A Sermon Based Upon 1 Peter 1: 3-9
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2014
" ….By
his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, (1Pe 1:3 NRS).
What
does hope look like?
A
middle--aged man was on a Caribbean cruise enjoying his first real vacation in
years. On the first day out to sea he noticed an attractive woman about his age
who smiled at him in a friendly way as he passed her on the deck. This pleased the man greatly. That night he
managed to get seated at the same table with her for dinner. As the conversation developed, he commented
that he had seen her on the deck that day and he had appreciated her friendly
smile. When she heard this, she smiled
and commented, "Well, the reason I smiled was that when I saw you I was
immediately struck by your strong resemblance to my third husband."
At
this he perked up his ears and said, "Oh, how many times have you been
married?"
She
looked down at her plate, smiled modestly, and answered, "Twice."
Certainly,
hope looks differently to people. To an
Olympic athlete, hope might look like a gold medal. To expectant parents, hope will look like a
healthy baby. To someone undergoing
medical tests, hope looks like a clean bill of health. And for someone facing the end of life, hope
can look like life that never ends.
Hope
is many things to many people, but it is overall, a hope that sustains life,
motivates us to get up in the morning, and gives us reason to believe not only
in today, but also in tomorrow.
ONLY FROM A
LIVING GOD
In
today’s text from First Peter, to certain Jewish and Gentile Christians living
in the middle-east of ancient world,
hope looked like ‘the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead’ (1 Pet. 1.3). This is the ‘hope’ that gave them, as our text says,
a “new birth”, and a new “power” for “salvation” “through faith”,
which resulted in an “indescribable”
and “glorious joy” in life. This experience of ‘blessing’ and “hope” is
present all through this passage because it was a newfound “faith” that promised the “salvation of (their) souls.”
Can
we ‘rejoice’ in such a hope
today? We are removed 2,000 years from
that time and some 6000 miles from that place, and with so much more to have
and to hope for in our lives than those people ever dreamed of, one could wonder
what we would ever need with such a hope.
Can the ‘resurrection of Jesus
Christ’ be such a ‘living hope’
for us? For most people today, hope is
what can be realized ‘here and now’.
Hope must have much more relevance and be closer to us than something that
seems so far away.
Several
years ago, I had to visit a doctor in Charlotte to have surgery on my leg and
foot. During my extended surgeries, I
got to know him fairly well, as his brother was a Priest in New Orleans. One day he asked me if I had ever heard of
the “Elevation Church” in Charlotte. He
said, even though he had become Protestant and Presbyterian, he was taking his
five sons there to that contemporary “Southern Baptist” church, mainly because
of the music.
If
you’ve been watching the news the past few months, the pastor and the Elevation
Church have been getting quite a bit of press, because of the Pastor’s 1.7
million dollar mansion which many consider excessive, even for a mega church
pastor. Pastor Furtick has also been
criticized for falsifying his books as best sellers, in order to boost
sales. Still, despite the negative publicity,
the church has grown to 14,000 members, sometimes claiming to have record over
3,000 Baptism a year. They even are
known to have mass baptisms event, which the pastor calls “mass miracles”, but
others call ‘mass’ manipulation or marketing.
You can judge for yourself by going the church’s website to get a ‘how
to guide’ for making a miracle happen.
Unashamedly, the church tells how to plant people in the crowd, how to
use videos of excited baptism candidates to motivate others, and how to stage a
simultaneous event so you can do your part to “help God pull off a
miracle.” (http://www.wcnc.com/news/iteam/How-Elevation-Church-Pastor-Furtick-produce-spontaneous-baptism-246072001.html).
While
some prefer the kind of ‘miracle’ humans
can manipulate, that is certainly not what our passage means when it refers to ‘a living hope’ which came through ‘the resurrection of Jesus Christ.’ There is no thought of marketing or
manipulation here. There is nothing
anyone could have done to manufacture such an event as this. The ‘resurrection’
Peter speaks of is a ‘living hope’
exactly because it is a miracle only God can do, and there is no human being
who can help God pull it off. (Even the Bible
does not say that Jesus raised himself, but it says “God raised him from the dead.” 1 Cor. 6.14.) If human beings, even if Jesus could have
made this , or any miracle happen in his human flesh, then it was not a miracle
at all (That’s
why when Jesus healed, he always said, “Your faith has made you well). A miracle that is manufactured by us, in the
flesh, is not only a manipulation, it is complete and utter nonsense, no matter
how hyped, how well marketed, or how seemingly successful it appears. The difference in a ‘living hope’ which the Bible speaks of and a hope that will die out
is whether or not it is truly from the living God. As our
text declares, the ‘miracle’ of resurrection is a hope made possible only by God
and ‘his great mercy’.
YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL NOW
Not
only is the ‘living hope’ something
only God can do, our text also tells us that a ‘living hope’ is about something we don’t yet have, and really
can’t fully have in this moment. What
kind of miracle is that; a miracle you can only have part of? To understand this, pay very close attention
to Peter’s words and how he speaks of ‘a
salvation ready to be revealed in the
last time….”
(1.5).
A living
hope is not about a salvation so great, so all-encompassing, so comprehensive of all our lives, that you
can’t fully have it all now, fully claim it all now, or fully realize it all now. The kind of hope that remains alive and active in us is about ‘salvation’ that we are still hoping for, because
if you already have it all, it ceases to be hope. If you already have all God can or will give
you, hope does not live, but hope quickly dies.
For
hope to be a living hope, it ultimate goal and gift must always remain ahead of
us. It must give us reason to go on, reason
to get up in the morning, and reason to endure the struggles, even when this
life, or the evils of the world, work against us. A living hope is so great we can’t fully have
it all now, but it what we greatly desire, sorely need, and are often even desperate
for. That kind of hunger and need is the
carrot before the rabbit that keeps ‘hope alive’ in us. But unfortunately, this kind of deferment
for the sake of ‘hope’ does not fair very well in our culture of ‘instant gratification’ which says, “I want it my way” and “I want it now”. But
unfortunately, when you want it, you get it and when you have it, no matter how
wonderful and good it might be, it no longer lives as hope, but it is taken for
granted, can even become a burden, or even a curse, instead of an much awaited
blessing.
Right
now, as I write this message, the Power Ball Lottery is at 400 million
dollars. Who wouldn’t want to have such
a windfall? Thousands, if not millions
of people will make a mad rush to the stores and outlets to purchase tickets,
dreaming of what they could do if they had all that money.
But
the reality of having that kind of money is something most people don’t want to
consider. Back in the winter months,
while I was exercising one afternoon, I turned on the T.V. to the Dr. Phil Show
and watched as he interviewed two young people, who claimed to have been abused
by their wealthy parents. Their parents
locked them up like animals to control them.
They ridiculed, pressured and refused the food, to force them to conform
or to keep them subdued.
At
one point in the interview, Dr. Phil asked them, if as children, they knew they
had money, and the young man said, “No,
all I wanted was a Father like the other children said they had; one who would
play with me, read me stories, take me places and tell me he loved me.” You could see the emotional scars these
children wore, all because their family were heirs to the Duke fortune and were
part of a family who had unlimited wealth, having everything anyone could ever
hope for, and more. But having it all
did not bring blessing, it brought out the worse in people, and it caused
feelings of hopelessness, and it brought a curse. (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/01/29/4648968/duke-family-fortune-heirs-tell.html#.Uwc-j_ldV8E).
When
we have everything we want, but too little of what we need, we lose hope. This can be true is so much of life, so now,
let’s consider what is a ‘living hope’.
According to Peter, a living hope
is primarily two things. First of all,
Peter would tell us that a living hope
is about ‘a salvation ready to be
revealed in the last time’ (5). The
great salvation we have in Christ is not a salvation that is given to us all at
once. In the original language of the
New Testament, salvation is always presented in three tenses of time: “I have
been saved, I am being saved and I will be saved.” We often forget about this second and last
tense. We often treat ‘salvation’ like a
commodity we can buy at the store or order at McDonalds. We move too quickly from getting saved to
being saved and forget that salvation is much bigger than what we can have all
at once. Salvation that brings us hope
is something we must ‘work out’ to fully realize as we wait for what can only
be realized beyond the limits of this life.
Peter reminds us again, that much of our ‘salvation’ in Christ will not be revealed until ‘the last time’. Peter goes on to explain this ‘last time’ as the time when “Jesus Christ is revealed’ fully and
completely in the world, which will only through death comes or when Christ
returns. As hard as this might be for
many to contemplate, the best part of our salvation is yet to come, and if we
want to have it, know it and realize it, we have to endure, we keep believing
and keep serving until the ‘end’, and of course, we have to wait. That
might sound ‘inconvenient, but it is this ‘waiting’ that keeps hope alive in us.
And as Langston Hughes once wisely
wrote, “If hope dies, life (becomes) a
broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Waiting
for what will come is hard, but it’s not the hardest part about hope. The second thing Peter underscores is that a living hope is about ‘the genuineness of your faith….(that
is) tested by fire’ (7). What Peter is talking about his readers know
all too well. Peter speaks of having to
‘suffer various trials’ which will
most effectively prove whether or not hope remains alive in us. This is really a foreign idea for much of
our culture isn’t it? To understand
that hope is something which only comes alive when we wait for it, and thrives when
we hurt or suffer, sounds very strange. Why would God allow any good person to suffer,
to hurt, especially when they are innocent, or when they are good, or they are
his followers? As one person complained,
“If God allows this to happen to his friends, I’d rather be his enemy!”
While
a lot of the suffering in this world can be attributed to evil, the fact that we
all have to suffer pain, and will probably suffer more if we try to do the good,
appears to be an apparent injustice sewn into fabric of our human
situation. One Philosopher attempted to deal with the
problem of pain and evil, responding specifically to the thousands who died in the
great Lisbon Earthquake defending God by saying, “This is the best of all possible worlds”. What he meant was that you can have the gift
of life, without suffering pain. Just
like you can’t have water to drink, that doesn’t have the possibility to drown
you, or you can’t have fire to cook your meal or keep you warm, unless it might
also burn you, and most of all you can’t feel love and freedom, unless there
was also the likely possibility of hate and evil. Life in a physical or bodily form is not
possible in any other way than that it must include hurt, pain and suffering.
That’s
a well-known and sophisticated philosophical argument, but Peter does not argue philosophically, but
understands ‘suffering’ as a “test by fire”, in that the suffering we have in
life now, will result in more joy, more praise, and more glory and honor, when
Jesus Christ is finally revealed. In
other words, using the image of a
refinery that produces gold through fire and pressure, Peter believes that the
pain and pressure of suffering proves our faith is true, and causes us to live
our lives in expectancy and hope, instead of living in excessiveness and despair. In other words, we are made into better people because we must suffer, than we would
be if we didn’t.
LIFE CAN BREAK US, BUT HOPE MAKES US
A
living hope, which is hope alive in us ---alive in us even when we don’t get
what we want or need---is the only kind of hope that makes life worth living and
grants us hope even when we hurt or when we must die. Only this kind of “living hope” can make us
into the person we need to be for life; a person of faith, of hope, and of love.
Pay
special attention to how Peter summarizes his living hope near the end of our
text, when he writes: “Although you have not seen him, you love
him…..” In short, hope teaches you
to love. Next, Peter says: “Even though you do not see him now, you
believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy.” Hope builds faith that enables the deepest
joy of living. Finally, Peter says in
verse 9: “For (in hope) you are receiving the outcome of your
faith, the salvation of your souls.”
This ‘living hope’ comes alive right now in both you and in me, as it
gives us the hope to become the ‘soul’ we can in Christ. In this way, hope makes life worth living,
because hope teaches us to love, teaches us to believe and gives us reason to
rejoice in this life of pain and death, because the ‘resurrected Christ’ has already begun to give us the ‘outcome of faith’ already at work in
the ‘salvation of our souls’ as we
wait for the new, eternal, spiritual body, which only God can give. In
other words, life can and will finally break us down, physically, perhaps even
emotionally, but at the same time, hope is already at work in us spiritually, making
us into all that God wills us to be, working in us and working on us, from the
inside out, to finally give us ‘an inheritance
that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you…” (v.
4).
We
all know that the word “inheritance”
refers to the birthright, the heirlooms, or the wealth or property that is
passed down through the generations of a family. But in the Hebrew sense, ‘an inheritance’ referred especially to
the inheritance to possess the land that was promised to Abraham and his
descendants. But the Christian
inheritance is even greater. As the
great Biblical Scholar William Barclay once noted, Peter uses three powerful
word pictures: imperishable, undefiled, and unfading to remind us just how much greater is the hope Christ
gives. It is a hope that can never be
taken away from us, and more than this, Peter also says that this kind of
promise of hope now ‘protects’ us ‘by the power of God’ until all our
salvation is finally revealed. Again,
Barclay reminds us that “protect” is
military word, meaning that in Christ “our
lives are garrisoned by God who stands sentinel over us all our days.” (The Daily Bible
Study Series, “The Letters of James and
Peter, Revised, Westminister Press, Philadelphia, 1976, p. 174).
In
uncertain times, when you don’t know who you can trust, or when stock markets,
economies, and incomes rise and fall, your hope can only be ‘protected’ or safe
than when you put your greatest hope in God. This does mean that this life
should be written off, but to the contrary, the God who created this world is
at work, even in the brokenness, pain and losses of life to bring about the
greatest gains, gains that we can hardly imagine to be possible. The possibilities of what ‘can be’, even when
all seems lost, began all the way back at the crucifixion of Jesus, then came
alive through Christ who rose from the dead and ascended to as God’s right hand
man to assure us that in God, hope is never lost. Hope in God never disappoints, because, as
the old creed says, “God is the creator
and maker of heaven, and earth” but not only this, but God is also redeemer
and the guarantor of what is yet to come.
I
recently read how during the Christmas holiday, Gardner-Webb University’s
president, Frank Bonner and his wife Flossie, enjoyed a trip to New York
city. Dr. Bonner said they had a
wonderful time, in spite of the huge crowds, and that the people, contrary to
what many would think, were courteous, friendly, and helpful. So, he says, “the concept of rude New Yorkers
is an absolute myth.” He found that “New
York is one of the world’s great cities”, but also in the midst of that city
that can be magnificent and uplifting, is much that is also disturbing. You can walk through the opulence of the
stores on Fifth Avenue, then out on the sidewalks lie the homeless wrapped in
blankets struggling to survive against the bitter cold. And of course, there is also the 9/11
Memorial, where you can study the engraved names of over 3,000 innocent victims
of terror, and also reflect upon the depths of the human capacity evil. How do you process all this? Bonner and his wife attended the Christmas
Eve Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and found the only answer. The greatest cause and reason for good in the
world---indeed the only true hope for the problems of our human condition---is
the saving grace, undying goodness, and redeeming love of Jesus Christ.
(From
“Presidental Persecptives” by Dr. Frank Bonner, in Gardner-Webb The Magazine,
Vol. 49, No. 1, 2014).
But
how does that hope, that sometimes seems so far away from our world, our time
and our place, get to us? How does it
become hope alive in us, not just for those first believers? Peter knows.
He says, “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though
you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice….” Preacher Tom Long reminds us of just how
excessible this hope is to us, even when
we think it might be far from our own situation. He also tells of being in New York (or it
could be any large city) and reading “Madison Avenue” like Saturday adds from
all those large, powerful, “miracle-like” inspiring churches boasting all their
assets; their choirs, their friendliness, their gifted preachers, their multiple
ministries and even their ample parking.
They are the kinds of churches people will leave a church for, if they
can, because they seem to have it all. “Other
churches”, Long says, seem to pale in comparison, or as Long says, they seem “to
have nothing, absolutely nothing” That’s
how the church was that first Easter too.
The church made of 11 disciples, and a few women had “absolutely nothing.” (Quoted from a sermon “The Church With
Nothing” by Tom Long, in Whispering the Lyrics, CSS Publishing, 1995, p. 89f.)
That’s
also how The Church of First Peter felt, as it suffered: It also felt like it had
absolutely nothing. But when Jesus walks
into such an empty place or an empty life, through bolted doors, and when Jesus
interrupts frightened, scared or anxious disciples, suddenly, immediately, and instantaneously,
immediately the church that has nothing, has everything. This ‘church’ that is suffering the loss of
so much, now begins to realize that what
it thought it once had, means nothing compared to what is now made accessible to
them through the risen Christ. Only God can give hope like that. Life can try to break us, but hope in Christ
is what ‘protects us’ and will make us what we could have never been, without
God’s help. Hope gives ‘new birth’ to life, and for those who keep loving and keep believing in Jesus, it gives us a living hope.
The
words from William Barclay’s poem, echo Peter’s living hope once more:
“I see thee not, I hear thee not, yet
art thou oft with me;
And earth hat ne’er so dear a spot, as
where I meet with thee.
Yet, though I have not seen, and still must
rest in faith alone,
I love thee, dearest Lord, and will, unseen
but not unknown.
When death these mortal eyes shall seal,
And still this throbbing heart,
The rending veil shall thee reveal All
glorious as thou art. Amen.
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