Scripture readings: Matthew
28:16-20; 1 Peter 3:18-22
You know that when kids go to camp the parents are
supposed to label all their clothing. This doesn’t always help.
The only time I went to camp, it was a Y.M.C.A. camp.
It was the summer when I was eight years old. The last day of camp we packed up
all our things, and we piled our luggage on the road so that it could be loaded
onto the buses, and we were all supposed to take showers so we would be clean enough
for our moms’ inspections.
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| A Hazy September Day |
In the process of taking my shower, I lost my
underwear. It didn’t matter that it was labeled. I lost it anyway, and I couldn’t
find it. I cried like a baby. And my other underwear was in my bag, which was
buried under the luggage of other boys who were ready to take the buses for
home. I cried with embarrassment because I was obsessed with a peculiar kind of
nakedness that lurked under my clothing.
In the scriptures we have read this morning, Peter
tells us about a form of embarrassment felt by God’s people. It is a peculiar
kind of nakedness. Jesus, sending his people out, under his authority, into a
world that is under his authority, gives to his people a permanent label that
covers this nakedness and protects them from this embarrassment.
A lot of Peter’s first letter is concerned with a
very peculiar form of embarrassment. It is the embarrassment that goodness
feels in a fallen world. It is the embarrassment that comes from having been
caught not wearing the uniform of the world.
There is a universal uniform of the heart, and the
mind, and the life that does not know the grace of God. God’s people do not
wear that uniform, and it sets them apart. It makes them look strange.
There is a universal style that says, “We are in
charge of ourselves. We will serve ourselves.”
You can serve yourself by being a rule-breaker. To a
lesser degree you can create a specialty of your own by flaunting certain rules,
and a lot of people choose this way to run their own show. It is a way of being
in charge.
You can also serve yourself by being a rule-keeper,
and that is the uniform and style of religious people, who still manage to serve
themselves instead of God. They run their own show by appointing themselves to
be the chief score-keepers and the judges of others. No matter how strongly
such people orient themselves to God, they still assert their own way of being
in charge.
In a fallen world, human nature maintains its
independence from God by any means possible, and at all costs. Whether by rule-breaking,
or by rule-keeping, they wear the uniform of the world.
The people who know the God who became a human being in
Jesus have seen the face of a God who pours himself out for us as a sacrifice
to set us free from our isolation from him. The people who know the God who
became one of us in Jesus know their need for such a sacrifice.
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| Old Farm Equipment |
They do not live in the uniform of the world: the
world’s heart, and mind, and life. They live in Christ, who died and rose for
them. And so the sinners and the religious people of the world may think they
are strange, and even bad; just as the world thought that Jesus was strange and
bad, and crucified him for it.
So Peter, as we have just read, tells us about “those
who speak maliciously about your good behavior in Christ.” (1 Peter 3:16) In
the previous chapter, Peter said, “Live such good lives among the pagans that,
though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify
God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)
You have to understand, here, that good lives and
good deeds, as Peter speaks of them here, do not mean lives and deeds of
rule-keeping. There is more than one New Testament Greek word for goodness, and
this particular goodness, as Peter tells it, means the lovely goodness of lives
and deeds done in the grace that comes from God.
It is a goodness of beauty. It is a goodness of
attraction. It is a goodness that carries an infectious power that can that can
reproduce itself in those who are on the seeing, and the hearing, and the
receiving end of that goodness. It is the goodness that first came to us with
the love of God in Christ that covers our sins, and changes us from the depth
of our hearts. It is the goodness that God came to show us in Jesus.
It melted our hearts. It stripped us of all our self
deceptions and self righteousness, and all the defenses we had built to protect
us from losing our independence from God. It is the goodness that now enables
us to stand before God and this world with a good conscience.
Our problem, as God’s people, is that we can have
this goodness of God’s grace and yet we feel naked because we have lost the
universal uniform of a fallen world. They think we are strange; and we wonder
if they are still right, after all.
We inherit the uniform of the world at birth. We
learn to love the uniform at a very early age. It gives us the self confidence
that comes from blending in. It gives us the confidence that comes from the
acceptance of others.
I was visiting cousins, years ago, and reminiscing
with my cousin Don about songs our family used to sing together, and we started
singing bits and pieces of them. My Cousin Candy’s son, Kevin, was in the
living room with us. Kevin was seven or eight years old. Either Don or I
thought of “The Leland Stanford Junior Farm” song. It’s a college drinking song
and there is just a little bit of mild vulgarity in it.
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| Fall Colors in the Weeds |
I said, “We can’t sing that. Kevin is here.” And
Kevin said, “I want to hear it!” Kevin wanted to wear the uniform of the world.
Now Kevin wears the uniform of a Marine Corps captain.
Think like a child again. What is it like to be a
child and not know the meaning of a word that everyone else seems to know? What
is it like to know that you are the only kid in your class who has not done a
certain thing?
You think you must be the only person in the whole
world who has not done it, and you feel ashamed and naked. You are missing an
essential piece of the uniform of the world.
What if you are a grown up, and you know that other
people are doing something in the way that they report their income, for taxes,
and they are making more money than you are because of it? You think you are
missing out on something. You feel foolish, and embarrassingly innocent.
Peter says, “It is better, if it is God’s will, to
suffer for doing good than for doing evil.” (1 Peter 3:17) It is better to be
embarrassed by the exposure of your goodness. It is better to have others think
you are different, and to have them think you are naked because you are different,
than it is to have the confidence of the uniform of the world. And yet,
sometimes, we feel we have let ourselves be cheated, because we have not been
smart enough to put on that uniform.
We feel guilty of a kind of failure to measure up to
the values of the world around us: a peculiar kind of nakedness. But this is
the peculiar kind of nakedness that forms the uniform of Jesus.
Jesus was crucified for his goodness, and for the
goodness of his mission. He was stripped nearly naked for our salvation on the
cross. “It is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for
doing evil. For Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the
unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made
alive by the Spirit.” (1 Peter 3:17-18)
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| Bird on a Wire Fence |
The soldiers at the cross took Jesus’ clothes, as the
gospels tell us, but the ultimate nakedness is the emptiness with which we
leave this world. Jesus put on that nakedness when he died for us. Death is a peculiar
kind of failure; a sort of nakedness that shows we are not in control.
The cross seemed like a kind of failure; the failure
of goodness to succeed in this world; the failure of goodness to thrive. It was
the righteous one who died, and only two unrighteous people died with Jesus; one
on each side of him, on crosses of their own. The rest of the fallen world crowded
around the foot of the cross, and they mocked and heckled Jesus in his
nakedness.
Who looks more successful when you look at a picture
of Jesus on the cross? And yet Jesus rose from the dead and has the final word
on everything in this world. The nakedness of Jesus and his people always has
the final word over the uniform of the world.
When our goodness is not the goodness of the grace of
God at work in us; when our goodness comes from our selves, and from our own
competence, and from our standing up to the world on the ladder of our self
righteousness; this world will pull our pants down and show that we have
nothing underneath. (I really saw something like this happen to someone when I
was in high school.) Then we have something to be embarrassed about. But, if we
stand up to the world by standing in Jesus, and in his cross, and in his
resurrection, and in his righteousness, then we will have nothing to be ashamed
of.
That is the good conscience, the clear conscience
that Peter is talking about. He is telling us about the difference in the kind
of success offered to us by the uniform of the world as opposed to the better
success of the promise and the goodness that do not come from ourselves.
It is the promise and the goodness of life, coming
from the resurrection of Jesus, that overcomes this world. The victory of Jesus
has the final word, and Jesus is the place where we can stand with confidence.
Baptism, as Peter puts it, tells us of the
resurrection power of God in Christ to stand over all other powers of this
world, and to bring us through this world knowing that we can hold up our heads
when the world tells us we are naked, and empty, and foolish. The power of the
resurrection of Jesus carries us to safety out of a fallen world.
The flood, in Noah’s time, as Peter puts it, was the
proof of the power of God to carry his people to safety, out of a fallen world.
Jesus spoke to that ancient world of Noah’s time by the power of the Holy
Spirit. Jesus offered that world a safety that only Noah and his family
accepted. Whatever we imagine seems more successful and more powerful than we
are, Jesus is able to speak to it, and overcome it, and have the final word,
and bring us through it.
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| Pretty Fall Weeds |
In our reading from the Gospel of Matthew, the good
news was still brand new. Jesus was dead, killed on the cross. Now Jesus was
alive. Jesus proved that he had the final word over a world of evil, and sin,
and death. He conquered them all, when he conquered death.
He proved that “all authority in heaven and on earth”
was his. He proved that he was the king of heaven and earth. He sent out his
people with the promise of his presence to give them the power to serve him. He
sent out his people telling them to bring his lost world to him. He gave them
the authority to baptize people everywhere “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
(Matthew 28:19)
The words of Jesus that tell his disciples and us to
make new disciples “baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” are not about a ceremony or a formula of
the right words to use. The Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the fullness of God. They are everything
about God who creates, and saves, and empowers us with the fullness of his
presence, and his life, and his work.
Jesus was saying, “Go out and claim people for the
fullness of God; which includes me, the Son. Label them with the ownership of
God. Put the name of the completeness of God upon them.”
This world with all its false promises tries to own
us, and but its label on us, and make us wear its uniform. God puts the stamp
of his ownership upon us in a way that cannot be lost.
You see, we do not put the label on ourselves. These words
tell us that Jesus sets a pattern for us. We are authorized to claim others and
not ourselves. Once upon a time, in our own turn, we were claimed by God. And
so the claim placed upon us gives us the authority to claim others. Grace is
always given and received. No one comes into the kingdom of God
Think about children. Children learn confidence by
being claimed, in love, over, and over, and over again.
Even if the children who seem unclaimed have to
battle their way to adulthood by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps,
and by claiming themselves, that kind of success is naked without the humbling
success of first being claimed and owned by someone else.
You cannot learn the art of love without learning to
be loved, without letting yourself be loved and claimed beyond your control.
Nothing else works. We can hold onto Christ, and claim the love of Christ in
our great need, but we do not truly know him, as he is, until we know that it
is his nature to claim us first, without our having any claim of our own, on
our part.
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| Washtucna on that Hazy September Day |
Once we know this, we have the authority of Jesus to
claim, for him and for his kingdom, anyone like us who has no dream of a claim
on the kingdom of
God
He authorizes us to establish his authority over this
world and over all the people in it. We claim them for the grace, and the love,
and the goodness of God that they cannot claim for themselves.
God, in Christ, is our Lord and Savior. Standing up
with a good and clear conscience, against all that this world throws at us,
comes from no other place than the nature of God himself, and we only know who
God is through Jesus his only Son.
That is the authority that rules heaven and earth and
gives us our message. And we need to hear that message for ourselves. We need
to hear the message of the resurrection power of Jesus, and find that it has
the final word for us.
Claimed and Owned.
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful sermon, as always.
So much to think about here, I must ponder it for a while.