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Morning Meditation
November 28, 2025
Regarding Hope
Reading: I Peter 3:15b-16
Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.
Meditation by Peter Vanderveen
By sheer happenstance, our national holiday of Thanksgiving is celebrated very near the end of the Christian liturgical year, which culminates in the feast of Christ the King, just before we begin again looking for light in the darkness in the season of Advent. It’s a fitting correlation.
When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was much more associated with hardship than with excess. The mythological rooting of the holiday was a remembrance of early European settlers (still free from the baggage of being colonists) gathering with native Americans (a term that didn’t have the same stamp of historical implications as our use now of “indigenous people”). They shared a meal together in order to mutually reflect on the fragility of life and the blessing of being able to store up whatever was needed to survive the harshness of the coming winter. It was a holiday of hospitality in light of our clear vulnerability and interdependence. Giving thanks was firmly grounded in the dynamics of a felt mortality.
Some remnants of this observation remain, but the emphasis of our gatherings has clearly shifted.
If, however, giving thanks arises from the depths of our humanness and what it means to be creatures, then the verses from I Peter above, appointed for today, provide a remarkable complement. For thanks and hope are essentially intertwined. As soon as we realize gratitude, then we also have the capacity, the need, and the ability to delight in hope. We can envision the possibility of giving thanks again, or, even more, of giving thanks continually. The time we have before us includes this grace.
I have always had a visceral response to this one sentence from Peter. It just seems to get everything right. Hope is not something that has to be conjured, as if imagined out of thin air. It isn’t evasive or hard to find. For it is elemental to us: it is in us, in our bones. It is as deeply rooted as thanks and one of our truest expressions.
And the distinct hope that Peter had in mind is the direct complement to our mortality. It is the immortality of God’s promise to us, that we will never be left only to ourselves: not in life and not even in death. For God is always both present and yet still coming to us – and there’s a beautiful immediacy and vitality in this coupling, a dynamism that allows hope to be both firm and yet fresh, and readily available at all times. God’s hospitality knows no bounds. And Peter encouraged the early church to live fully within this confidence and joy.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is now characterized by excess, in nearly mythological proportions. But hope provides a better future.
Prayer
We will stand before you, O Lord, at the last,
and we will know as we are known,
and we will see what we have failed to see;
open our eyes to see and know
that we stand in your presence now,
that you are here before us
in the needs of family, friends, and strangers alike,
seeking our response of love;
grant that we may respond now in such a way
that we may be prepared to stand before you at the last.
Christopher Webber: Give Us Grace
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