Under New Management

(Proverbs 23:19-211 Peter 4:1-6)

You may have heard of the Presbyterian pastor and author Tullian Tchividjian; he’s Billy Graham’s grandson, and the successor to D. James Kennedy as the senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church down in Fort Lauderdale.  I haven’t read a lot of his work, but he wrote a remarkable little essay last fall called “Church, We Have a Problem” that I’ve been mulling ever since.  In it, he writes this:

Spend any time in the American church, and you’ll hear legalism and lawlessness presented as two ditches on either side of the Gospel that we must avoid.  Legalism, they say, happens when you focus too much on law or rules, and lawlessness when you focus too much on grace. . . .

It is more theologically accurate to say that the one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms.  Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”).  Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”). . . .  Either way, you’re still trying to save yourself—which means both are legalistic, because both are self-salvation projects. . . .  We want to remain in control of our lives and our destinies, so the only choice is whether we will conquer the mountain by asceticism or by license.

This is a profound insight.  Rev. Tchividjian goes on from there to talk about the importance of preaching grace, which is indeed the main point at issue.  I want to take his comments in a different direction, though, because I think he highlights something important about the world.  The world wants us all to be legalists, and on the whole, it doesn’t really care which kind.  Put another way, the world wants us to be conformists.  Some times and cultures favor “keep the rules” conformists, while others favor “break the rules” conformists, but what really matters either way aren’t the obvious rules being kept or broken.  What matters is the deeper set of rules you aren’t allowed to question.

This is important to recognize when we talk about our individualistic culture.  It is indeed individualistic in the sense that it values the desires of the individual above the well-being of the group (hence no-fault divorce laws, for example).  It’s quick to praise self-expression and denounce “conformity”—by which it means keeping the standards of previous generations, which are now hopelessly passé.  But have you ever noticed that non-conformists run in packs?  It’s great to be an individual and chart your own course, as long as you’re an individual just like everyone else.  Be “different” in one of the approved ways, and you’re golden.  If you’re actually different from the world, you’ll be attacked—as, among other things, a conformist.  And no, no one will see the irony.

Obviously, the world isn’t monolithic.  It has factions—different groups that want different things and approve of different things.  They’re rather like political parties.  But just like our political parties, they only fight each other when there’s no common enemy.  Introduce a threat to the system and the existing power structure, and they band together to defeat it.  We see an example of this in the gospels.  The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians hated each other, but they teamed up willingly to kill Jesus because they hated him even more.  As long as you’re in the system and belong to an accepted group, you might get flak from other groups, but you’ll be okay.

The key question from the world’s perspective is, are you a part of the system?  Do you follow its rules and honor its priorities?  If so, you might think you’re the one calling the shots, but it’s the world that’s running your life; you’re under its management, in its employ.  For example, you might be a spender or a saver; you might believe in working hard and living frugally, or you might live one paycheck behind and borrow from everyone in sight.  These are different factions which honor money in different ways, but they agree on its importance.  That’s what the world really cares about.  Even as Christians, it’s easy to fall into these patterns, thinking and acting much like everyone around us does—acting as if the world owned and ran us, too.

Now, on a quick read of 1 Peter 4, it looks like the apostle is only concerned about obvious bad behavior, as he seems to be describing an extreme group of sinners—acts of lawlessness, lust, orgies, drunkenness, carousing, and so on.  There are two points to consider, however.  First, with the exception of the final item on his list (idolatry), every­thing he’s denouncing was also condemned by pagan writers.  These were vices that society recognized as vices.  Second, I don’t think we can assume that the Christians to whom this letter was written had all been addicts of the worst sort.  It’s probable that most of them had lived reasonably respectable lives before their conversion.  And yet, Peter tars all of them and their whole society with this broad brush.  Why?

I think the answer lies in the fact that this list ends with the condemnation of idolatry.  Most if not all of the rest of the terms in verse 3 refer to behaviors which, though generally recognized as wrong most of the time, were practiced every year at some of the Greek and Roman religious festivals.  If you participated in the religion of the culture, however upright and upstanding your daily life may have been, there would be times you would abandon self-control and any sort of moral constraint as a part of your worship of the gods of the culture.  To refuse to do so was to mark yourself off as someone who followed a different Lord than the world around you and gave your alle­giance to a different authority—and thus as someone not properly under control.

That’s what it’s all about.  The world always talks about morality—even those who denounce traditional morality speak in moralistic terms—but the underlying theme and purpose is control.  Remember, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of this present darkness, as Paul says in Ephesians 6.  The world wants to make us legalists, either striving to use law to control our desires or letting our desires determine our law; either way, it has us in its grip.

Peter reminds us that we’re free of that grip, and calls us to live free of it.  Christ suffered in this world, the perfectly just bearing the weight of all our injustice, to buy us out of our slavery to sin—and he is now done with sin.  He came into this world resolved to defeat sin, he carried that through and broke its power by his death and resurrection, and he has now left it forever behind him, passing through and returning to the presence of God the Father.  Because of his work, we no longer belong to this world, and we are no longer slaves to sin and death; instead, we too look forward to the day when we will leave them forever behind us, passing through them to live with God, in whom there is neither sin nor death, eternally.

Peter says, fix your eyes on that, and arm yourselves with the same resolve to live your life to do the will of God.  We are no longer slaves to this world, we are slaves of God; we’re under new management, accountable to a new master.  We need to set our hearts and minds to live in that freedom, even though it will mean suffering abuse from others, and possibly worse.  We need to steel ourselves to bear that suffering as Christ did, neither running away nor fighting back, but trusting in the justice of God the Father and accepting suffering as an opportunity to bear witness to the love and the grace of God.  As that translator said in the video of the Masterworks China trip from a couple years ago, “Don’t pray that we will not have persecution, but pray that we will prevail and stand throughout persecution.”

Doubt and Faith

(Ezekiel 37:1-14Luke 24:33-43John 20:19-31)

Thomas has gotten a raw deal from the church over the years.  For centuries, in the Western church, he’s been remembered not as an apostle of stubborn faith and the man who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to India, but as “Doubting Thomas.”  For centuries, that phrase has been a byword for a skeptic, and particularly a foolishly unreasonable one.  He doesn’t deserve that.  The fact that we so often read John’s account as if he did says more about us than it does about either Thomas or John.

We don’t see a lot of Thomas in the gospels (only a few brief appearances in John), but I think we get a picture of an introverted man of deep emotions, with a definite pessimistic streak—perhaps the sort who used pessimism to protect himself against hope.  In John 11, when Jesus tells his disciples he’s going back to Jerusalem, they try to talk him out of it; when Jesus persists, Thomas says, “Let’s go with him so that we may die with him.”  Here, we’re not told why Thomas wasn’t with the rest of the group on the day of the resurrection, but I have a hunch he was off by himself trying to come to terms with the disaster of the crucifixion.  You may know people like that—when they’re hurting, they shut everyone out and process it by themselves, until they feel ready to deal with other people again.  I suspect that was Thomas all over.

As readers, we have the advantage of a bird’s-eye view of the events that followed Jesus’ resurrection.  We know the whole story, and we can see where everyone is and what they’re doing.  The disciples didn’t have that.  They hadn’t read the end of the book—they were living the story and trying to make sense of it.  We see this in John 20.  Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, finds it open, and comes running to Peter and John to tell them someone’s stolen Jesus’ body.  They go running, look in the empty tomb, and think—what?  John tells us that “he saw and believed,” but in the next breath he says, “They still didn’t understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.”  So what, exactly, did John believe?

Then that evening, the disciples are all gathered—with the doors locked, because they’re afraid the Jewish leaders might come after them next.  Then, suddenly—there’s Jesus.  Never mind locked doors, never mind walls, there he is.  They’ve been telling each other he’s alive, but when he actually shows up, they think he’s a ghost.  That sounds bad, but we shouldn’t be too hard on them.  After all, it was one thing to believe that Jesus had come back to life; that was hard enough.  To have expected him to defy the laws of physics by suddenly appearing in locked rooms would have been quite something else again.  What else would you call someone who walks through walls, but a ghost?

Jesus doesn’t condemn them.  He gives them his peace, to calm their fear, and then he invites them to touch him and to see his wounds.  He even goes so far as to eat a piece of fish in their presence before they believe it’s really him; only then do they begin to rejoice.  They’ve been told Jesus is alive, and they say they believe it—but when he actually shows up, they need proof.

Then Thomas rejoins the group, having started to come to terms with Jesus’ death, no doubt expecting to spend some time mourning with his friends—and instead, he gets a cockeyed story about Jesus raised from the dead.  Put yourself in his place:  what would you have thought?  Yeah, you’d have thought they’d all cracked under the emo­tional strain and taken a group vacation from reality.  Thomas understandably refuses to believe a word of it unless—notice this—he gets the same proofs Jesus gave them.

The next Sunday, they’re all together again behind locked doors, and once again Jesus just shows up in the room.  Once again, he gives them his peace, and then he turns to Thomas and says, “Here I am, and here are my wounds; touch me, and believe.”  But Thomas doesn’t need it.  He doesn’t need to watch Jesus eat lunch.  He looks at Jesus and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

This is the central confession of this gospel, the point to which the whole book builds, because Thomas goes farther than any of the other disciples ever had.  To avoid accidentally taking God’s name in vain, no observant Jew would ever, or will ever, say it.  Instead, they substitute the word “Lord.”  For Thomas to call Jesus “My Lord and my God” can only mean one thing:  he understands that Jesus is the one true God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Notice how Jesus responds to Thomas’ great confession of faith.  He doesn’t praise Thomas for it, as he had earlier when Peter said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”; nor does he chastise Thomas for his doubt.  Instead, he prods him a little.  “Because you have seen me, you have believed,” Jesus says.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  He’s not comparing Thomas to the other disciples here—they had all had to see Jesus before they believed, and the others had had to see rather more of him.  He’s pointing Thomas beyond himself and beyond his own situation, to days yet to come.

It would not be long before Thomas would be proclaiming the news he had at first refused to believe—Jesus who was crucified has risen from the dead!—to people who wouldn’t see Jesus come popping in to prove it.  The Lord is pointing Thomas to those of us who would come later, who would have no choice but to believe without having the evidence right in front of us; and he’s speaking to us.  From the first readers of this gospel down to the present day, we’ve all believed in Jesus without seeing or touching him.  We’ve known doubt, just as Thomas did, but unlike him, we’ve had to go forward by faith; we haven’t been able to rest on personal proof the way he did.

When we dismiss Thomas as a doubter, we read this passage as if we stood above him, as if his doubt were somehow exceptional.  When we do that, we cut ourselves off from the comfort Jesus offers here.  We need to come into the story at Thomas’s level and stand beside him, as people who also have times when we struggle to believe, and maybe even are afraid to.  It can be hard to believe in Jesus.  We haven’t seen him, and we haven’t seen anyone who was embalmed and buried come alive again.  I suspect that many of us have wished once or twice that we could just see Jesus, and touch him, and have him tell us we’re doing okay.  The thing is, in his words to Thomas, we have his assurance that he knows how hard it is.  That’s why he pronounced a special blessing on us, and on our faith; and that’s why he sent us the Holy Spirit, to carry us through.

That’s also why John wrote this gospel, to carry that blessing.  He wrote to give us reason to overcome our doubt and fear and believe in Jesus Christ—and that isn’t a once-for-all struggle that we leave behind once we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.  At least, for most of us it isn’t, and so we need John’s witness, we need to hear the promises Jesus made to all who follow him.  And we need the reassurance that in the times that we doubt, Jesus does not condemn us; rather, he comes gently to us as he did to Thomas and restores our faith, so that we can say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

We are no less in Christ when we doubt than when our faith seems strong; and we are no weaker when we doubt, because it was never about our strength anyway.  Christ has risen from the dead by the power of his Holy Spirit, and he has breathed his Holy Spirit into us—the Spirit of resurrection, who makes the dead ones live and the dry bones dance.  The power is not in our faith, but in the one in whom we put our faith; and he holds our faith firm even when we can’t.  He holds us together even when we can’t.  He has given us his life, which has overcome death.  No matter how dark things may seem, he will bring us through, and in the end, we will see the Son rise.

Nonviolent Protestors

(Isaiah 8:11-151 Peter 3:13-22)

Peter has exhorted his readers not to fight fire with fire, but rather with blessing, offering the assurance of God’s word that “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”  He follows that in verse 13 with a proverb:  “Who’s going to persecute you for being eager to do good?”  The implied answer is “no one,” and in general—which is the level on which proverbs work—that’s true.  In the normal course of events, if others see you doing things they consider to be good, they aren’t going to attack you for that.  Peter’s ap­pealing here, as he has at earlier points in the letter, to the fact that even a corrupt society recognizes much of what is truly good, and appreciates it as such.  As a general rule, people who do evil are punished, and those who don’t, aren’t.

Still, that’s only generally true.  It doesn’t always hold, and Peter knows it.  Some people hate what is right, and enjoy tormenting “do-gooders”; others feel threatened by those whose example makes them look bad.  Then too, there are those for whom it’s strictly business.  Nothing personal, but the morally upright are just easier to rip off and abuse, that’s all.

Beyond that, while there is much that God calls good with which the world agrees, we know the world is in rebellion against God; it seems each culture and every generation rebels in different ways, but there are always aspects of his righteousness which the world declares evil rather than good.  As we saw in the Beatitudes, anyone who hungers and thirsts for the righteousness of God will end up being persecuted sooner or later.  If you hunger and thirst for his righteousness, then you aren’t hungry and thirsty for the bill of goods this world wants to sell you, and you aren’t aiming to go where it wants you to go.  Instead, you will find yourself a walking contradiction to beliefs and commitments which the culture declares self-evident and non-negotiable, and the world will find it has no hold over you; that makes you a threat.

Instinctively, the fight-or-flight reflex drives us to react to worldly opposition by either backing down or going to war.  Large sections of the church in this country have taken the latter course as official policy, whether by trying to wall the world out or through political and cultural offensives.  Tellingly, their efforts do little to convince the culture of the love and grace of Jesus, and too often they end up being of the world even though they aren’t in it.  But for the rest of the church, which seeks to remain engaged with the world, compromise is a constant, insidious temptation.  There’s always the pressure to conform to the world—to look for some way to justify telling our society what it wants to hear.  Though we learn to hunger and thirst for righteousness, the hunger and thirst for the approval and applause of those around us never quite goes away.

Neither combat nor compromise is the right course.  As Peter tells us, we’re called to a third way:  to oppose without fighting, to stay connected without compromising.  Our job is to be different from the world—conspicuously, but not combatively, assertively but not aggressively.  On the one hand, we need not fear what the world fears—and fear drives the world as much as anything does.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as the Scriptures tell us, in part because it puts every other fear in perspective:  compared to him, every earthly threat is insignificant.  If we fear God, we can be fearless with the world, and thus free to proclaim our faith boldly without feeling the need to protect or defend ourselves from anyone or anything around us.

Thus, on the other hand, we don’t actually need to fight for our faith.  We’re to contend for it, yes, but not in the world’s way.  It’s not our job to defeat others and win arguments, and nothing justifies tearing other people down or belittling them.  You’ll notice Peter says in verse 15 that we should always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks the reason for our hope.  We’re supposed to preach the gospel, yes, and do it without compromise, but Peter doesn’t tell us to push that conversation.  Rather, he envisions us living in such a way that other people ask usabout our faith.  What we say about Jesus ought to be credible, whether they want to accept it or not, because it’s backed up by what they’ve already seen in our lives.  If people haven’t already seen the sermon, they aren’t going to want to hear it, or be likely to believe it if they do.

Toward the powers of this world, then, we are to live as nonviolent protestors, actively resisting without fighting back.  Our strength is the strength of the Holy Spirit, which is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who suffered without even threatening to retaliate, and died to save even those who were killing him.  In a culture which is increasingly convincing itself that orthodox Christianity stands against progress, we must stand firmly against what this world thinks is progress, but do so with only gentleness and respect.  If we do so, there will be loud voices that will slander us in every way they can think of, and many will believe those slanders because they want to; but those who take the time to look at us will see them for the lies they are, and that will be a more powerful witness to Jesus Christ than anything we could devise.

Our culture, for all that it’s running on the fumes of the faith of generations past, still has a deeply-ingrained belief that love is the best thing there is—a belief which really didn’t exist apart from belief in the God of the Bible.  This society has divorced that belief in love from any belief in God, but for now, that belief in the idea of love remains.  As a result, we have a culture which loves to talkabout love, but is losing any sense of any obligation to show love, especially if that would require any sort of self-sacrifice.  “Love” has become a weasel word, used to justify whatever the powerful and the fashionable want to justify.

>We can’t out-argue that.  It’s hard to argue someone into believing what they don’t want to believe, and at this point, the cultural headwind makes it impossible.  Even if that weren’t so, the best an argument could win us with most people would be intellectual agreement, and that isn’t our goal; that doesn’t change people’s hearts.  Indeed, it often doesn’t even change their behavior, unless you have the power to require the behavior you desire—which only hides the fact that their hearts haven’t really changed.

But then, we can’t change other people’s hearts, no matter what we do.  Only God can do that, and he does it through his love.  We can’t argue the world into believing its view of love is wrong; we can only show it to be wrong by loving the world as God loved the world.  We can only show the world the love of God by loving one another, and by loving our families, and by loving our neighbors, and by loving the desperate, the powerless, and the outcast—and by loving our enemies, and seeking to bless them rather than insult them or condemn them.

This is hard; and for a long time in Western culture, the church could believe it didn’t have to do that, because the cultural authorities were outwardly friendly.  But now, even in America, we are riding out of Palm Sunday and toward the cross.  We’ve been accustomed to the praise, and we’ve taken it as our due, expecting it to continue.  Jesus knew better.  He knew the crowd’s allegiance was shallow and fickle, and that they would soon turn on him; and he knew he wasn’t there to receive their praise, but to suffer and die for them.

A Colony of Heaven

(Psalm 34:11-182 Corinthians 5:16-211 Peter 3:8-12)

I mentioned a few weeks ago my euphoria when Seattle won the Super Bowl; of course, as any Ravens fan could tell you, after you win, you lose a lot of your players, and so it has been for us.  Some of those departures won’t hurt us much; others will be harder to replace.  Kathy, you can tell your mother she’s going to love Golden Tate for the Lions.  The only two who really stung, though, were a couple of defensive ends who we cut to save money, Red Bryant and Chris Clemons.  Big Red especially, because he’d been the emotional leader of the defense for years.  He gave the team its rallying cry through the past two seasons:  “We all we got—we all we need.”
It’s a great line; and while the line has departed with Big Red, I hope the spirit lives on in that locker room, because that’s the attitude and approach that builds a cohesive team out of a bunch of very different people.  “We all we got,” so we have to depend on one another—no one else is going to show up to help us out if we don’t.  “We all we got,” so we need to build one another up, not tear each other down—we can’t strengthen the team by hurting one of its members.  Any harm we do to another, we do to all of us, including ourselves.  “We all we got,” so it’s up to us to take care of each other and be there to support one another—if we don’t, who will?  And if we take that approach and treat each other that way, then truly, “we all we need.”
This isn’t just true in football, either; in fact, it’s a pretty good one-line summary of Peter’s commands in this passage.  The bookends to verse 8, which NIV translates as “live in harmony” and “be humble,” could more literally be translated “of one mind” and “humble of mind.”  Peter’s point isn’t that we’re all supposed to hold identical opinions, of course.  Rather, he’s saying the same thing Paul says in Romans 12:  we should all have the same mindset as one another, because all our minds are to be set on the things of the Spirit of God.  It’s the mindset Paul describes in Philippians 2:  “Let this mind be in you, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who didn’t insist on his rights or cling to his prerogatives, but opened his hands and let them all go to serve us, humbling himself in obedience, even to the point of death on a cross.”
Yes, we disagree on many things, but we share one salvation in one Lord through one faith by one grace, and none of us has any claim to stand above anyone else.  The more we appreciate our own desperate need for grace—and even the best of us stands in desperate need, make no mistake—the less we will be inclined to look down on others for their need.  The more we see one another as the beloved of Christ, for whom he died and rose again, the less free we will feel to beat one another up to get our own way.  If our focus is on Jesus Christ through his Holy Spirit, we will be of one mind and spirit where it matters.  We will be humble toward God and one another, and we will treat each other with love, compassion, and understanding, because we will see ourselves in the light of God’s grace, as people who need love, compassion, and understanding.
This is important for many reasons, both spiritual and practical, and the practical reasons are very much on Peter’s mind here.  He’s still focused on the reality of their lives as outlanders in a suspicious and increasingly hostile world.  He says in verse 9, “Don’t return evil for evil or insult for insult”; the word for insult rarely appears in Scripture, but one of the few places either this noun or its verb form is used in the New Testament is by Peter in 2:23, talking about Jesus.  He’s tying this in to his broader theme:  when we’re treated unjustly, we need to have this mind in us which is ours in Christ Jesus, to trust in God’s justice and not return fire, and to be more concerned for the good of others than for our own pain.
Part of the reality of that is that we can’t do it on our own—we need the support of other believers.  We need the church, and we need it to be functioning as the church.  We’re not going to find help in thinking like Christ and living like Christ from the world; the church is all we have.  We all we got, and we need to treat each other accordingly.  We’re vulnerable, and all the more so if we don’t support and build up one another.  The church in this country has been able to ignore that reality for a long time because we’ve been used to having the support and protection of the powers that be, but that’s going away, ever more quickly.  We’re being reminded that we aren’t a powerful nation on this earth in our own right, but a colony of heaven, dependent on the power of God.
That colony language doesn’t come from Peter or from 2 Corinthians, but from Philippians 3, which we read a few weeks ago.  Philippi was a Roman colony, established to help secure Roman power in that region, and so all the freedmen of the city were given Roman citizenship.  They took great pride in that fact.  When Paul said, “Our citizenship is in heaven,” he was calling them to radically rethink their whole identity—to see them­selves not as a colony of an earthly power, but as a colony of the power of heaven amongthe powers of this world.  Peter here is calling his hearers to the same thing.
Of course, like Philippi, we’re a colony with a purpose beyond merely making money.  We’re here to be the physical representation of the kingdom of heaven on earth.  We’re here to carry forward Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation, calling people to be recon­ciled to God through him.  We’re a diplomatic colony to bear witness to the gospel, that there is salvation in Jesus Christ by grace alone, and that no matter what you’ve done, Jesus loves you enough that he died to save you.  We cannot carry out this mission if we don’t show each other the love and the grace of Christ.
We can’t because we’re a colony.  We’re an outpost.  We can’t appeal to the powers of this world to protect us or to do our job for us.  Not any more.  We all we got in this world.  To borrow from Ben Franklin, we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.  But God provides and the Spirit is with us, and in his Spirit, we all we need, just as we are.

More than that, we can only carry out our mission if we live with each other in love and grace—to frame it positively—because how we live with each other is how we earn credibility to preach love and grace to those around us.  Why should anyone believe in the sacrificial love of Jesus if they can’t see us laying down our lives in love for one another?  Why should anyone believe that our God is a God of grace if we aren’t a people of grace?  We can only teach people that Jesus lives if they see him living among us.  The only way we earn any credibility to tell them Jesus saves is if we live together as people who have been saved.  May we ever be so, to the glory of God.

Free to Serve

(Isaiah 52:13-53:121 Peter 2:18-3:7)

One of the biggest things that trips us up as we try to understand the Bible is our habit of treating it like a plate of monkey bread.  We come to it, and it’s all in one piece, but we figure that it’s really a bunch of little pieces stuck together; and we don’t want a whole lot of it, we only want a snack.  We only want to know what the Bible says about this one thing, or maybe we just want something to comfort us or encourage us; and so we pull it apart.  We treat it like a lot of small pieces stuck together for convenience, rather than as all one book that we need to understand as a whole.

The tendency with this section of 1 Peter is to look at it and say, “Here, Peter’s talking about slaves, and here he’s talking about marriage,” and then go off and talk about the husband as the head of the household and the importance of female modesty and never actually come back to the book at all.  That misses the heart of this passage.  For one thing, look at verses 18-25 of chapter 2.  Peter begins, “Slaves, be subject to your masters with all respect,” but then he doesn’t actually say very much about slaves at all.  He spends more than half those verses talking about Christ and his suffering, and most of what he says applies to everyone in the church, not just slaves.

For another, context matters.  What do slaves and married women have in common?  Under Roman law, both were completely under the authority and at the mercy of another person.  What has Peter just been talking about in verses 13-17?  As slaves to God, we are to defer to other people and respect those who are in authority over us.  Is that always going to be a positive experience?  Will those authorities always treat us justly?  No.  And if they don’t, where is that going to bite?

The fact of the matter is, it probably won’t be from the emperor first.  Governments may be unjust, and even the best of them create a lot of injustice along the way, because this world malfunctions all over the place; but except in times of all-out persecution, it’s rare that any government deliberately does as much damage to any one person as an abusive husband can.  Slaveowners could be even worse, for obvious reasons.  It’s all well and good for Peter to say, “Respect the emperor,” even when the emperor is Nero or Caligula; but what if you’re a slave and your master is a mini-Nero?  What if you’re married to Caligula’s evil twin?  What are you supposed to do about that?

American society being what it is, we instinctively analyze and respond to these questions in terms of legal rights and political power.  We want Peter to say, “Rise up and demand justice”—but he couldn’t, because the people he’s addressing have no ability to do that.  They’re powerless.  Outside the very rich, if a man killed his wife, unless his wife’s family had a powerful patron, the authorities didn’t care.  If he killed his slave, nobody cared.  Other slaves might, but they didn’t count, and didn’t dare say anything.  Legally speaking, you’re going to submit—or else.

Peter’s answer is spoken into this reality, and the heart of it is an application of verse 16:  “As free people, but as slaves of God.”  You’re not free by the law of the world, but you are free in the spirit.  If you’re a slave, if you’re a married woman under Roman law, you’re going to submit; you can’t control that.  But you can control why you submit.  Do you submit resentfully, because you have to—perhaps because you’ll be beaten if you don’t?  Peter says, look to Christ, and do it for him.  Do it because he submitted to far worse for you, so that he might heal you and give you new life in God.

For slaves whose masters are cruel and unjust, the reality is that they will suffer unjustly.  Peter acknowledges this, and asks, “Is it really any better if you suffer because you deserve it?”  The answer is, of course, no.  If you suffer for doing good, he says, look to Jesus and endure it without fighting back.  He did that for us, because he trusted that the injustice of his earthly judges would not stand; God the Father and his justice would have the last word.  If we do the same, bearing undeserved suffering patiently because of Christ, because we trust in the Father, then our suffering isn’t pointless—we’re suffering for God, as an act of service to him, and this pleases him.

As Peter says this, he starts off talking to slaves, but he isn’t only talking to them—his words are for the whole church.  If we’re all slaves to God, and if we’re all exiles and resident aliens in a world where we really don’t quite belong, then what’s true of those household slaves is in fact true of all of us.  For one, if we live faithfully with the Lord, we’re all likely to suffer unjustly; that reality was just more obvious in their case.  And we’re all every bit as indebted to Jesus, who freely allowed himself to be tortured to death when he never deserved it.  If he’d insisted on his rights and demanded justice, we’d all be damned.

For another, we’re all going to have to submit to others, and not just the government.  No, we don’t have legal slavery; but the critics of capitalism have long denounced it as “wage slavery,” and they’re not entirely wrong.  Just ask the Man in Black. . . .

Obviously, there’s a difference between being beaten for praying and being taken advantage of at work because you have a selfish, unjust boss who knows you can’t afford to quit.  Employees have options and recourse that slaves didn’t.  But if you’re in a position where those options are all theoretical and there’s no better job in sight, you’re just as caught.  Bad economies empower bad bosses, and it comes down to the same two choices in the end.  If you’re being treated unjustly, you can resist in some way, even if all you do is complain, or you can look to God and bear the injustice with patience and grace for Jesus’ sake.  Put another way, you’re going to be a servant regardless; the choice is yours either to serve grudgingly, kicking and screaming, or to serve freely and graciously in the name of the Lord.  The work is the same in either case, but the heart is completely different—and it’s amazing how much that difference can mean.

When Peter speaks to wives, we see his concern for the witness of the church come into play again.  Women married to unbelievers were in a difficult situation.  The Roman writer Plutarch declared, “A wife ought not to make friends of her own, but to enjoy her husband’s friends in common with him.  The gods are the first and most important friends.  Wherefore it is becoming for a wife to worship and to know only the gods that her husband believes in.”  The women Peter’s addressing were violating that completely, and so they had to be very careful; they could easily endanger both themselves and the church.

This is why we have the injunction against fancy hairdos, jewelry and clothing, because they were commonly seen as signs that a woman intended seduction.  To quote the Roman satirist Juvenal, “There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.”  It was already questionable for a married woman to go out alone to meet with a lot of men her husband didn’t know; if she went out dressed to the nines, her husband and their society would likely assume the worst.  By contrast, if she lived in such a way that the goodness and holiness of God could be clearly seen in her life, that would allay his concerns, and perhaps draw him to Christ as well.

There’s a lot we could say here about how Peter is subverting the Roman social order, but most of it is outside the scope of this sermon.  I do want to look at verse 7, however, which brings the point of this passage—that in Christ, we’re called to choose freely to serve others—home to husbands, who weren’t legally obliged to submit to their wives.  He says to them, “Husbands, don’t you get any ideas.”  The culture of the time thought women were inferior and rendered them powerless, and Peter’s been talking to wives about how to live out their required submission to their husbands; now he forbids married men in the church from taking advantage of that.  As Karen Jobes puts it, “Peter teaches that men whose authority runs roughshod over their women, even with society’s full approval, will not be heard by God.”

Remember, in verses 13-17 Peter tells Christians to live with deference and respect to every person; this played out in particular ways in the Roman house­hold, but that didn’t let husbands and masters off the hook.  Nothing in this passage in any way justifies any sort of abuse of power; indeed, we are grateful that thanks to people like Mary Ann Cox, women with abusive husbands have options now that their Roman counterparts didn’t.  Whatever position of authority you may have, you have it only because of God, and under hisauthority, as his slave; he will judge you on whether or not you’ve used it in accordance with his will and his character.  Jesus suffered injustice, trusting in the one who judges justly; you don’t want to be on the other side of that equation.  Whether you are powerful or powerless, you are a slave of God; you are free in Christ, which means you’re free to serve.

Free Slaves

(Jeremiah 29:1-71 Peter 2:13-17)

In 1984, a Nigerian man named Umaru Dikko found himself in a bit of trouble.  He had been his country’s Minister for Transportation from 1979-83, but then a coup took down his government and he fled to exile in London.  Once there, understandably enough, he took every opportunity to attack the new government back in Lagos.  He also became a vocal critic of Israel, perhaps because the Israeli government bought a lot of Nigerian oil and sold the Nigerian government a lot of weapons.  That may have been understandable too, but it wasn’t wise, because Israel has the Mossad, and you never want to get on their bad side.

In July of 1984, a joint Nigerian-Israeli operation kidnapped Dikko, drugged him, and stuck him in a wooden crate (together with the Israeli anaesthesiologist whose job it was to keep him unconscious).  Crazy?  Not exactly.  Legally, any sort of bag, box, or other container which is properly labeled as a diplomatic bag is protected under the Vienna Convention and completely untouchable by local law enforcement.  It wouldn’t have mattered if Dikko had woken up and started yelling—there would have been nothing anyone could do.

Except for one thing:  that bit about “properly labeled.”  As it happened, someone in the Nigerian embassy forgot to do the paperwork.  Customs officials at Heathrow received word of the kidnapping while the crate was being processed; understandably, they thought it might be a good idea to check out that crate that was headed for a Nigerian airliner.  Since the crate lacked the necessary documentation, there was no label to keep them from searching it.  Dikko was freed, and four of his kidnappers ended up in a British prison.

As abuses of diplomatic immunity go, that one’s pretty extreme; we tend to associate it more with such things as the $17.2 million owed to New York City as of 2011 in unpaid parking tickets by members of the various UN delegations.  Still, the extreme case makes the point well:  if you tell a group of people they aren’t bound by the government of the nation in which they live, some of them will take advantage of that.  It doesn’t take many bad actors before the group as a whole develops a reputation for antisocial behavior.

Now, when you’re talking about recognized diplomats under international law, that reputation might not cause any real problems.  Being unpopular won’t hurt them, and they’re protected by treaty from anything worse.  The early church, however, was a small minority with no legal recognition or protection, and their mission was to be a witness for the gospel to the com­munities in which they lived.  A bad reputation could cripple their efforts, and if the government decided to go after them, they were defenseless.  Peter’s been very clear that Christians need to see ourselves as citizens of the kingdom of God who live among the nations of this world; but that doesn’t give us the right to misbehave, much less any protection if we do.  It means we’re held to a higher standard than the laws of this world, not an easier one.

This is the issue Peter begins to lay out in our passage this morning.  The crux of his argument, and the key point for this whole section of the book that extends through 3:7, is found in verse 16:  “As those who are free . . . yet as God’s slaves.”  The world defines being free as having freedom forthis world—freedom to do what the world teaches us to want to do.  It’s freedom to be ruled by our desires without anyone telling us “no.”  What Peter’s talking about, what God offers us, is freedom from this world.  It’s the freedom to step outside our desires and outside the roles and expectations the world lays on us, and to choose to do and to be something else.

Which is to say, the world thinks freedom is being able to do what we want with nobody stopping us.  The freedom of God is the freedom to stop ourselves.  It’s the ability to pull free of our desires and fears and think clearly rather than just reacting to them.  It’s the liberty to choose not to do what we want because we understand that what we want to do isn’t what we ought to do or what’s best for us.  It’s freedom from the world, from ourselves, for God.

Peter invites us to act as free people by turning away from that slavery which the world mistakes for freedom.  He summons us to freely choose to live as what we already are in Christ, as slaves to God.  If that doesn’t sound like freedom to you, consider this:  the way of the world is the way of anxiety.  No matter what, there’s always that crawling uncertainty, doubt, and fear at the heart of life.  The most you can ever do is bury it.  If you’re really good at what you do, you may be able to keep it buried for a long time, but you can’t change this fact:  much of what’s good in your life and your world is utterly dependent on things you can’t even understand, much less control.  That’s even true for the most powerful people on this planet.  Eventually, things will go wrong, and you won’t know until they happen, and you won’t be able to do anything about it—but it will all be on your head anyway.

Not so for the people of God.  Our dependence is no less, but we know the one who controls all the forces and events no human can even understand; we know the one on whom we depend, and we love him, and we know he loves us and takes care of us.  That’s why the word of God tells us over and over again not to worry and not to fear, and why Jesus promised us a peace that passes all human understanding—it’s the peace of not having to fear those things which pass all human understanding.  Being slaves to God means freedom from the anxiety that comes with being slaves to ourselves, and thus being free to live as people who are whole and well.

Of course, as we’ve already noted, Peter isn’t just talking about this to make his readers feel good, or to give them a theological education:  he wants to apply it in a particular way.  If we live as slaves to God and owe our allegiance to him above any human authority, how then do we relate to those human authorities?  Is this an excuse to assert our independence from them and do whatever we want?  Peter says, firmly, no.  We are not to use our freedom as an excuse to cause trouble.  That’s not what it’s for, and not what we’re for.

Instead, because we revere God and love his people, we are to treat everyone else (and especially those in authority) with respect and consideration, so that those who attack the church will only make themselves look foolish and ignorant for their efforts.  Peter tells us to defer to our fellow human beings, because they are God’s creations just as much as we are.  Here again we could look to Philippians, this time chapter 2:  “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility put others first, ahead of yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interest, but also to the interests of others.”  Like the Jewish exiles in Babylon to whom Jeremiah wrote, our job is to pray for the community and the nation to which God has sent us, and to do whatever we can do to bless it, and partly for the same pragmatic reason.

As part of that responsibility, Peter emphasizes something which I think we really need to hear:  he commands respect and deference for the emperor and the other ruling authorities.  I don’t hear much of that in this country these days.  I hear a lot of disrespect, contempt, and abuse directed at the President, at Congress, and at politicians and government figures all down the line, and it’s just wrong and ungodly.  There’s no excuse for it, and don’t try to tell me there is.

Peter wrote during the later years of Nero’s reign, when he’d already started executing anyone who displeased him.  Nero had had Paul put to death in AD 62, and would ultimately have Peter crucified.  In 64 AD, he made Christians the scapegoat for the Great Fire of Rome and had them burned as torches in his gardens to provide light for his parties.  This is the emperor for whom Peter commands respect.  Nero’s uncle and predecessor, Caligula, once had an entire section of the stands in the arena thrown to the lions because he was bored.  Peter commands respect for the emperor anyway, and doesn’t offer exceptions.

We need to listen to him, because quite frankly, we’re spoiled.  We have yet to see the President burning Christians as torches on the White House lawn; if we did, Peter would still tell us to treat him with respect.  Anything else dishonors God.  Anything else is a sign that we’re still too caught up in this world, and pinning too many of our hopes on it.

Ambassadors for Christ

(Isaiah 10:1-4Philippians 3:17-4:11 Peter 2:11-12)

Michael Card tells a remarkable story in his book Immanuel (read here by John Piper):

That’s what Peter’s talking about in this passage; that’s the goal of his instruction.  He tells us we’re exiles and resident aliens in this world.  He’s used each of these words before, but now he puts them together to multiply the effect.  Then he takes it a step further, adding in the point he’s just made in verse 9:  we have a purpose in this world that goes beyond just getting through the day and making a living.  We aren’t supposed to just blend in with everyone else, as if we were citizens of this world right along with them.  Our citizenship is somewhere else; we’re here on a mission from God.

Let’s unpack that for a minute.  Peter doesn’t explicitly use the language of citizenship, but coming hard on the heels of verses 9-10, his point here is right in line with Paul in Philippians 3.  It isn’t in the way you probably think, however.  The NIV reads, “sinful desires,” but a more literal translation would be “desires of the flesh.”  Peter isn’t just talking about things which are obviously sinful—and neither is Paul.  The point is broader than that.  The desires of the flesh are those desires which are natural to those whose minds are set on earthly things.  Yes, obviously, many of those are clearly sinful; but many of them aren’t.  There’s nothing wrong with our instinct for self-protection and self-preservation, or with our desire for material comfort and prosperity.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to experience pleasure, or to have a good reputation.  They’re just earthly, worldly, of the flesh, and so by themselves, they point us away from God.

Now, does this mean that we shouldn’t have any desires at all?  No.  We’re not supposed to be enemies of pleasure, as if we worshipped a cosmic killjoy; I’m not going to tell you to put on a hair shirt and go out and sleep in the snow on a bed of nails.  We need to understand that Peter was using typical language from both Jewish and Greek moral and ethical teaching, which would have been familiar to his audience; where the NIV reads “desires,” we should understand that to mean unrestrained desires or impulses.  The point isn’t that it’s wrong to have desires, but that it’s wrong to just give in to them and let them run the show.

It’s natural to desire pleasure, but that desire needs to be under control.  If it’s starting to get away from you—maybe you’re starting to drink a little too much, or your eyes are starting to wander once in a while—then you need to abstain.  You need to cut yourself short.  It’s normal to want financial and material security, but if you find yourself making all your decisions on that basis—if that desire is running your life—then you need to set that aside, because that way of life doesn’t bring glory to God.  It’s perfectly understandable to want a good reputation, but if you catch yourself shading the truth, or maybe spinning things a bit, to make yourself look good, then you need to sacrifice that desire to God, because he’s a God of truth, not of the lie.

We’re called to be a people who respect our earthly rulers, but who fear God alone—not any person around us and not any human power.  We’re an organized com­munity of resident aliens in this world, members of another nation living in the midst of this one, owing our allegiance to a greater King, for the purpose of declaring and displaying the character and the glory of that King in the earthly community in which we live and work.  Like Joseph, we’re here to tell people the good news of Jesus Christ with such persistent love and such humble grace that even when people attack us and beat us for it, our example will move them to repentance and faith.  We’re on a mission from God, alright—a diplomatic mission.  We’re his ambassadors to Winona Lake and Warsaw, to Kosciusko County, to Indiana, to America.  We’re the designated representatives of the kingdom of heaven to this community and this nation.

As some of you probably know, I’m pulling that language (and the title of this sermon) from 2 Corinthians 5, which we didn’t read this morning.  In verse 20 of that chapter, Paul describes himself and his colleagues as ambassadors for Christ because they’re speaking on behalf of Christ, carrying forward his ministry of reconciliation which God has entrusted to them.  It isn’t only a ministry for Paul and other special people in the church, however.  It’s been given to all of us.  Paul implores us to be reconciled to God so that we would then turn and do the same for others, leading them to find the peace with God which we’ve found.

This is who we are.  We are God’s people put here as his representatives to this nation and this community to declare his praises by our words and our actions, whether the world wants us to or not.  We are a new kind of people who don’t exist for ourselves, for God has formed us for himself to be his diplomats, helping lead those around us in the fine art of having his way.  We are his ambassadors bringing the good news that the God of heaven has made a peace treaty with the people of this world, and inviting them to sign it.

A Peculiar People

(Exodus 19:3-6Hosea 2:21-231 Peter 2:9-10)

If you’re familiar with the King James Version, you probably realize that I took the title for this message from its translation of verse 9.  You might also remember that I referenced it in the first sermon of this series.  Our modern translations are right to use the word “chosen” instead, because the word “peculiar” doesn’t really get the right idea across anymore, but it’s too bad, really.  “Peculiar,” as the King James uses it, carries a sense of possession and uniqueness which the word “chosen” doesn’t.  I could say that this is my chosen shirt this morning, and I could say that Sara is my chosen wife, but I couldn’t say that this shirt is peculiar to me—I’m not emotionally invested in it, and there are a lot of other people who have shirts just like it.  Obviously, I wouldn’t normally call my wife peculiar, but in this sense, she’s peculiar to me alone.
Now, you might point out that I didn’t just choose her, she also chose me, and you don’t know how right you are; but that only strengthens the point, because we have also chosen God.  His choice of us is clearly first and greater, but it isn’t something that just happens to us—we respond to him, and so participate in his choice.  We’re bound to him by his act and our own, and so we’re doubly his, and his alone.  No one else has any claim on us—not even denominations that think they have a right to our property.  We are only God’s possession.
All that said, I’ll admit it’s not the whole reason I chose this title for the sermon.  The fact is, while Peter doesn’t explicitly say this, we are indeed a peculiar people as the world understands the word.  We are odd; we are atypical; we are outside our world’s idea of “normal.”  To say God has chosen us doesn’t just mean that he’s chosen us to be with him in the next life; he’s chosen us, as Peter makes clear, to do his work and serve his purposes in this one.  We are strange to this world because we’re turned toward God.
Peter tells us we are a separate nation from the nations of this world.  We are a nation set apart in allegiance to the King of heaven, to be his priests to the other nations.  As we see in Exodus 19, this is language used in the Old Testament to describe Israel and their mission.  God had made a covenant with Israel, and that was to define them in every respect.  They were to be holy to the Lord—different and distinct from the peoples around them in the way they lived life, the values they upheld and the goals they pursued—because their primary allegiance was to him rather than to any worldly powers.  Precisely in that, they were to serve as the priests of God to the world—the access point through whom the nations could come to God, and by whom they might be led to him.
Biblically, all our standards for life are to be disjointed from our culture and society.  How we do business, why we do business, how we talk to one another, how we use money, our attitudes toward material possessions, our view of sex, our ideas of what we deserve and what we don’t deserve—in all these things, and in everything else, we should be fundamentally different from those around us.  The purpose of everything we do is “to declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  That’s why we exist.  You want a mission statement?  In the big picture, that’s it.  Anything else you come up with has to point to that and end there.
The world worships itself, in various ways.  That worship defines the world, makes it what it is, and makes it do what it does.  When we go along with the world in its ways, we join in its worship, bowing at its altar.  That’s not who we have been called and created to be.  We are a people created by the entirely different worship of an entirely different God—a God who is neither ourselves nor defined by and for ourselves.  Everything we do is to be worship offered to him, and to flow out of our worship together as his people.  God has redeemed all of our life in Jesus Christ, all of it belongs to him, and so all of it is for him.

Our morality is to be not a matter of duty, but an offering of worship to God.  Our politics should be not about power and self-interest, but an offering of worship to God.  Our identity is truly found not in what the people of our town or in our broader culture see when they look at us, but in our worship of God.  And our witness to our world, our outreach and evangelism, aren’t things we do because we want the church to get bigger, but expressions of our worship of God.  We worship God, we learn to see how good and great and marvelous he is and how wonderful his grace, and so we talk about him wherever we go.  That’s the idea.

Living Stones

(Psalm 118:20-23Isaiah 8:11-15, Isaiah 28:14-18; 1 Peter 2:1-8)

Jesus is the living Stone promised by God.  He is the keystone of the arch of the living temple of God; he is the cornerstone of the whole building, the one from whom everything else is built out.  For you who believe in him and bow before him as Lord of all creation, he is an unshakeable foundation for your souls, and a sanctuary that will never fall.  The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame and will never have to fear the things of this world, no matter what storm may come.

For those who don’t put their trust in him, Jesus is the cause and occasion of judg­ment.  His blessings aren’t promised to everyone regardless of what they do or what they believe; his promises are only for those who come to him and lay all the weight of their lives on him, accepting him as the only trustworthy foundation.  Either you commit to rest your whole life on Jesus and put all your hope in him, or you don’t.

Granted, none of us put all our trust in Jesus all the time without fail; we have to keep choosing to trust him alone, because we drift.  We’re well trained to put our trust in our money, our education, our résumé, our family, our connections, and so on, and if we aren’t vigilant in our own hearts, we will always tend to revert to old habits.  Even so, the commitment to trust him alone, to follow him alone, to serve him alone, has to be there.  We can’t have Jesus as half our foundation, whether we take money or anything else as the other half; as he himself said, a house divided will never stand.

In the last analysis, we’re either all in with Jesus or we’re all out, and he drives us to make that choice.  You can maybe be neutral about Jesus from a distance, where you can’t see him clearly, but as you get closer, that quickly becomes impossible.  You either bow before him in utter surrender as the king of everything, or you refuse his demands and go your own way.

For those who reject him, who refuse to acknowledge him as the only true cornerstone for life, their refusal changes nothing:  he still remains the cornerstone.  He still remains a massive, immovable, unbreakable stone right in the center of life.  For those who build their lives on him and are built on him, he is the firm foundation.  Those who refuse to acknowledge that must still deal with him.  They may try to pretend he isn’t there at all, or that he isn’t what he is, but that doesn’t mean their way is clear.  In trying to walk through a stone they will not admit is there, they will stumble and fall and break themselves, and willfully refuse to under­stand why.  When the storm of God’s judgment breaks on the lies of humanity, they will be swept away, still rejecting the refuge.

This is the Prince of Peace who said, “I did not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword.”  He was, and is, a divisive figure, because he demands and deserves our absolute allegiance and our highest loyalty.  No lesser promise of support and service is ac­ceptable to him—it’s all or nothing.  And this is the mighty God in whose image we are being remade day by day.  He is the living Stone; we are being made living stones.

This is significant for us in a couple ways.  First, it connects to one of the main themes of this letter:  because we are in Christ, because of who we are in Christ, because we take our identity from him and not from the world, we will have conflict and we will have trouble.  People stumbled over Jesus, and they will stumble over us, and then they’ll blame us for their fall.  It doesn’t matter if they weren’t really looking where they were going; it was the stone’s fault, and they will vent their anger by kicking it and beating on it, even if it means they break a toe and bruise their fists.  This is the inheritance of the children of God—in this world.  We need to expect it.  We need to stop assuming that conflict means we’re doing something wrong.  It may mean we’re being like Jesus.

Second, this is the point at which Peter shifts from talking about our individual identity in Christ to our collective identity in Christ, and note how he does this.  I’m sure you’ve heard the line, “We don’t go to church, we arethe church,” and he affirms this in a profoundly concrete way.  Unlike Paul in 1 Corinthians 3, he doesn’t talk about us as the people who build the church—Peter tells us that we’re the building materials.  We are the stones with which God is building his temple on earth.

Think about that.  The home of God on earth is us—he lives in us by his Holy Spirit—and he builds it with our lives.  We are the visual representation of the character of God, in the way we live together; we’re the ones given to draw in the nations and lead them in the worship of God.  We’re called to carry on the ministry of Christ as a sanctuary and a shelter; we aren’t the foundation, but we lead people to the One who is.  We stand as a great rock in the world’s way.  For some, that makes us a beacon of hope; others see us as an obstruction to be bulldozed at any cost.

This is what our lives are for, and this is what our life together as the church is for.  Nothing more, and nothing less.  We don’t exist for ourselves, and the church doesn’t exist for us.  Like Jesus, we don’t exist to support ourselves, but to spend ourselves for the world; supporting us is God’s job, and he’s better at it than we are anyway.  We’re part of something much, much larger than any of us, or all of us together, and the measure of our lives is—is the temple of God more glorifying to him, more true to his character, and more dedicated to his work, because we’re a part of it?

Permanent People in a Temporary World

(Psalm 34:8-10Isaiah 40:1-111 Peter 1:22-2:3)

You have been redeemed from the empty way of life of this world with the precious blood of Christ, who gave his life as the perfect, sinless sacrifice for sin.  God the Father raised him from the dead, and through him you believe in God and have been made children of God; therefore your faith and hope are no longer in this world or the things of this world, they are in your Father in heaven.  This is Peter’s summary of the gospel in our passage from last time.  As he makes clear, it’s not enough for us simply to agree with this in our heads; we need to agree with it in our hearts, our mouths, our hands, and our feet as well.  If we nod and smile and say, “Yes, that’s true,” then go on about life as if we’d never heard any of it, we’ve missed the point.

This is truth we need to obey.  That might sound like a strange way to put it, but it’s a normal part of life.  We obey the law of gravity:  we know that if we hold something out and let go of it, it will fall, so we don’t intentionally do that unless that’s the result we want.  We know the law of gravity is true, and we act on that knowledge—we make our plans and our decisions with the understanding that gravity is in effect.  I am married, I have four children, and I obey that truth—I don’t do things the same way I would if I were living alone.  (Partly because I don’t want to be living alone.)  These truths define and limit us.  They tell us this is how life is, this is what we can do and what we can’t, and we obey them, or else we get the consequences.  So it is with the gospel.  The Father doesn’t just want us to say that it’s true, he wants us to live the truth.

It’s through this, Peter says, that our lives are being made holy, as God commands in Leviticus 19.  I said last week that part of seeing ourselves as children of the Father is recognizing our fellow believers as our brothers and sisters in the family of God; Peter lands on that here, telling us that part of the purpose for which we’re being made holy is that we would love one another deeply and sincerely as brothers and sisters in Christ.  There should be no place among us for evil actions or dishonesty—no hypocrisy or jealousy, no gossip or backbiting or trying to undermine one another; we should never have agendas against one another, no matter how justified we might think them to be.  We face too much opposition from the world to be turning it against ourselves.  Instead, the more we look to the Father, the more his love will move us to value the good of those around us ahead of our own desires.  That’s his character being formed and revealed in us, and it’s the core of our witness to the world around us.

Obviously, this is something God is doing in us, not something we can do by our own efforts.  Our part is to seek to develop a taste for the things of God—a commitment to taste and see that the Lord is good.  My Nana used to tell us kids that we weren’t allowed to say we didn’t like something until we’d tried it five times, and she wanted us to try everything honestly.  There was no room in her view for taking a bite of food determined to dislike it—we were supposed to look for reasons to like it.  For all that, broccoli and I had a hate-hate relationship until a couple years ago when I tried some that my in-laws had just picked from their garden; all of a sudden, I had some idea what the good part of broccoli was supposed to be.  I’m still not hugely fond of it, but I’ve been able to develop more of a taste for it now that I know what I’m tasting for.

There are a lot of kids out there who won’t eat anything much beyond Wonder Bread, hot dogs, cheese pizza, and candy—cheap pleasures that don’t require any effort from them.  That’s the sort of food, spiritually speaking, that the world teaches us people to enjoy:  the cheap pleasures of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander, among others.  To learn that the food of God really does taste better, and to learn to desire his goodness instead of the evils of this world, takes time, and a certain degree of commitment.  There are exceptions, but generally, you have to want to taste that the Lord is good before you will.

I said this takes time and commitment; but it takes something else, too, because if all you have is the life of this world, the things of God will never taste good to you.  The food of God does not feed the life of this world—it starves it.  I mentioned learning to like broccoli a moment ago, but I left out part of the story.  My in-laws’ garden broccoli had a significant effect on my perceptions, but I don’t think that would have happened were it not for some medication I’d started taking a while before which changed my tastes in food—not hugely, but significantly.  I was able to make an external change, in my response to broccoli, because there had already been an underlying change in me; I could act differently because I myself was different.

That, working inward from the beginning and end of this passage, brings us to the key point at its heart.  What makes all of this possible?  What makes all of this real?  “You have been born again, not of any mere earthly seed that will perish in time, but of the eternal, incorruptible seed of the life of God through his living word, which abides forever.”  When my children were conceived and then born, they received life from me and from their mother; that life passes and decays, and in time it will end.  We have been born again as children of God, and we have received his life; that life will never end, and it does not decay.  This world is temporary, and everything that is born of it is temporary.  God is eternal and his word is permanent, and everyone who is born of him is permanent.

That ought to change how we live.  Whatever we spend of ourselves is permanent; what­ever we buy from this world is temporary.  Obviously our time is passing, and so is our money; but we have the chance to spend them on things that will last forever, instead of things that are here today and gone tomorrow.  Our talents and skills are gifts God has given us for his service, meant to be used to do works that matter eternally.  If we use them instead merely to gain the goods of this world, which do not last, aren’t we wasting them?

And if we let ourselves be filled with envy of others, if we lie to make ourselves look better or others look worse, if we give in to the temptation to undermine others and tear them down, if we nurture grievance and bitterness in our hearts, Peter tells us, we’re wasting our lives.  None of these things is ever from God.  They are of the life of this world, they serve only the purposes of this world, and none of them will endure, for he will blow them away like dead leaves in a hurricane.  It doesn’t matter what our reasons might be, treating other people this way never pleases God.  Bitterness, malice, deceit, envy, slander, and spite are all completely alien to his character; they arise from hearts which are focused on the things of this world rather than of God.  This world is temporary.  We have been born again, we are no longer of this world.  In Christ, by the Holy Spirit, God the Father has given us his life and made us permanent.  Peter challenges us:  live like it.