Sermon 5-1-11

"A New Birth for You and Me"
1 Peter 1:3-9

Listen again to the pronouns in Peter’s first three lines:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
        Peter begins with praise

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
        Peter acknowledges God’s mercy

and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you,…
        Peter asserts that Jesus’ resurrection is a joyful, life-changing event.

This use of pronouns makes it clear that Peter believes that in Jesus’ death something significant has happened to us.   In the next five verses he goes on to enumerate those significant happenings.  They have to do with faith, suffering and salvation. 

Faith is composed of two things, knowledge and trust, knowledge of God and trust in God’s benevolence.  Question 21 of the Heidelberg Confession, part of our constitution, asks, What is true faith?  The answer is: It is not only certain knowledge by which I accept as true alI that God has revealed to us in his Word, but also a wholehearted trust which the Holy Spirit creates in me through the Gospel…

Peter gives us the critical knowledge in verse four with the words an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading. “Imperishable” tells us that God is eternal.  “Undefiled,” tells us that God is perfect and untouched by human events.  “Unfading” tells us that God is always present. 

I like to use simple metaphors for God in my philosophy classes, presuming that most are not familiar with the Bible.  One is the ocean.  When we look out on the water, we see only the restless waves.  What we don’t see is the 99% of the ocean that is below the wavy first few feet.  The depths are still and undisturbed, yet without the depths, the waves on the surface would have nothing to support them.  The actual physics of this I won’t get into here.

Our world looks to us like waves – marching onward, effected by wind and tide, here today and gone tomorrow.  The world is waves and God is the depths beneath and behind everything.  This metaphor works in both the physical and the spiritual senses.  Through this ocean metaphor, we can begin to see God in and behind all the events of our lives.  This is the understanding part of faith.

The wholehearted trust mentioned in the Heidelberg catechism may be the harder part of faith for many.  It’s not that God isn’t trustworthy; God seems to be unfailingly just and benevolent.  The problem is that we have to place our trust in God before placing it in ourselves.  When we even think about placing our trust outside of ourselves, our egos go into high alert.   Egos believe their purpose is to protect us from outside threats.  To the ego, trusting even in God seems as risky as giving our credit card number to a stranger and expecting them to use it wisely.  The real problem with faith in God has little to do with God and everything to do with our ego-fed desire to be in control of our lives.

And this leads us into Peter’s next topic – suffering.  Suffering is what our ego inflicts on us when things don’t go our way.   Suffering is what the human dimension of Christ experienced on the cross.  Suffering is what happens in churches when the world out there fails to conform to its desires.  “Why don’t people come to church anymore?”

One solution to suffering was propounded by Siddhartha Buddha a long time ago. The Buddha said that he taught only two things, suffering and freedom from suffering.  Suffering for the Buddha was what happened when the ego didn’t get what it desired, or conversely got what it didn’t desire.  The Buddha’s approach to ending this suffering was not to try to wrestle the world into conformity with our desires.  Instead, it was to let go of the desires themselves.  Accept what is, he counseled, instead of torturing ourselves with longing for what is not.  Acceptance is the only thing that will produce freedom from suffering.

This is the “new birth” that Peter is speaking of, a birth of freedom and joy to be relieved of the burden of the ego-dominated life.  Jesus, of course, demonstrated this for us in his death and resurrection.  We humans have a choice – we can be ego-centered and suffer or we can be Christ centered and rejoice.  God gives us that choice; the rest is up to us.

What does this choice look like practically?  Lets go back to our inheritance in Peter’s verse 4. for guidance.

Imperishable or Eternal

Are our thoughts and actions based on the eternal or the transient – on the waves or on the depths?  God is in both, of course, but mostly in the still depths; mostly not in appearances, but in what is behind appearances.

Undefiled or Untouched

Is what we are thinking and doing about what we want, or do we have the needs of a larger circle of God’s people in view?  Are the needs of our family, our community and our nation also well served?  Do we have God in view in all we do?

Unfading or Omnipresent

Are we fearful based on past experience or posturing based on future expectations?  An omnipresent God is only present in the moment because past and future are subject to fading in our minds.  There is no place to meet God except in the present and we have to be there too.

We have a choice in each moment.  If we choose Christ, we enter a state of salvation.  The word salvation is derived from the Latin root salvus, meaning healthy or whole.  Salvation is the physical and spiritual deliverance from the pain and fear of the distancing from God and one another that is a consequence of our ego-centeredness.  Now if God is always present, experiencing distance from God can only be an illusion.  Salvation, then, carries the sense of turning from the illusory, the transient and the false, to the real, the eternal and the true.

Salvation is not a future reward, it is the experience of the present with an awareness of God in it.  It is experiencing the whole ocean, waves and depths.  Salvation is not freedom from misfortune, but the placing of our misfortune in the context of Christ’s deep and wide love for us.  When we do that, in John’s words from our first reading, we have life in his name.

Continuing the ocean theme, here is a story of life in context.

A middle-aged man was on a Caribbean cruise enjoying his first real vacation in years. On the first day out at sea, he noticed an attractive woman about his age who smiled at him in a friendly way as he passed her on the deck. This pleased the man greatly.

That night he managed to get seated at the same table with her for dinner. As the conversation developed, he commented that he had seen her on the deck that day and he had appreciated her friendly smile. When she heard this, she smiled again and commented, “Well, the reason I smiled was that when I saw you I was immediately struck by your strong resemblance to my third husband.”

At this he perked up his ears and asked, “Oh, how many times have you been married?”

She looked down at her plate, smiled demurely, and answered, “Twice.”

I use this story to illustrate a point about salvation.  It is not passive.  We can’t earn It, but God’s grace is always there when we are ready for it.  Both the man and the woman in the story brought a context to their thoughts and actions.  Both were ready; both acted.  And we can imagine both lives were changed, just like William and Catherine’s

Christ’s resurrection meant a changed life for him.  It can also mean a changed life for us.  Because of Christ, our humanness is no longer an obstacle, if we let it go.  A new life, a new context, a new birth is possible for you and me.  All we have to do is give up our stale old life of meagerly suffering, surviving and enduring.  God is here, ready and waiting for us to turn away from our self-centeredness towards the salvation of Christ-centeredness.  Joy awaits.  The choice is ours. 

Amen.