live. And resurrection hope rests on the belief that God has promised to resurrect us and the belief that he has the power to do so. And we believe that he does because he already has. And he also says that that work has already begun, that by the power of the Spirit, resurrection power is already at work among us. This is why Peter says it is a living hope. Yes, it is fixed to the future, but it is changing our lives today. It is a fixed and true and living hope, which also means that resurrection hope is relational. We're not primarily hoping for something, though there's a lot of things that we're hoping for, but we're primarily hoping in someone. It's a risk that we call faith. It's the choice to trust, it's the choice to trust that God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit will keep his promises to us, and he has the power to do so. So as we prepare to come to the table today, my prayer for all of us in this moment as we come to receive from our Lord and our King is that there would be more to hope for each one of us. If you're a follower of Jesus, my prayer for you is that you would meet the risen Lord here at the table, that he would reveal himself to you once again in the breaking of the bread. And in doing so, that he would renew the living hope inside of you, the hope in his power and his promises by being present to you in whatever it is that you're walking through today. If you're here and you're not sure what you think about Jesus, you're not sure about Easter and resurrection and all of these things, then I just want to encourage you to take the risk of curiosity. Would you come back next week and the week after that? Would you try Alpha? Would you pick up a Bible? Would you take all those questions that you have about faith and about spirituality and begin to talk to your Christian friends about them? Ask the questions that you've always wanted to ask. And maybe, just maybe, Jesus will show up in those conversations somehow and make himself known to you. And maybe that's you today. Maybe Jesus has shown up in your life recently, that there's been a series of things that brought you here today. I want to encourage you to take that risk of faith this morning. Make the choice to trust him. Join us in these prayers as we tell the truth about ourselves and our world. And then we place our trust in Jesus. And if you do make that choice today, I encourage you to tell one of our pastors so we can follow along with you and walk with you in the way of discipleship. For glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Friends, as it was in the beginning, it's now because of the resurrection of Jesus, and it will be forever. There is a world without end for us. That is our resurrection hope. There is more. Thanks be to God. Amen.