Scripture readings: 1 Peter
4:7-19; 2 Peter 3:8-14
A man had just retired. He had big plans for
landscaping around his house. He was out working in his yard one day, when his
eighty-plus-year-old neighbor came by.
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| Photos at Desert Aire/Mattawa and Crab Creek WA November 2015 |
The older neighbor was carrying a box of oak
seedlings. He had bought the seedlings to plant in his own yard and he had some
left over. He asked the new retiree if he wanted to plant some baby oak trees.
The younger man said, “No oak trees for me, thanks. I
won’t live long enough to enjoy them.”
The older man gave him a sad look and said, “Son, I’m
sorry to hear that. We’ll sure miss you!”
Which of those two old people was the wisest? Is it
wise to say, “When you know you are approaching the end of your days, plant an
oak tree”?
Is that wisdom?
The Bible has wisdom just like that. I think you
could as well paraphrase what we read in Peter’s letters this way, “If you live
in a world that is fit to be burned then spend your lives giving something good
to that world.”
Peter said: “Love each other deeply… (1 Peter 4:8)
“Offer hospitality…” (1 Peter 4:9)
“Use whatever gift you have received to serve others
faithfully…” (1 Peter 4:10)
“Be willing to suffer for doing good….” (That is:
“Those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their
faithful Creator and continue to do good.” (Peter 4:19)
This is how God asks us to live in a world that is
fit to be burned. “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of
people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look
forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” (2 Peter 3:11-12)
“Godly” is a word that is an adjective describing the
quality of an action or process. Godly living means living a way of life that
can be clearly seen to come from God and to be going to God and leading to God:
the God who creates, and loves, and saves, and rules, and makes all things new.
Godliness means living your life along these lines.
This is how God asks us to live in a world that is
fit to be burned.
Peter wrote to people whose lives had been changed by
Jesus coming into their lives. They were committed to live with purpose, and
love, and generosity, because of Jesus.
At the time when Peter wrote to them, it looked as if
the only good this was going to accomplish for them was to get them arrested,
and tortured, and killed in a horrible death. This was not an absolute
certainty, but it was always a lurking possibility.
It was something worth worrying about, if you believe
in the power of worry. You could never know for sure when, and where, and if
the axe might fall.
They knew this. Peter knew it too.
In fact, they had been in danger from the very moment
they believed. They had entered a world of danger that was especially dangerous
for people who stood out because of their commitments.
They had not been tricked into this. As Christians,
they had never been innocent optimists. In fact, they had found God in the face
of Jesus Christ who said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34)
In fact, the world had crucified their Lord, and that
crucifixion was where their salvation and their new life came from. A new life
was made possible by the fact that God himself became a human being, in Jesus,
in order to come into this world that is so full of sin, and evil, and
injustice, and violence, and hatred. God loved this world enough to die for it,
as its victim, in Jesus.
Then Jesus rose from the dead. He proved that he
could save us by facing this world at its worst and not being overcome by it.
The world has always worshiped power, and success,
and ambition, and pride. It has always worshiped anger. It has always worshiped
glory and the selfish self. That is where bitterness and hatred come from. That
is where violence and victimization come from.
Some people claim that the existence of this evil
contradicts the existence of God. Or, at least, it contradicts the existence of
a strong God, or a good God. Since we were born collaborators with this world
that so angers and scares us, we have enough of this world flowing through our
veins to make us wonder about the contradictions. We are full of contradictions
ourselves, and we have never fully learned how to take to heart this strange
God whom we have learned to call our God.
So God wants to give you a greater experience of
exactly who he is. God offers himself to you so that you may know him in a way
that will contradict your doubts.
When you meet God, one of the things that will bring
you to your knees is the fact that he is a God of contradiction. We see who God
is because we see Jesus. Jesus is God living as a contradictory human.
In Jesus we see that God is the humble lamb who dies
for the sins of the world, even though he is infinite in power and holiness.
God’s ownership of the universe as it is, and God’s power of resurrection to
make a new heaven and a new earth, in place of the old, is lamb power. God’s
power is lamb power.
In the face of a world that is fit to be burned, the
Lord Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world. The world doesn’t
contradict God. God contradicts the world. We are the people who follow this
God.
The Lord has called us to be a contradiction to this
world. Peter said, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind
of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives….” “Holy”
means set apart by God for a purpose. It means life with a purpose.
Holiness also means to be set apart in a way that
makes you different from everything else around you. Holiness makes you the
contradiction that you are called to be: not weird in a weird way, but
beautifully weird. In godliness you live your life along a line that intersects
with God and his contradictory work. In Jesus, God himself lived a godly life
in order to hold your life close to his, as friend to friend.
Jesus told his disciples, “He who has seen me has
seen the Father . (John 14:9) What
had they seen? They had seen a person who cared about a poor couple running out
of wine for the refreshments at their wedding. (John 2:1-11) They had seen a
person who protected a woman in danger of being killed for her sins. (John
8:1-11) They had seen a person who cared about the hunger of thousands. (John
6:1-15)
Looking at Jesus, they had seen a person who cared
about sickness, and grief. He cared about the poor, and those who were outcasts
and hated by others. And he did something about it, and what he said and did
about it pointed to his Father . It
was all godly, because it pointed to God. God, in Jesus, contradicted the way
the world worked around him.
Most people would probably have to be almost twenty
years old now to clearly remember the most shocking day of terrorism in modern
times: September 11, 2001. Those who are able can remember the volunteers who
went to Ground Zero to dig through the rubble of the World Trade
Center
In this sense, what they did was very godly. So was
the work of the firefighters and the police who climbed the stairs of the
towers before they fell, or waited at the bottom for their work to begin.
In the last thirty days we have heard of the airliner
full of vacationers that exploded over the Egyptian desert. We have heard that
funerals in Bagdad were bombed, and that another neighborhood in Beirut Paris Paris
Tomorrow people will work in office buildings, and
they will go to airports and fly in jets, and they will work as police and
fire-fighters and other first responders, and they will put on uniforms as
members of our armed forces at a time when one of our NATO allies has declared
the attack upon Paris as an act of war. And everyone here has some connection
to these people, or we are one of these people, or we have been, or we could
be.
We shop in shopping centers. We go to theaters and
eat in restaurants. We drive on bridges. We live downstream from great dams and
reservoirs. We go to work, or we know people who do.
And we listen, and we watch, and we talk about our
lives in this world. Even in our own homes we shape this world we live in. We
make this world less godly. Or we make it more godly.
We are people who live in a world that God came to
contradict. We are all called to join together with God and contradict this
world.
To live as free, and loving, and generous people in a
world of fear and hatred is a contradiction against this world and all its
evil. Can we be people who are not motivated by fear or hatred? This is the
holy and godly way to live, even in a world that will only be purified by fire.
The God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus calls
us to contradict this world together, and to live holy and godly lives
together.
Peter wrote, “If anyone speaks, he should do it as
one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves he should do it with the
strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus
Christ.” (1 Peter 4:11)
Sometimes God’s call for us to contradict the world
makes me think of that dream I had, toward the end of 1964, right after my thirteenth
birthday.
That angel came in the night and showed me some
things. There was a pall, or a shadow, over everything I saw. There was a black
cloud that was coming over the world.
I felt that war was in the cloud; and fear. It was
raining on the world, and the rain seemed to bring misery on everyone. Some
people were running from the cloud. Some people were walking. Some were too
exhausted, too afraid, too confused to move. Some had made tents to shelter
themselves from the cloud and the rain, but they were no real shelter, and I
knew that they were all going to be swept away.
A voice told me that people would be in great fear,
and confusion, and anger, and despair, and I was to speak to them for God.
I don’t know when the great cloud I saw will come.
Maybe I have misunderstood its meaning. Maybe we are in it now. You might be
surprised to know that I don’t think about it all the time, but times like the
past few days makes me think about it.
The dream I had has nothing to do with a calling for
me or for you to say or do great things, or to do things very well. My calling
is not a call that requires me or you to make a good impression or to receive
anyone’s special recognition.
The calling is just to be a contradiction to what you
and I find around us. Even God’s own people don’t always understand what it
means to live in contradiction to this world. To be a contradiction is my
calling and it is yours.
This world needs more wisdom and more help than any
human is able to give. But Peter wrote that you can be a simple person who
speaks to this world for God, and you can be a person who serves others in this
world with the strength that God supplies.
This strength comes when you have experienced the
most miraculous contradiction of all: that the designer and creator of all
things (the Lord of heaven and earth) has died for you, and that he lives in
you, and that he loves this world, and that he wants to love this world through
you. This is how you and I are to live in such a world as ours.
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