Hope in a Culture of Cynicism

Final Part of the Lenten Series: The Season We'd Rather Skip

Photo by Pragyan Bezbaruah: www.pexels.com

I’ve told this story before, but it matters here so I’m going to tell it again. In the summer of 2022, I stepped away from pastoral ministry completely. I had spent a decade leading a non-denominational evangelical church and I was done. Not just tired. Done. Done. The kind of done where you’re not sure you’ll ever go back.

I wasn’t angry exactly, I was something worse. I had become cynical. I had seen too much. Too much politics disguised as theology. Too many power plays wrapped in prayer language. Too many leaders who cared more about the brand than the people. And somewhere in the middle of all that I had lost the thing that had called me into ministry in the first place. I couldn’t feel it anymore. The fire or the pull or whatever you want to call it. It was just gone, and I didn’t know if it was coming back.

We were living in Texas at the time and my wife, and I spent two years trying to find a church that felt like home. We visited dozens of places, and nothing fit. Everything felt like a version of what we’d left or a version of something we couldn’t quite connect with. Two years is a long time to wander without a spiritual home. Long enough that you start to wonder if maybe you’re the problem.

The Sentence That Changed Everything

In June of 2024 I went to visit a friend in Kansas City. He was on staff at a church called Resurrection, A United Methodist Church. We were just hanging out for the weekend. Catching up. Nothing spiritual on the agenda. And at some point, in the conversation, he said something to me that I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared for. He told me it would be a shame if I wasn’t in ministry.

That’s it. That was the whole thing. One sentence over a casual weekend visit. No dramatic intervention. No prophetic word delivered with a booming voice and a hand on my forehead. Just a friend who looked at me and said I still see it in you, even if you don’t.

I don’t know how to explain what happened inside me when he said that. Something that had been locked up for two years cracked open. Not all at once. Not like a light switch. More like a door that had been sealed shut for so long I forgot it was there and someone just barely pushed it open enough to let a little light through. That conversation set in motion a chain of events that brought my family to Kansas City and brought me back into ministry in a way I never could have predicted or planned.

Hope showed up that weekend. As a person. As a friend who believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself.

The Cynicism Trap

I understand cynicism. I lived in it for two years. And I can tell you that cynicism is one of the most seductive postures a person can adopt because it feels like wisdom. It feels like you’ve finally seen through the nonsense and arrived at the truth. The church is broken. People are disappointing. Institutions are corrupt. Nothing ever really changes. And once you’ve settled into that mindset it becomes very difficult to leave because leaving feels naive. Hope feels foolish when you’ve been burned enough times.

And our culture runs on cynicism right now. Turn on the news and everything is a crisis. Open social media and everyone is outraged or exhausted or both. The general consensus seems to be that things are getting worse, people can’t be trusted, and optimism is for people who haven’t been paying attention. And honestly there are days when the evidence for that position feels overwhelming.

The church is not immune. Deconstruction spaces in particular can become breeding grounds for cynicism if we’re not careful. And I say that as someone who writes in that space every single week. There is a version of deconstruction that tears everything down and never builds anything back up. That identifies every problem with the old system and offers nothing in its place. That becomes so skilled at critique that it forgets how to hope. I’ve been there, and it’s a dead end.

Resurrection Is Not a Concept

Here’s what I’ve learned about hope. It almost never shows up the way you expect it to. It doesn’t arrive as a theological argument that finally convinces you everything is going to be okay. Or through a book or a podcast or a perfectly worded Instagram post. Hope, in my experience, almost always shows up as a person. Someone who sees you. Someone who sits with you in the wreckage and doesn’t try to fix it or explain it or fast-forward through it but who simply says I’m still here and I still believe something good is coming.

That’s what Easter is about, friends. And I don’t mean Easter as a holiday with lilies and new outfits and a sunrise service. I mean the actual resurrection. The thing itself. The audacious, ridiculous, world-altering claim that death does not get the last word. That the worst thing is never the last thing. That a man walked out of a tomb and in doing so rewrote the entire story of what is possible.

I spent six weeks in this series asking you to sit in hard things. Mortality. Hunger. Confession. Lament. Silence. Grief. I asked you not to rush through them. I asked you to let Lent be Lent, and I hope you did. Because here’s what I believe with everything in me.

The hope of Easter only means something if you’ve actually walked through the valley to get there.

Resurrection that skips death is denial. But resurrection that comes after you’ve sat in the tomb for three days, or two years, or however long your particular wilderness lasts? That kind of resurrection will wreck you in the best possible way.

The Door Is Open

If you’re reading this and you’re in the cynical season right now, I want you to hear something. You are not too far gone. You are not too burned. You are not too deconstructed or too disillusioned or too done for hope to find you. I know because hope found me in a living room in Kansas City when I had absolutely zero expectation that it would. It just showed up wearing the face of a friend and said one sentence that blew the door open.

That’s how God works. Through people who love you enough to tell you the truth about who you are when you’ve forgotten. Through a meal and a conversation and a weekend visit that you didn’t know was going to change your life. Through the stubborn, relentless, unshakeable insistence that dead things don’t have to stay dead.

This whole Lenten series has been about the season we’d rather skip, and I get it. Nobody wants to sit in ashes and hunger and grief and silence. We want the Easter part. We want the hope and the joy and the lilies and the hallelujah. But the road to Easter goes through all of it. Every single bit of it. And if you’ve walked that road with me these past seven weeks, I want you to know that I’m grateful. And I want you to know that the tomb is empty. And I want you to know that hope is not naive. It’s the bravest thing you’ll ever choose to believe.

Happy Easter, yall.

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