Living in Exile

Sermon for April 26

1 Peter 1:13-23

Peter’s first letter is written to people struggling with an uncertain time. He calls them exiles – a group of Christians living in what is now Turkey. Scholars believe that they were Gentile Christians living in the uncertainty of leaving behind their pagan families and friends. They left all that to find a true relationship with the real God through the work of the Messiah Jesus Christ. They gave up a lot more than traditions; they lost their families and their social support, because to turn your back on a local god was seen as an affront to that god and to risk disaster. In today’s passage, Peter calls on them to rise to the occasion. Peter tells them to not lose sight of the wonderful gift they have received in the face of so much hardship. Peter starts by saying we have to get ready to work. He says prepare your minds for action! In Greek, Peter says “gird up the loins of your mind.” “Gird up your loins” was a common expression. Men wore long, flowing shirts and robes and if the need arose to move quickly, they had to be ready to tuck the hems of their garments into their belts so they wouldn’t trip over them. This was girding up your loins. So when Peter says, “Gird up the loins of your mind,” he’s saying you have some work to do. The sink is full of dishes, the garden isn’t going to plant itself, the grass needs mowing, so roll up your shirt sleeves! When there’s work that needs doing, you need to free yourself from distractions so you can get the job done. For Christians, our main work is to focus on God. So Peter reminds us to get rid of every distraction. Focus will require concentrating on fundamentals, and Peter gives us three: Family, Fear, and Fellowship. Today, in the time of the Covid-19 isolation, we might feel like we are in exile. We have been exiled to the church’s back parking lot at least. But the call for us is the same as the call for Peter’s first audience. In the face of a difficult and distracting situation, Christians need to be clear about our Focus on God. Family If we are God’s children, we are going to take after our Father. Children watch their parents. They do what their parents do. When I was a child, I longed to be more like my dad. I would put on his shoes and walk around. My dad in turn would always talk about wanting to be like his dad before him.  His dad, my Papa, was 6-foot-2-inches tall. Granny had a door frame on which she measured the heights of my dad and his sisters growing up. Dad got her to mark Papa’s height on the frame so that Dad could look forward to catching up. Today my dad is probably done growing. He measures 6-foot-1-and-1/2-inches tall. He made a big deal about always being half an inch shorter than the man he so wanted to measure up to. Listening to that as a kid, I mentally prepared myself to only get to 6-foot-1-inches. I stand before you today at 5’10”. We don’t always measure up. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have similarities.  Anybody who knows my dad knows that I talk like him. Don’t tell 17-year-old me this, but I also think like him. A couple years ago I was invited to pray at a state Baptist meeting, and my dad told me afterwards that someone came up to him at the ministry fair and confessed, “Shelton, I had to open my eyes when your son was praying to make sure it wasn’t you up there.” There are parts of my dad that I will always carry with me. Peter points out that in Christ we have been adopted by God. Our purpose is to be our Father’s obedient children. We are to look up to God in the same way that children often look up to their fathers and want to be like them. We won’t measure up in every way, but there should be something similar about us. Something about the way we talk, the way we walk, that is like God. Peter reminds us, God said for us to be “holy, for I am holy.” We Christians are children of God and therefore inheritors and imitators of God’s holiness. Fear In the midst of showing us what it means to claim God as our father, Peter reminds us of something that we all too often forget – fearing God. It has fallen out of favor, but we should always remember to fear God. Now the fear of God isn’t some sort of overwhelming terror. We don’t run and hide from God, but again and again the Bible warns us about an over-familiarity. After all, we are often told that familiarity breeds contempt.  It was popular when I was growing up to say “I don’t have a religion, I have a relationship.” I think this was meant to correct a certain distance a lot of people felt between themselves and God. After all, Jesus didn’t just teach us to call God “Father,” the word he used Abba is more appropriately translated “Daddy.” And in Christ we do find ourselves in an intimate relationship with God. But we need to be careful not to confuse that intimacy with equality. Fear of God is trust of God. It is understanding that God is infinitely more righteous, infinitely more knowledgeable, and infinitely more capable than we are. Fear of God is also an awareness that God is infinitely more loving; because God used that righteousness, that knowledge, and that capability to make our salvation in Christ Jesus. God is worthy of our trust because God could have done anything with those infinite abilities and what God did was forgave us. We trust God because God gave us everything, at great cost, that we might have a relationship with God. Jesus Christ was God taking on flesh, living and dying for us. For you. For me. And then God called us together in fellowship. Fellowship After presenting us with our new identities as God’s children and showing us the wonders of God’s mercy on the cross, we would expect Peter, perhaps, to tell us about the heaven that we are going to. Or perhaps to warn us of the hell we might experience if we do not accept the salvation Christ offers. Instead, Peter tells us now that we have been washed clean, we can finally have real love for each other. In two words, he shows us what the love of Christians in fellowship can be. First, Peter says that in obedience to the truth, we have real sibling-love for each other. In one word he reminds us that all of us who call God father must necessarily be brothers and sisters to each other. When I went to college, whenever I made a new friend, I would have to introduce them to my best friend Jon. If they couldn’t be friends with Jon, they couldn’t be close friends with me. To love someone deeply is to love the people they love as well. You can’t love God if you hate God’s children. Churches are full of siblings who love each other, who spend time together, who care for one another. This is Christian fellowship. Second, Peter says that the sibling-love that we have for our fellow Christians shows itself as a self-giving love that comes from a deep place inside us. This type of love is given regardless of whether we feel that it has been earned. It’s a posture, a reflex. It is certainly not a calculation. The love of God fills our hearts to overflowing, and to be like God means that our reflexive response to people will be to love them. It sounds exhausting until you realize that this love which flows out of us flows from the source of all love. From a God who “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” This God is with us all the time, showering us with love, filling us with grace, and enabling us to keep going. Conclusion We are surrounded by an invisible bubble that keeps us alive. The earth’s atmosphere is a precise cocktail of gasses that support all of the life on this planet. 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen. We cannot see it, but we also shouldn’t take it for granted. We need oxygen to survive, but the earth’s atmosphere is around 21% oxygen. If it were much more than this, there would be no way to control fire, which also survives on oxygen. If there were much less, we would lose consciousness and eventually die. It is easy to take the constant supply of oxygen for granted, since most of the time we breathe without thinking about it. But if you remove oxygen, it has tremendous consequences. I think sometimes we relate to God the way that we relate to the atmosphere. One of the blessings of the Incarnation is that we have constant access to God. My favorite part of the Good Friday story is when the curtain of the Temple—which separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place, where the presence of God was believed to dwell— was ripped in two from top to bottom.  Even as a child I understood that symbolism: God is not sequestered or kept away behind any curtain. In Jesus Christ, we find that God is with us, as close as oxygen. Breathe in. Breathe out. The presence of God. God is like the very atmosphere around us– we are always in the divine presence. But just like the air we breathe, sometimes we get so used to God being there that we forget. We forget God’s presence.  Peter calls us in this passage to focus our minds and prepare ourselves for the work God has for us. He wants us to remember we are family, with God as our Father and fellow Christians as our siblings. Peter reminds us to fear God, a God who has earned our trust and our fear with the powerful work of salvation. As a family who fears God, Peter also encourages us to love one another with a self-giving love of siblings that defines Christian fellowship. This is the work God calls us to – loving one another. Today, a lot of us have a lot more time on our hands than usual. I have seen a lot of people talk about wanting to use this time for self-improvement. For working on projects that we have put off until now. But I want to encourage you to something simpler. Something more accessible. Something more foundational that I fear we have taken for granted. Something that grounds us and makes it possible to love one another: Breathe In. Breathe Out. And remember the presence of God.