Easter 3, Year A 2026: 1 Peter 1:17-23

This year’s Lent Madness winners were Constance and her companions, also known as the Martyrs of Memphis. In August of 1878, yellow fever invaded the city of Memphis, Tennessee, for the third time in ten years. By the month’s end, the disease had become epidemic and a quarantine was ordered. While more than 25,000 citizens had fled in terror, nearly 20,000 more remained to face the pestilence. As cases multiplied, the death toll averaged 200 people per day. When the worst was over, ninety percent of the people who remained had contracted the fever and more than 5,000 people had died. In that time of panic and flight, many brave men and women, both lay and ordained, remained at their posts of duty or came as volunteers to assist in spite of the terrible risk. Notable among these heroes were four Episcopal sisters from the Community of Saint Mary, and two of their clergy colleagues, all of whom died while tending to the sick. The Sisters had come to Memphis in 1873, at the bishop’s request, to found a school for girls adjacent to St. Mary’s Cathedral. When the 1878 epidemic began, the cathedral dean and Sister Constance immediately organized relief work among the stricken. Helping were six of Constance’s fellow Sisters of St. Mary, plus Sister Clare from St. Margaret’s House in Boston; the Reverend Charles Parsons, Rector of Grace and St. Lazarus Church in Memphis; and the Reverend Louis Schuyler, assistant at Holy Innocents in Hoboken. The cathedral group also included three physicians, two of whom were ordained Episcopal priests, the Sisters’ two matrons, and several volunteer nurses from New York. The cathedral buildings were located in the most infected region of Memphis. Here, amid sweltering heat and scenes of indescribable horror, these men and women of God gave relief to the sick, comfort to the dying, and homes to the many orphaned children. Only two of the workers escaped the fever. Among those who died were Sisters Constance, Thecla, Ruth, and Frances from the Community of Saint Mary, Father Charles, and Father Louis. All six are buried at Elmwood Cemetery. The monument marking the joint grave of Fathers Charles and Louis bears the inscription: “Greater Love Hath No Man.” The high altar in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Memphis, is a memorial to the four Sisters.

Today’s text from the First Letter of Peter is a call to the church universal to holy living. First and Second Peter, along with the letters of James, John, and Jude, are known as the Catholic or General Epistles, a designation that was deemed appropriate for works addressed to the church universal. As opposed to the letters of Paul, which are to particular churches in particular cities, the letters of Peter are addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1:1). Because of this, we have a little more wiggle room when it comes to interpreting these general epistles as being prescriptive for the church universal - because that was the intention of the writer. Although the writer is very unlikely to actually be the Apostle Peter, the claim to his authorization suggests that the emphasis in the writing is related to his image. That is, in the days when this was written, people didn’t claim to write as others to defame them or get away with plagiarism, as the concept of copyright infringement didn’t exist until the 18th century. Rather, they did so to encourage people to listen to their message.

We read the beginning of First Peter last week and will be working our way through the letter throughout the Easter season. Throughout First Peter the focus is on Christian baptism and how it sets us apart not just spiritually but physically too - that is, that we ought to look different from our non-Christian neighbors because our baptisms have changed who we are. Therefore, the focus on household codes is a call to holy living - how do we live in our day-to-day lives that show we are followers of Christ, even in the face of un-acceptance from our neighbors.

A reference to the beginning of Christian life is found twice in chapter 1: “You have been born anew, not from perishable seed but imperishable.” This is the beginning of several arguments on how baptism strengthens the Church to bear good witness to the Gospel in a Pagan world. Given the dignity of the Christian people, there is a standard of conduct that can set an example for the surrounding Pagans in order to counteract their low opinion of Christians. During this time Christians were suffering, being reviled and abused by their fellow Gentiles. The Christians are alienated because they can no longer live the way their Pagan neighbors do and the Gentiles could not understand the strange turn that the gospel produced in the converts’ lives which left them to appear seemingly asocial. In response to this, the writer reminds the reader that Christians have the example of Christ, the righteous one who suffered for the unrighteous. His death was not the end, for he was made alive in the spirit. A more recent tendency has been to refer to First Peter’s suffering and trial language not as addressing imperial persecution but to local hostility wherein nonChristians spoke badly of Christians, treating them as evildoers, defaming their conduct, vilifying them, and insulting them because of their belief in Christ. At this point, Christians would have constituted a new cult, exclusive and, to outside eyes, secretive and subversive - suspect of immorality or even of atheism because they did not participate in the public cult and therefore insulted the gods. The strong stress on the dignity and status of Christians would have encouraged a group that was being ostracized by their own countrymen, a group that could have been addressed as homeless or sojourners, like Israel in the exodus on the road to the Promised Land; they should not look back to their former status as did the Israelites, but press on to their imperishable inheritance. Although they may have been accepted by their neighbors before, they were then “no people” in God’s eyes and had not received God’s mercy; now they are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.

In chapter 2, Peter writes, “Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” It is unlikely that there was a government-led persecution of Christians at the time this letter was written. He most likely would have worded it differently if the emperor was actively persecuting Christians. The point he is making is that the emperor ought to be treated the same as you would treat any person, with your reverence and obedience directed to God.

What intrigued me in the First letter of Peter is that there is no attention given to changing the existing social and domestic order, even when it is unjust. The emphasis is how to respond to the status quo in a way that exemplifies the patience and self-giving of Christ. This can provide extremely helpful encouragement today, in a time in which there is so much suffering, so much that can be infuriatingly and frustratingly wrong going on in our world, and we can feel powerless to change it. Not only powerless but perhaps even culpable, given that Wednesday was Tax Day and our tacit complicity can feel even more exposed and convicting. That our tax dollars continue to go to an unjust war in Iran. Far too much time is spent wondering if God is on our side and not enough wondering if we are on God’s side. In the words of Dr. Charles Matthews, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, A war can only be deemed “just” after acknowledging that all humans are corrupted by sin and that the decision to go to war is “made at real moral cost. The justice and judgment of God are beginning to be worked out in history on this account. And the just war tradition depicts us humans as necessarily part of the world and, as such, part of the awesome and horrendous unspooling of God’s providential judgment on the world.” All this to say, there is no such thing as a “holy war”, or a war that exists outside of morality. To quote the Rt. Rev. Ann Ritonia, the bishop suffragan of the armed forces, if a nation goes to war, “how do we fight without losing our humanity? The heart of the [just war] tradition is restraint and accountability, even when the situation is brutal.” 

What can we, like the readers of First Peter, do within a system? One that needs to be changed, but that we, nonetheless, must live in in the meantime? How do we live our baptismal covenants to respect the dignity of every human being when our government is killing Iranian schoolchildren on our behalf? When calling our members of Congress feels like an exercise in futility? First Peter helps us with that tension between being in the world but not of the world. They were well aware of this contradiction - Christians in Peter’s time had to live under an emperor whose worship was considered a civic duty - there was no concept of separation of church and state.

Hope can feel like an empty answer. A half answer. It can feel passive. But the way in which we are instructed to hope by scripture is active. Hope can be powerful. As Paul writes in Romans 8, “In hope we were saved.” And as we read from 1 Peter last week, “By (God’s) great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed.” We don’t know what our hope will lead us to do. The Martyrs of Memphis didn’t begin their ministries thinking they’d be led to die while caring for the sick. But they lived in the hope, the confidence, the anticipation that what they were doing was furthering their relationships with Christ and in so doing changed the world. May our simple acts of hope in living out our baptismal covenants lead us to that same confidence. Amen.