(1 Peter 4:12-19)

If you were here a couple months ago when we looked at 2:1-8, you most likely remember Peter calls the church the house of God and us the living stones of which it’s built; you might not have caught the connection to this passage because the ESV here translates oikos as “household” rather than “house” for some reason, but it’s the same word.  There, he articulates the reality that being part of the church is integral to our identity in Christ, in part because we collectively are the place on earth where God lives, the access point for the nations and his physical representation in the world.  Peter has spent some time unpacking that second part, showing us what it means to be Jesus’ earthly representatives; he’s acknowledged living out our new identity in Christ will in some times and places bring persecution and suffering.  Here, he turns to look from a different angle, showing us suffering for Christ isn’t just something to be endured patiently—it’s actually, strangely enough, reason to rejoice.  This connects back, as we’ll see at the end, to the church’s role as the access point for unbelievers to God.

Peter makes the turn by describing persecution and suffering as testing by fire.  He’s alluding to several Old Testament passages here and there are differing opinions as to which is most important, but I’m with those who see Malachi 3 as the primary background for his imagery here, along with a verse from Zechariah 13.  There’s a noteworthy detail you might have caught in verse 3:  the prophet says the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, then parallels that with the statement, he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.  Parallelism is the most important literary element in the Old Testament, and the structure here is weird.  If you look, you can see the first part has refiner and purifier, while the second changes the nouns to verbs and flips them around to purify . . . and refine; that kind of parallelism, if you’re interested, is called a chiasm because it looks like the Greek letter chi, which is the same as our X.  Given that, given that the second line has gold and silver, you would expect the first part to have silver and gold—but it doesn’t.  The gold is omitted.  That tells you the prophet is doing something deliberate here.

There’s a story about this; I don’t know if it actually happened, but when I looked into it years ago, I found solid support for its explanation of what Malachi is doing.  As the story goes, there was a women’s Bible study on Malachi that decided to figure this out, so one of its members did some research.  She managed to track down a silversmith, and then managed to talk him into letting her show up and watch him work.  As she watched, he held a piece of silver in the middle of the flames.  In refining silver, he explained, one must hold it in the hottest part of the fire to burn away the impurities.  The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot and remembered Malachi says the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.  She asked the silversmith if he had to sit in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined.  He said not only did he have to sit there holding the silver in place, he had to keep his eyes on it the entire time.  If the silver were left in the flames even a moment too long, it would be ruined.  The woman was silent for a moment, then asked, “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?”  The silversmith smiled at her and said, “That’s easy.  I know it’s done when I see my face reflected in it.”

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(1 Peter 4:1-11)

The name of Tullian Tchividjian may be faintly familiar to some of you; if so, it’s most likely for his high-profile moral failure in ministry over a decade ago—he resigned as senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale in 2015 after admitting to an extramarital affair; he’s now known to have had at least one other affair before that one.  Up until that point, he’d largely been a golden boy—charismatic pastor, successful writer, and Billy Graham’s grandson—and while I must confess to an unreasoning prejudice against that category of person, he did some good stuff.  In particular, I go back to an essay he wrote in 2013 titled “Church, We Have a Problem” in which he made a striking observation:

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.

Tchividjian focused his application on the importance of preaching grace, but I value his comments most for what they show us about the world:  the world wants us all to be legalists, and doesn’t much care which kind.  It wants us to be conformists.  Some times and cultures favor “keep the rules” conformists, 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 you aren’t allowed to question.

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(1 Peter 3:13-22)

When I set out back in February, to lay out the preaching calendar for this year, I had no thought of putting this sermon on Reformation Sunday.  It’s appropriate, however, because the Reformation didn’t start as a church-planting movement.  When Martin Luther went down to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517 and posted a list of 95 statements on the main door, he was issuing an invitation to his fellow scholars to an academic debate on the theology and practice of the sale of indulgences.  The church door was the community bulletin board.  Whether you were a theology professor wanting to start a conversation or a university student wanting to find your lost cat, that’s where you posted the flier.  Luther wasn’t trying to start something new, he was joining a chorus of voices going back over a century crying out in protest at the corruption of the institutional church and calling for reform.  That’s why the great sea change he inadvertently began came to be known as the Protestant Reformation.

The way the Reformation is often discussed, you’d think the protest was the point, but it was only the means.  Strange as it might sound, the spirit animating it was a spirit not of protest but of restoration.  It wasn’t an angry, combative spirit demanding its rights and its own way—not at first—but an unyielding spirit calling the powers that be to self-examination and humble repentance.  Sadly (for with the Protestant historian Mark Noll, I think we should celebrate the Reformation as a tragic necessity), the powers that be proved characteristically unwilling to humble themselves and repent.  Instead, they responded with force, trying to crush Luther’s protest—and why not?  It had worked for over a century.  This time, however, God’s patience had come to an end:  their use of force didn’t silence the spirit of restoration, it unleashed a spirit of retribution and the fury of generations.

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(1 Peter 3:8-12)

Right this moment, being a lifelong Seattle Seahawks fan is obnoxious—but no one’s going to sympathize when we just won the Super Bowl in February.  Thing is, we remember how things went the first time Seattle won the Super Bowl.  They reached it again the next year, but lost in agonizing fashion.  That team was built of loud, combustible, chip-on-their-shoulder personalities.  It worked as long as things were going well, but that game-losing interception was a hammer blow that fractured the whole relational structure of the team.  The fractures proved irreparable, and the team came apart.

In retrospect, the demise of a potential dynasty began not with that loss but with a personnel decision made shortly after the win:  Seattle cut defensive end Red Bryant to save money.  Big Red, who was a steadier personality than the likes of Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Michael Bennett, had been the emotional leader of the defense for years, and he was the one who had given the team as a whole its rallying cry the season before:  “We all we got—we all we need.”

That’s the attitude 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.  “We all we got,” so we need to build one another up, not tear each other down.  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 take this approach and treat each other this way, then truly, “we all we need.”  When Big Red left, not only the rallying cry but the spirit behind it left with him, and the seeds of self-destruction were sown.

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(1 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 see it as 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 one book we need to understand as a whole, composed of individual books, each of which we also 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.  That misses the heart of this passage.  Look at 2:18-25.  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 saying 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.  If they don’t, where will that bite?

Fact is, it probably won’t be from the emperor first.  Read more→

(1 Peter 2:13-17)

In 1984, a Nigerian man named Umaru Dikko got himself in a spot 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 Israel 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 about it.

Except for one thing:  that bit about “properly labeled.”  Read more→

(1 Peter 2:11-12)

We’re a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; and we are, Peter continues, a nation of foreigners.  He uses two terms here, both connected to earlier in the letter.  One, for the second time, he calls us exiles.  The first time comes in the first verse of the letter, and you may remember we talked about this word in the first sermon of this series.  The Greek word referred to people who lived long-term in a place where they were not citizens, to which they remained foreigners.  They were outsiders who did not melt into the surrounding culture; they stayed identifiably different.  For their difference, they were often regarded with suspicion as possible threats to the social order, for their primary loyalty lay elsewhere.

To intensify his point, Peter also calls us “resident aliens.”  This is the only time he uses this noun, but he used the adjective form in 1:17.  The Greek word here is paroikos, so there’s a minor wordplay with oikos, the word for “house” which he used in 2:9; this word is oikos plus the prefix para, which means “by,” “alongside,” “near,” or “beyond”—thus for instance parallel lines are lines which run alongside each other but never touch.  Literally, paroikos would mean someone or something near the house.  It was first coined as a word meaning “neighbor,” but in Greek usage quickly came to denote someone who was a resident in a place for a long time but not a citizen there.  The only real difference between this word and the one translated “exiles” is that one had more of a negative sense, while this one was used of foreigners and outsiders who enjoyed the protection of the community.

Put these two words together, then, and there’s a balance between them.  We don’t belong here; we’re out of place.  We’re not supposed to be assimilated to the culture and society around us because we have a higher allegiance and bow to a higher authority than any in this world.  On this, both words agree.  To say we’re exiles is to highlight our nonconformity to our culture and emphasize the reality that if the goals and values and instructions of our society conflict with those of the kingdom of God, our call is to follow God in defiance of the world around us.  To call us resident aliens is to remind us we’re to be committed to the good of the community and the well-being of the society in which God has planted us, and to be committed in a way which actively displays that commitment to the world.  We’re to be neither isolated from the culture nor integrated with it, but interacting with it as something different from it.

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(1 Peter 2:9-10)

If you’re familiar with the King James Version, you probably see I took the title for this message from its translation of verse 9.  If you’re not, here’s the first part of this verse from the KJV:  “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.”  The ESV translates that “a people for his own possession,” which makes it typical of modern English translations; I don’t fault modern translators for that because the meaning of “peculiar” has shifted across four centuries.  It’s too bad, though; “for his own possession” lacks the connotations “peculiar” had.  I can say this is a shirt I possess, and while I obviously don’t own Sara, there’s a sense in which I possess her as my wife, but I can’t say that this shirt is peculiar to me—I’m not emotionally invested in it, and a lot of other people have one just like it.  As for Sara, I don’t make a habit of calling her peculiar, but in this sense, she’s peculiar to me alone.  Peculiar meant unique and remarkable and something only one person had.  There’s a sense of special and particular value here that we don’t want to lose.

That said, it’s not the whole reason I chose this title for the sermon.  Peter doesn’t explicitly say this, but we are indeed peculiar as contemporary Americans understand the word.  We are odd; we are atypical; we are outside our world’s idea of “normal.”  This is in part because we’re treasured by God.  You may  remember we talked about this while we were going through Ephesians 1, that we are God’s glorious inheritance and his treasured possession.  That means we don’t need to look to the world to find that affirmation.

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(1 Peter 2:1-8)

If you’re planning on coming to the inquirers’ class the next three weeks—or thinking of coming—this morning’s message will be a little bit of a preview of the second session.  That session will be focused on the church, and that’s what Peter’s talking about this morning.  I told you a couple weeks ago the apostle’s primary concern in this letter is with his hearers’ daily lives as believers in Christ loose in the world rather than with their life together as the church, and that’s true; but as I’ve said repeatedly, he’s addressing that concern by telling them who they are in Christ, and their identity in Christ (and thus ours as well) isn’t only individual, it’s also corporate.  Put another way, the church isn’t just a thing we go to, or even a thing we do with other people, that we can participate in or not as we prefer.  Rather, the church—being a part of the church, participating in its mission, and joining in its life—is integral to our identity in Christ.  If you’ve ever heard the line “Don’t just go to church, be the church,” that’s why:  on the one hand, just showing up on Sundays doesn’t mean much if that’s all it is for you, but on the other, if you’re not involved in an actual imperfect congregation of actual complicated, challenging, imperfect people, you’re making yourself less than you were meant to be.

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(1 Peter 1:22-2:3)

You have been redeemed from this world’s futility 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 week.  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 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 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 single.  (Partly because I don’t want to be single.)  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 this is what will happen if we defy them—not because God made rules to justify punishing us for breaking them, but because ignoring reality has consequences whether we want to believe it or not.  As with gravity, so with the gospel:  it’s not enough to believe it with our mouths, we need to believe it with our hands and feet and hearts.  We need to live the truth we say we believe.

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