(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→