PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

First Peter 1:3-9                                                  The Outcome of Your Faith

Sermon March 30, 2008:  People's UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            Your faith matters plenty.  In a time of war, when the value of houses creeps lower, when investment reports look shaky, when somebody in Washington starts waving another red flag about Social Security, when everything costs enough more that you actually notice it; or just when you get a little older and your body sends you signals about it, or the dentist rubs his hands together every time you sit down in his chair, or the children who have been the center of your family's attention for nearly two decades are about to be absent—your faith matters plenty.

            The period of time between Easter Day and Pentecost (fifty days later) is called "Eastertide."  (The suffix "tide" is old Anglo-Saxon for "time"—"Easter-time.")  We are now in that part of the church's devotional year called "Eastertide":  the paraments are white to remind us that Christ's death and resurrection have cleansed us of our sins and made our souls "white as snow."  Devotionally this time-period is given to meditations of joy at Christ's triumph over sin and our more certain hope of salvation, even in the face of "time and tide [which] wait for no man."  For this season the Lectionary appoints First Lessons in the Book of Acts (instead of from the Old Testament), and Epistle Lessons from the First Epistle of Peter.  I want us to spend some time with First Peter over the next several weeks.  This would be a good time to read First Peter in your private devotional time, as well:  First Peter during Eastertide. 

            When I read through First Peter in the original Greek several years ago, after I had finished the book I went back to the beginning and wrote myself a note about what the letter does for us.  I found my note this week.  Let me read what I wrote.

 

 

Eighty years ago the scholar Benjamin W. Robinson summarized the letter more concisely.  He said First Peter means that "suffering is a means of purifying and ennobling the soul."[1]  So today I boil it down to an even more concise summary:  Your faith matters plenty. 

 

            "But" somebody says, "there's no suffering here!  Christians are not being persecuted, and for most of us life is pretty good:  even when it's bad its better than most people have."  That's true.  We Middle Class Americans, along with others in Europe, Japan, Australia, have the highest standard of living that any humans have ever enjoyed in the more than hundred-thousand years of human life.  Most generations of the human race have experienced life as sorrow and devaluation as our ancestors clawed their way up from hunter-gatherer bands to agricultural villages to empires and feudalism and poverty, and so an individual would naturally wonder if life has any meaning at all.  For the vast majority of the human race the message of First Peter is, "Yes, your life has value:  God gives you value." 

            In fact, many believe that First Peter didn't start out as a letter:  it started out as a sermon preached at a baptismal service.  There was probably no empire-wide persecution going on at the time, but the sermon talks about "exiles," "various trials," "tested by fire."  It says these things to communicate to the people about to be baptized    that being a Christian really does make a difference in the way you live and the way this world of war, economics, disease and crime look at them.[2]  Whatever contempt, whatever rejection, whatever hostility they may encounter because they are Christians, it all offers the opportunity for the "purifying and ennobling of the soul."  Your faith matters plenty. 

 

            So here are the candidates for baptism and their families, gathered in some wealthy person's home.  It's a secret meeting.  Don't imagine a church, or an organ, or a pulpit:  just an aged pastor standing before them, talking about what their baptism means.  His words are polished and his language is almost poetic as he begins with the traditional prayer "Baruch Adonai"—"Blessed be God…."  And he says that their baptism makes each one of them a participant in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ: 

 

He talks about the joy we share during this season of Eastertide.  And near the end of this opening prayer he says:

 

 

This is a beautiful announcement of the gospel of hope.  And its message resonates across the millennia to us, as well:  "the outcome of your faith" is your human fulfillment in God's future.  No matter what kinds of things have happened to you, whether triumph or disaster in the terms this world understands, "the outcome of your faith" is kept safe in God's treasury for the time of its full revealing:  your human fulfillment in God's future, "the salvation of your selves."  And in fact, because that is so, you already have a taste of that human fulfillment even now.  And so don't sell short this religious faith that you have inherited, or come to accept, or been born into-- your faith matters plenty, even when for you the shadows of doubt challenge, as Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:[4]

 

 

 

            I grew up in a cultural atmosphere that was soggy with religion—East Tennessee in the 1950's and 1960's.  All over my hometown there were grand churches with steeples and bell towers, and there were frame shacks with hand-printed signs out front.  One day my senior year in high school my sociology teacher was sick, so the principle substituted.  He didn't know much about sociology, but he knew what he wanted to talk about—religion; and right there in a tax-supported public school an employee of the city talked for forty five minutes about religion and behavior.  In the cafeteria over lunch we all received pocket-size Gideon Bibles.  Among the basic things you knew about people in my hometown were:  their parents, what they did for a living, where their house was, what school their children attended, and which church they belonged to.  Religion was an institution, a system, a set of expected behaviors including Sunday closing laws and invocations before every public event in town, including ball games, city council meetings and war memorial dedications. 

            Now you know, an adolescent comes to a time in life when he or she has to step out on their own and decide for themselves who they are and what they want out of life.  Some of the time that stepping out comes across as "rebellion" against authority—rebellion against house rules, rebellion against school rules, rebellion against the law.  My brother ran with a group of five or six boys who were always looking for rules to break.  One Friday night they shot a cat, broke into the high school chemistry lab, stuffed the cat into a large beaker, filled it with hydrochloric acid and set it over a Bunsen burner.  When Monday came, the school had to shut down the whole science wing for three days because of the smell.  And the principal always knew which five boys to call to the office to talk about those kinds of pranks.  When religiosity so permeates a culture, somebody is going to break the rules.

            My form of rebellion came in college:  it was intellectual—I  challenged all the beliefs I had been taught.  Scared my parents to death.  That's what you do when you grow up in a culture that is soggy with religion. 

            But the kind of "faith" this preacher in First Peter is talking about is not an institution, or a book, or a rigid orthodoxy:  it's your connectedness to God.  The content of this faith is not reducible to a creed:  it's a relationship:  God becomes a "You" whom I can converse with.[5]  I participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the contact point is my baptism.  When I come away from the water I have been "born anew," First Peter says:  I have left my dying self behind, and I have shared in Christ's mystery-enshrouded birth from the tomb.  And because of this, even in the face of a culture that enforces a certain kind of religiosity, or a culture that looks down on people who are willing to say out loud that they are Christians—even here I am full of joy, Eastertide joy, to have my morals and my spiritual perception transformed.  Can you imagine how those candidates for baptism felt when they heard this call and promise from the heart, and then came to the water?  Your faith matters plenty. 

 

            So here we are in Eastertide—the season of rejoicing.  Our rejoicing is about a birthday:  our own!  It is "the outcome of your faith," which is your humanity fulfilled both NOW and also fully in God's future.  This is not a doctrine, it's an event, it's a relationship, it's a friendship of sheer joy.  And this is the content of the Christian "faith":  Your faith matters plenty. 

AMEN