sermonboy.com

Second Sunday of Easter

1 Peter 1
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.


Sometimes it’s good to inherit, and other times it’s not.

Take Agatha Christie, for example. There is a point in the story—usually the mid-point—when the will is read. An in the course of listening to the ‘reading of the will’ the chief suspect is usually revealed, the person to inherit.

It’s an odd thing, really. Everyone in the room a suspect, a name is revealed, and all eyes fall upon the potentially guilty party. Wouldn’t it be better to be on a train out of town? Or why commit such a ghastly crime in the first place, knowing that some solicitor is going to read your name out loud? Of course, the writer is only trying to throw us off the scent, knowing full well that the person to inherit is usually clever enough to not commit the crime.

It could, of course, just be part of the polite world of the murder mystery. In the same way everyone helpfully gathers for the reading of the will, everyone returns for moment that our intrepid detective reveals the identity of the murderer. They listen carefully as the detective summarizes the entire story—and they seldom interrupt as potential blame is cast. Then, when the final evidence falls into place and the guilty party revealed—they immediately concede. Yes, the gallows await, but let nothing stand in the way of British politeness or the desire to never make a fuss.

But this is not the kind of inheritance Carol described as she shared from 1 Peter. Instead we have “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.” It cannot be taken away because Poirot reveals your guilt, it cannot spoil like shares in Nortel or fade like a house that’s falling down. This is a very different kind of inheritance, one that resides with God.

So what is the inheritance like, precisely? Let’s look at the full summary again: “In an act of great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” New birth into a living hope in the resurrection. New birth into a living hope.

And all of this, of course, is only a week old. As hard as it is to believe, Easter was only a week ago. And in that week, we tend to dwell on the simple message of new life, and the experience of joy that comes with spring and the end of Lent. They are meant to be conflated—new season and new life—and it is comfortable to simply dwell here a little while.

Soon, however, we look for meaning, and the implications of all this new life around us. What does it mean to experience ‘new birth into a living hope’ and how do we apply this to the world around us? Or more simply, what is it, and what is it not?

To begin, the commentators* remind us that the selection of this passage on the second Sunday of Easter is prompted by the story of doubting Thomas. You may recall that every year the reading for the Sunday to follow Easter is that fearful gathering, when the disciples are hold up in a locked room and Jesus appears to them.

Thomas is missing, and after uttering the famous words “unless I see the wounds I will not believe” he is rewarded with just such a visit. He gets his visit, but he also gets a rebuke from the Risen Lord ‘you have seen me and believe—how blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believe?’ Those last words are for us—as every good preacher will tell you—both as an assurance and as a challenge to continue to believe even when we fail to see.

“And though you have not seen him,” the author of 1 Peter says, “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” That’s the connection between our reading and the Thomas story, keeping us grounded in the unfolding narrative, but also highlighting another problem in the realm of belief.

The problem is this: If you add a contemporary lens to the end of the reading, you might be tempted to imagine it’s about you alone. Of course it’s about you—”for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls”—but it’s not about you. Maybe I should explain.

Over time, over a very long time, we became a collection of individuals. We weren’t always a collection of individuals, this happened over time. There are endless debates about how and why this transition took place, but agreement that before we were you and me, we were simply us. So when we read ”for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls” we have to resist the idea that you or me (or you and not me) are going to get some individual reward, like going to heaven.

Yes, there is a heaven, and yes heaven is a goal, but not in the sense that heaven is prize that some will get and others will not. That’s a distortion of the Christian goal. The Christian goal—which is first God’s goal—is this: “The God who made heaven and earth intends to draw them together at the last.” That’s not my summary, that belongs to Bishop N.T. Wright, and it’s only partly his summary, since he found it when he prayed “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Jesus isn’t a conduit to somehow escape this world into a better world, Jesus is the bridge that brings this world and that better world together. Of course it’s not here yet, recalling that it’s “thy will BE done on earth as it is in heaven” as in future tense. So it is our future hope that this coming together will occur, that this coming together at the last will be reality for all people, not just a few, and not just as individuals, but for everyone.

So heaven and earth have yet to be drawn together, but we have experienced a “new birth into a living hope in the resurrection.” Easter is the first and best sign that this consummation has begun (Wright), that this living hope is real and possible, and that an end to death means that the line between heaven and earth is beginning to blur. It is a hopeful time, but it’s not the full story.

The middle of the passage Carol shared also says this: “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith” may be revealed. In other words, this is never linear. The joy of Easter will give way to all sorts of setbacks, suffering and sorrow, some imposed and some self-inflicted.

In part, the author of 1 Peter is talking about persecution, but he is also talking about the challenges of being a new community. On the first, we know that this is really low-grade persecution, the initial tension that comes as church and synagogue begin to part ways. 1 Peter is most likely written in the 80’s, and the era that we call persecution has yet be begin. On the second—trying to live together—we know that the letters of Paul and the Book of Acts give us ample evidence of the kind of conflict that follows when people try to create something new. Being ‘in the world but not of the world’ means we are still human, in spite of the best advice.

In other words, we have experienced a “new birth into a living hope in the resurrection” but we are still our old sinful selves. God entered the world in Jesus to reveal that ways of heaven, Jesus gave us the way to follow and taught us to pray for heaven and earth to come together, but the world is still as it is. We do our best, in this collective we call church, but we can’t bring heaven and earth together ourselves—this is God’s work. We can help, but it always remains the work of heaven.

Our primary task, as inheritors, is to share the message of “new birth into a living hope.” This is the true message that follows the reading of the will: that we have witnessed the beginning of that final consummation, that time when heaven and earth will come together, and we a living hope in Christ Jesus. That the way of heaven, as revealed in Jesus, will someday come once and for all—quite literally once and for all—and that Easter is just the beginning. Thanks be to God, Amen.

*Texts for Preaching, Year A

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:22 AM