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March 30, 2008
Living Hope
a sermon on 1 Peter 1.3-9
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
The resurrection of Jesus is
good news. It is good news for everybody. If you are here this morning and you
are grieving, the resurrection of Jesus is good news. That should be obvious;
the resurrection is about hope beyond death. Yet there is so much more! If you
are lonely, the resurrection is good news for you. If you are under stress at
work or out of a job, the resurrection of Jesus is good news for you. If your
family is falling apart, has fallen apart, or you don’t know what to do about
your children or your grandchildren, the resurrection of Jesus is good news for
you. If your health is failing—slowly or quickly—the resurrection of Jesus is
good news for you. If you care for someone else who depends on you, and the load
gets heavy at times, too heavy, the resurrection of Jesus is good news for you.
If life scares you—there are too many perils out there, and you feel
overwhelmed—the resurrection of Jesus is good news for you. If you feel
depressed, and you don’t know why, the resurrection of Jesus is good news for
you. If you feel depressed and you do know why and you have a very good reason,
the resurrection of Jesus is good news for you too. If you just can’t seem to be
happy, even though your life is good … if you feel deep down that you are
unlovable … if you struggle against the same temptation and fail over and over …
if you are young and moving into life as an adult … if you have it all and feel
like the king of the world … whoever you are, whatever your circumstances: the
resurrection of Jesus is good news for you. I know what you’re thinking, “Well,
that’s great. But how exactly is the resurrection of Jesus good news for me? How
does it get me a job or straighten out my family?” It doesn’t. I said it’s good
news, not an instant solution to all your problems. However, never discount the
presence and power of God in your life. Never neglect prayer. Never disparage
the resilience and strength you have because of your faith and because of the
presence of the risen Jesus in your life. Among other things, the resurrection
means that when scripture promises God’s grace is sufficient for our needs, it
is right. Again, this does not mean everything turns out the way we want. It
doesn’t mean we have an easy time. But it does mean … well, look at our
scripture reading. It is all about the difference the resurrection of Jesus
makes in our lives every day. Don’t you love it? I do. This little passage comes
right at the beginning of the letter we call 1 Peter. Whether it was written by
Peter or not, I do not know. Probably it wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter in the
least. Whoever wrote it was a genius.
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Letters in the ancient world were structured differently from how we write them.
We begin with the recipient: “Dear so-and-so.” They began with the writer. Then
the recipient. Then a greeting or blessing. The greeting or blessing was usually
short, something like “grace and peace to you.” Then often letters included a
thanksgiving. You can tell a lot about the contents of an ancient letter and
about the mood of the writer when the greeting is longer or different. For
example, when Paul begins his letter to the Galatians without giving thanks, you
can tell right away he’s not happy. Our passage is a rather long introductory
greeting, and it packs a punch. It is encouraging and uplifting and full of
celebration: Praise be to God! He has done so much for us! If you think the rest
of the letter is going to be a pep talk, you are right. The fact is, the first
people who read this letter needed encouragement. They had made a commitment to
Christ. This commitment was unpopular, so it cost them. It cost them friends and
family. It cost them maybe jobs or customers. It put them in an awkward position
with respect to the government. Apparently they were suffering because of their
loyalty to Jesus. What had happened? Where was God? Wasn’t finding the truth
supposed to make life better? They needed a potent reminder of what God had done
for them, who they were, and how they were supposed to live through hard times.
All this, of course, is for us too. How is the resurrection of Jesus good news
today? I’m going to organize the answer like this: Christian hope, Christian
experience, and the persistence of suffering. Our passage is such a beautiful
expression of resurrection power. Naturally that touches the future, what I am
calling Christian hope. Yet the present moment is different too because of
Jesus. We do not have to wait until the end to experience the blessings of God.
The Christian can experience God’s presence and power today. But, we must not
get too carried away. It would be easy to make a mistake and say that because we
can experience love and joy right now, that our lives should be nothing but
blissful happiness. I knew a woman who thought that once. She believed a good
Christian should always be cheerful, and she was the most bubbly person I ever
met. Then I heard one day she had been committed to a mental hospital. She
cracked under the strain. It is very important to me that this passage talks
about suffering. If it didn’t, I might think the rest of it was wishful thinking
and exaggeration. I have suffered. You have too. I know the ways that most
everyone in this church suffers. We have some people carrying heavy loads. So I
am not interested in anything that says, “Hey, be happy! Everything is great!”
Because I know it isn’t. I get excited, however, when I find scripture affirming
the reality of suffering, and not downplaying it, but dealing with it head-on,
and still saying, “Yes, we suffer, but we still have something to celebrate,
because we have something infinitely precious that cannot be taken away from us
and—on top of that—we have love and joy. They are real, and even our suffering
cannot snuff them out.
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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he
has given us new birth … into …” into what? Two things. The first is a living
hope. A living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The
second is “into an inheritance.” Let’s unpack this a little bit. We have a
couple of easy-to-understand images. God has given us, as Christians, new birth.
We are reborn into his family. This image of rebirth reminds us we are not the
same as before. We have a new life, a new family, and … an inheritance.
Inheritance is a good word, because it means something we have by virtue of
being born into this family. We didn’t earn it. We didn’t make it. We simply
inherited it. God’s action is emphasized here. God gave us new birth; we didn’t
give birth to ourselves. That’s not how birth works! God also gave us an
inheritance. Another way inheritance is an appropriate concept is that you have
to wait for an inheritance. It’s yours, but you can’t spend it right away.
That’s the Christian life, isn’t it? God has promised us a lot more than we have
at the moment. Whoever wrote this letter was excited about the inheritance,
because he piled up adjectives to describe it: immortal, pure, and permanent.
All this is in contrast to life now. Nothing about us right now is immortal,
pure, and permanent. This inheritance is kept for us in heaven, which is
interesting because it does not mean what some people assume it means. Some
people take this, along with that line at the end about “the salvation of your
souls,” and they assume this world is bad, our bodies are bad, and our hope is
to someday be set free from them so our souls fly off to heaven. That’s not
quite right. Christian hope is resurrection hope. This world is not bad. Our
bodies are not bad. They are just broken. God doesn’t want to destroy them, he
wants to fix them. And that’s what he is going to do. According to Christianity,
when a Christian dies, his or her spirit does go to heaven to be with God. But
that’s not the end. Someday, Christ will come again; both heaven and earth will
be made new, and they will be joined together; and the dead in Christ will be
raised to new life with bodies, not less real than the ones we have now, but
more real. More real and glorious, just like the body of the risen Jesus. That
is when God’s kingdom will come in all its glory. Peace and justice will be
permanently established. God will no longer be hidden from us, but so present to
us that we could no more doubt his existence than our own. We will see him
face-to-face. Then all his promises will prove true, all that business about no
more sorrow or suffering or death. I realize this is a lot to believe in. “Too
good to be true” doesn’t begin to cover it. Personally I would never buy it for
a minute, except for one thing. God raised Jesus from the dead. And because of
that, I have been reborn into a living hope, that what the Father did for Jesus,
he will someday do for me. This is our great hope. This is the future promised
to us in Christ. This is the reality our passage points to with words like
inheritance, resurrection, and salvation (which is used twice). Notice too that
this salvation is already a present reality. It is kept for us in heaven. It is
“ready to be revealed at the last time.” We do not experience it yet. We hope
for it. But
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that doesn’t mean our hope might prove empty. It is already real. God has
prepared it already. He just hasn’t revealed it yet. Therefore, as Christians we
have hope. Despite the problems and pains of life, we know that someday God will
welcome us into our eternal home. We are his children, and we have an
inheritance. It’s going to be great. Now this alone would make life better in
the present. Just knowing that someday our suffering will be over and something
far better is waiting for us would sustain us through the hard times. And yet,
there is so much more to Christian experience than just waiting. God’s children
are not like a losing team that constantly cries, “Wait ’til next year!” Jesus
is alive, and his presence and power are real to us. This is what I want to talk
about next: Christian experience. I talked about our hope, which looks to the
future. Now let’s consider the present moment. Living hope means it makes a
difference now. What we know about the future puts all of life into a different
context. It gives us a reason to rejoice. No matter how bad things get right
now, nothing can separate us from God’s love. Nothing can diminish our
inheritance. Nothing can stop his promises. The Bible always uses our hope to
spur us to action. For example, we know that God is going to establish justice
someday. Does that mean we sit around doing nothing just waiting and thinking
how good that will be? No, it means we know God loves justice, so we try to do
the best we can to approximate justice now. Someday God will reconcile us to one
another. Should we just wait for that to happen? No, we ought to love and
forgive one another. We ought to work for greater unity among Christians. God’s
promises are not an excuse to be lazy; they are a mandate to work because we
know that our effort won’t be wasted. We are doing God’s work, and it will last.
It matters. Look at verse 5. It says that right now we are being protected by
the power of God. That’s a bold statement to make to suffering people. It might
seem incredible since we know that some people are destroyed by their suffering.
Some lose their faith. How exactly does God’s power protect us if it does not
prevent suffering? All this passage says is we are protected by God’s power,
through faith, into salvation. Drawing on other scriptures, I suspect this means
something like “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but
not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not
destroyed” [2 Cor 4.8-9] or “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested
beyond your strength” [1 Cor 10.13] or “My grace is sufficient for you, for my
power is made perfect in weakness” [2 Cor 12.19]. God’s power does not exempt us
from suffering, but it is real and it does make a difference. We can count on
him to see us through. You might find this small comfort, thinking of Paul, who
wrote those verses I just quoted. He was most likely executed for his faith.
That’s not a happy ending. Yet he wrote those things having suffered terribly
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already and knowing full well he might be killed for his faith sooner or later.
He knew nothing could take him out of God’s hand. And he found God’s grace
sufficient for each day. Christians are resilient because the risen Jesus lives
in us. You have to love how this passage talks about our experience of Jesus. Do
we see him with our eyes? Can we touch him? No. But we love him. We believe in
him. He gives us joy. Our passage piles up words here too when it talks about
our joy. It says we “rejoice with joy unspeakable and glorious.” These are the
kinds of words used to describe heaven and God. What would it be like to see God
face-to-face? Indescribable glory. Pure joy. Everything else just fades away and
doesn’t matter anymore. Think of it like this. Do you know the feeling of
romantic love newly born, when you touch that person’s hand and your heart races
and you feel alive? When you look into that person’s eyes and get lost? For a
moment, nothing else exists. You even forget yourself. You get swept up and
carried away in this other person whom you love. The difference between that
feeling and the feeling you will have when you see God face-to-face is like the
difference between my shadow and me. My shadow gives you just a bare outline of
what I look like, but it has no real substance. I am so much more than my
shadow. The glory of God far surpasses the wonder of romantic love. And that is
the reality we are dealing with here. Obviously we do not yet see God
face-to-face. We have not had that direct sort of encounter with Jesus. But … we
do know him. We do love him. And so a little of that wondrous glory fills our
hearts even now. The Christian life is not a perpetual euphoric mystical vision.
But, Jesus is really present in our lives. We really do know him and love him
and believe in him. And this gives us a joy that transcends both the good and
bad things that come our way. Therefore, as we think about how the resurrection
makes a difference right now, not just in the future, we find that hope for the
future flavors the present. Hope keeps us going, and it motivates us to work,
because we know our labor is not in vain. Even beyond that, God’s power is at
work in us. He sustains and protects us, not from every harm, but he sees us
through to eternal life. And, Jesus Christ is present to us. We know him and
love him, and he gives us joy. Finally, let’s look at what this passage says
about suffering. Although it has in mind primarily suffering for being a
Christian, what it says applies also to other kinds of suffering as well. First
of all, notice how it subtly contrasts our present suffering with our
inheritance. Our inheritance is immortal and permanent. Our suffering is “for a
little while.” I have noticed this tendency in scripture. Paul wrote about “our
light and momentary affliction,” contrasting it with “an eternal weight of glory
beyond all measure” [2 Cor 4.17]. I do not think this is an attempt to minimize
our suffering, as if what we go
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through really is not so bad. I don’t think scripture is saying this at all. I
think the comparison works because Christianity takes suffering so seriously.
And we have to. Look at Jesus. We would never want to minimize his suffering on
the cross, as if “Well, it wasn’t so bad.” It was so bad. And so is our
suffering. Scripture never tries to paper over our suffering. The point of the
contrast is that as bad as our suffering is—and yes, it is very bad, no
question—our inheritance is so wonderful the suffering seems small in
comparison. Second, we find this business about our suffering proving the
genuineness of our faith the way fire refines gold. Some people balk at that.
Does it mean God sends suffering in order to test us or help us grow? No, not
necessarily. The suffering does not have to come from God in order to be
beneficial in some small way. God can take something evil we do and use it for
good. Remember how Joseph’s brothers sold him as a slave, and God worked in that
situation to save all their lives. Still, some are skeptical that the benefit we
get from suffering justifies the misery. And I think they are right. When I
minister to a person in pain, I never suggest their pain is a blessing in
disguise. It may be, but I guess I’m not very good at seeing through the
disguise. What I find so helpful about what our passage says is this: Our
suffering is not in vain. It is not pointless. It is not wasted. God redeems it.
Nothing is worse than believing your suffering is pointless. This is why so
often parents who lose a child take up a cause. They crusade against drunk
driving or raise awareness and money for cancer research. Those are good things
to do. They do them so that they will feel their child’s death served a greater
good. I can handle suffering, but not pointless suffering. I want my pain to
serve a greater good. This passage suggests that our suffering does serve a
greater good. I believe God never allows anything to happen that he cannot
redeem. If you are going to believe that, you are going to have to have a very
big God—one who can raise the dead and even far, far more. This is exactly the
God we meet in Jesus Christ. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Amen. rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
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