Oddballs For God
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
Immigration reform swirls around us. Immigrants, documented and undocumented, live among us. All of us, even Native Americans, are offspring of immigrants. No matter how far you have to trace back, your ancestors experienced being strangers and newcomers on the American continent. Many of them experienced being aliens. Probably many of them felt they were exiles or even considered themselves banished to a new and strange place. Reports of immigration on the Oregon Trail tell that women more than men felt such strangeness out there.
What's it like being an alien, a minority person, not a citizen? What's it like in a place and society whose ways are as foreign to you as you are to that society? Today in the US, it can be because you have Asian eyes or darker skin. The feeling arises continually in our human community whenever individuals are treated or feel as though they don't fit in, don't belong. Some conclude they're not only in the wrong place but they've been born at the wrong time. You can remember the times and places where you were the oddball.
The people of the Old Testament endured their times of being aliens or exiles. They'd been enslaved as laborers in Egypt in the thirteenth century BC. Later, they were conquered by Babylon in the sixth century BC and carried off as hostages whose presence in Babylon's concentration camps would keep their relatives back in Judah obedient. The New Testament always has Israel's Old Testament history behind it when it refers to believers as strangers and exiles.
The new Christians Peter writes to in this text are to consider themselves in exile in the world in which they used to live as citizens. In any culture upon this planet Christians are exiles. This isn't our real home, and this physical world we exist in isn't the true source of our life, values, or hopes. We're heaven's colony at best, a group of God's aliens set in the middle of a hostile world, and we take our orders from somewhere beyond. Any loyalty we give to the world's insistent calls for our allegiance is provisional. If Christians feel all snuggly with the culture around them, they don't understand the Christian faith. We need to learn that we are different for God's sake, as difficult as that is to get used to.
Peter reminds us of how we must think of our faith, as opposed to how the world around views us, whether it be at the bowling alley, at work, or in a university classroom. Because of Jesus, we've been yanked out of one culture and world-system into another. We need to maintain our new identity by remembering why we are this way. We endure this strange living-on-the-edge-of-society existence for God's sake. An early Christian wrote a letter to a person named Diognetus in which he explained our Christian life as being "in the world, but not of the world."
Our modern US, on the contrary, seems to take for granted that Christianity is a religion that only makes a good person better, kind of like a lodge. The people we live around, especially in the western US, assume that Christians are really no different than anyone else. We're not aliens. We're in the world. We're not exiles. We're of the world. We're certainly not oddballs for Christ. Yet the New Testament doesn't consider our faith to be an add-on, a little polish one applies to an alread-smooth soul. Christ has died to rescue us when we couldn't save ourselves. Christ declares that we belong to him and because of him we shall be distinct.
Peter proclaims that through Christ God ransomed us. In the ancient Roman world, ransoming was common, not just for ransoming prisoners of war but also for slaves obtaining their freedom. At the event where slaves received their freedom, sometimes the ritual was accompanied by a sacrifice, which explains why in this passage Peter refers to our being ransomed as having been accomplished by "the precious blood of Christ." Such is God's great effort to bring us into heaven's new family.
Usually verse 23 is translated, "you have been born anew," but it can just as well be understood as our being conceived again. God starts our lives over from the very beginning, renews us thoroughly. God is now our Father. In popular culture we call everyone God's child. In the Bible, however, everyone is God's creature. One becomes a child of God when reborn with God as our Father. If you're bothered about God as Father, remember that in the New Testament we see God the Father through Jesus. Erase from your mind general or specific ideas of fathers you grew up with or were abused by. Think of Jesus showing us how God is fatherly.
Because of what Jesus has done for us, we now live as intimately with God as with the family we grew up in -- exiles in the world, but family to God. Peter intends we'll have fewer misunderstandings, miscommunications, and spats than we did in our original family. He expects us to "have genuine mutual love," loving one another spontaneously and wholeheartedly, as families were meant to do, but most of us didn't or don't.
If we humans could do a super-wonderful job of caring for one another -- giving to others from our surplus, demonstrating our concern for others by sacrificing, as the best of families do, forgiving one another our sins, as the finest people do. If humans lived that way, we wouldn't need God's special intervention through Jesus. But what newspaper, whether local or national, can you read that demonstrates we're doing just wonderfully as human beings?
Peter writes to his Christian friends that God had to start over through Jesus. You're different now, he says, because of what God has done; so, he writes in verse 17, "live in reverent fear during the time of your exile." We're in reverent awe of God because we trust that God loves us enough to suffer for us. Although we might not fit well into our culture, our sense of being highly valued by God inspires everything we do.
When I was a child, my Aunt Mary was one of the shining stars in my life. So also with my two sisters. Our Aunt Mary loved us. Probably we loved her all the more because she didn't discipline us. She accepted us, listened to us, and hugged us. My sisters and I are in our fifties and sixties. Makes no difference. If we're at a family event and Aunt Mary is there, we three are attracted to her as iron to a magnet. Her kind of love creates a reverence, which helps me understand reverent living for God. We want to please God, because God loves us like the perfect Father, or like the perfect aunt.
Verse 23 recalls for Peter's friends that their new life and understanding of God has come about "through the living and enduring word of God." We take our place in God's new family and live as exiles in this world because God has said something to us. Some of Peter's Christian friends had learned of God's love through Peter's preaching. That's God's word. Christians get into the habit of calling the Bible God's word, but in the Bible the majority of times the phrase "word of God" or "word of the Lord" occurs it means God's spoken message. The people around the early Christians considered them a weird subculture or dangerous cult, but they trusted what their fellow Christians told them about God.
At 38 years old, Albert Schweitzer had earned a doctorate in philosophy, a doctorate in theology, and a doctorate in music. He was world renowned in each area, and his work in each is studied today. However, oddball for Christ, he then invested six years to earn a medical doctorate. He believed that God had spoken to him. He quoted Jesus, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it," and then Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor Schweitzer departed to the unhealthiest part of Africa to spend the second half of his life serving some of the world's most needy people. He was so odd, so out of the ordinary, so counter-cultural that in 1952 he was granted the Nobel Peace Prize.
The early Christians to whom Peter writes could, as did Albert Schweitzer, trust God's word to them and maintain reverence and joy in life, knowing that this isn't the only or the final world they'll live in. Peter reminds them who they are in order to renew their wonder and reverence because of God's love shown through Jesus and to encourage them not merely to remain in the faith but to progress in the Christian life.
God is never going to let us stay as we are. God is always in the process of changing us. There's that dirty word, "change." God doesn't confirm us in what we've always trusted, or the way we've always lived. God constantly stretches us.
Peter says in verse 22, they've already purified their very selves by their obedience and the consequences of that is loving "deeply from the heart." In the phrase "loving deeply," the word for "deeply" is difficult to translate. It comes from the verb "to stretch." In this context it can also mean "constantly," but consider the kind of loving Peter commends as stretching. Peter wants their love to stretch in new ways. He instructs them to extend themselves in their caring for others. They must reach out for that "more" that God has for us. God always has more. Is there any way to be God without always having more? Don't sell God short by assuming you know, have, or are all that God wants.
Americans are bombarded by advertising telling us we need this one more thing (or these twenty more things), whether it's a new car or the newest deodorant. The advertising industry will eventually convince us that every part of our bodies smell bad and some chemical application will solve that and bring us acceptance, admiration, and riches, as well.
The world we live in teaches us to stretch our indebtedness so we spend more and more of our income for the products marketed to us. Peter would certainly include such things in verse 18 where he refers to the impotence of "perishable things like silver or gold."
Television situation comedies teach us that all interesting people have numerous sexual encounters, drink alcohol, and are loaded with one-liner putdowns, even for friends. Peter tells us to turn our attention to God and to get our deepest needs met within God's strange group of exiles who are dispersed in a world that, if we don't buy its products and fight its wars, doesn't really want us around.
The Holy Spirit within us prompts us to stretch in our thinking, living, and loving for God, despite the pressures upon us in any culture to live as less than Christians. Albert Schweitzer stretched in faith and service. Like him we aren't supposed to reflect the values and behaviors of the society in which we live. We're odd. We're here to reflect God's glory, setting our faith and hope in God.
Peter instructs us to center ourselves upon our Lord Jesus. Remember what Jesus did for you. Verse 20 states that what God did through Jesus was "for your sake." Those are the great lengths to which God will go to love us, right to our Lord Jesus who "on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you.' " All that God has done through Jesus has been for us, even death on a cross. Now we live as Jesus' faithful and joyful followers, exiles, and oddballs for God. Amen.
What's it like being an alien, a minority person, not a citizen? What's it like in a place and society whose ways are as foreign to you as you are to that society? Today in the US, it can be because you have Asian eyes or darker skin. The feeling arises continually in our human community whenever individuals are treated or feel as though they don't fit in, don't belong. Some conclude they're not only in the wrong place but they've been born at the wrong time. You can remember the times and places where you were the oddball.
The people of the Old Testament endured their times of being aliens or exiles. They'd been enslaved as laborers in Egypt in the thirteenth century BC. Later, they were conquered by Babylon in the sixth century BC and carried off as hostages whose presence in Babylon's concentration camps would keep their relatives back in Judah obedient. The New Testament always has Israel's Old Testament history behind it when it refers to believers as strangers and exiles.
The new Christians Peter writes to in this text are to consider themselves in exile in the world in which they used to live as citizens. In any culture upon this planet Christians are exiles. This isn't our real home, and this physical world we exist in isn't the true source of our life, values, or hopes. We're heaven's colony at best, a group of God's aliens set in the middle of a hostile world, and we take our orders from somewhere beyond. Any loyalty we give to the world's insistent calls for our allegiance is provisional. If Christians feel all snuggly with the culture around them, they don't understand the Christian faith. We need to learn that we are different for God's sake, as difficult as that is to get used to.
Peter reminds us of how we must think of our faith, as opposed to how the world around views us, whether it be at the bowling alley, at work, or in a university classroom. Because of Jesus, we've been yanked out of one culture and world-system into another. We need to maintain our new identity by remembering why we are this way. We endure this strange living-on-the-edge-of-society existence for God's sake. An early Christian wrote a letter to a person named Diognetus in which he explained our Christian life as being "in the world, but not of the world."
Our modern US, on the contrary, seems to take for granted that Christianity is a religion that only makes a good person better, kind of like a lodge. The people we live around, especially in the western US, assume that Christians are really no different than anyone else. We're not aliens. We're in the world. We're not exiles. We're of the world. We're certainly not oddballs for Christ. Yet the New Testament doesn't consider our faith to be an add-on, a little polish one applies to an alread-smooth soul. Christ has died to rescue us when we couldn't save ourselves. Christ declares that we belong to him and because of him we shall be distinct.
Peter proclaims that through Christ God ransomed us. In the ancient Roman world, ransoming was common, not just for ransoming prisoners of war but also for slaves obtaining their freedom. At the event where slaves received their freedom, sometimes the ritual was accompanied by a sacrifice, which explains why in this passage Peter refers to our being ransomed as having been accomplished by "the precious blood of Christ." Such is God's great effort to bring us into heaven's new family.
Usually verse 23 is translated, "you have been born anew," but it can just as well be understood as our being conceived again. God starts our lives over from the very beginning, renews us thoroughly. God is now our Father. In popular culture we call everyone God's child. In the Bible, however, everyone is God's creature. One becomes a child of God when reborn with God as our Father. If you're bothered about God as Father, remember that in the New Testament we see God the Father through Jesus. Erase from your mind general or specific ideas of fathers you grew up with or were abused by. Think of Jesus showing us how God is fatherly.
Because of what Jesus has done for us, we now live as intimately with God as with the family we grew up in -- exiles in the world, but family to God. Peter intends we'll have fewer misunderstandings, miscommunications, and spats than we did in our original family. He expects us to "have genuine mutual love," loving one another spontaneously and wholeheartedly, as families were meant to do, but most of us didn't or don't.
If we humans could do a super-wonderful job of caring for one another -- giving to others from our surplus, demonstrating our concern for others by sacrificing, as the best of families do, forgiving one another our sins, as the finest people do. If humans lived that way, we wouldn't need God's special intervention through Jesus. But what newspaper, whether local or national, can you read that demonstrates we're doing just wonderfully as human beings?
Peter writes to his Christian friends that God had to start over through Jesus. You're different now, he says, because of what God has done; so, he writes in verse 17, "live in reverent fear during the time of your exile." We're in reverent awe of God because we trust that God loves us enough to suffer for us. Although we might not fit well into our culture, our sense of being highly valued by God inspires everything we do.
When I was a child, my Aunt Mary was one of the shining stars in my life. So also with my two sisters. Our Aunt Mary loved us. Probably we loved her all the more because she didn't discipline us. She accepted us, listened to us, and hugged us. My sisters and I are in our fifties and sixties. Makes no difference. If we're at a family event and Aunt Mary is there, we three are attracted to her as iron to a magnet. Her kind of love creates a reverence, which helps me understand reverent living for God. We want to please God, because God loves us like the perfect Father, or like the perfect aunt.
Verse 23 recalls for Peter's friends that their new life and understanding of God has come about "through the living and enduring word of God." We take our place in God's new family and live as exiles in this world because God has said something to us. Some of Peter's Christian friends had learned of God's love through Peter's preaching. That's God's word. Christians get into the habit of calling the Bible God's word, but in the Bible the majority of times the phrase "word of God" or "word of the Lord" occurs it means God's spoken message. The people around the early Christians considered them a weird subculture or dangerous cult, but they trusted what their fellow Christians told them about God.
At 38 years old, Albert Schweitzer had earned a doctorate in philosophy, a doctorate in theology, and a doctorate in music. He was world renowned in each area, and his work in each is studied today. However, oddball for Christ, he then invested six years to earn a medical doctorate. He believed that God had spoken to him. He quoted Jesus, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it," and then Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor Schweitzer departed to the unhealthiest part of Africa to spend the second half of his life serving some of the world's most needy people. He was so odd, so out of the ordinary, so counter-cultural that in 1952 he was granted the Nobel Peace Prize.
The early Christians to whom Peter writes could, as did Albert Schweitzer, trust God's word to them and maintain reverence and joy in life, knowing that this isn't the only or the final world they'll live in. Peter reminds them who they are in order to renew their wonder and reverence because of God's love shown through Jesus and to encourage them not merely to remain in the faith but to progress in the Christian life.
God is never going to let us stay as we are. God is always in the process of changing us. There's that dirty word, "change." God doesn't confirm us in what we've always trusted, or the way we've always lived. God constantly stretches us.
Peter says in verse 22, they've already purified their very selves by their obedience and the consequences of that is loving "deeply from the heart." In the phrase "loving deeply," the word for "deeply" is difficult to translate. It comes from the verb "to stretch." In this context it can also mean "constantly," but consider the kind of loving Peter commends as stretching. Peter wants their love to stretch in new ways. He instructs them to extend themselves in their caring for others. They must reach out for that "more" that God has for us. God always has more. Is there any way to be God without always having more? Don't sell God short by assuming you know, have, or are all that God wants.
Americans are bombarded by advertising telling us we need this one more thing (or these twenty more things), whether it's a new car or the newest deodorant. The advertising industry will eventually convince us that every part of our bodies smell bad and some chemical application will solve that and bring us acceptance, admiration, and riches, as well.
The world we live in teaches us to stretch our indebtedness so we spend more and more of our income for the products marketed to us. Peter would certainly include such things in verse 18 where he refers to the impotence of "perishable things like silver or gold."
Television situation comedies teach us that all interesting people have numerous sexual encounters, drink alcohol, and are loaded with one-liner putdowns, even for friends. Peter tells us to turn our attention to God and to get our deepest needs met within God's strange group of exiles who are dispersed in a world that, if we don't buy its products and fight its wars, doesn't really want us around.
The Holy Spirit within us prompts us to stretch in our thinking, living, and loving for God, despite the pressures upon us in any culture to live as less than Christians. Albert Schweitzer stretched in faith and service. Like him we aren't supposed to reflect the values and behaviors of the society in which we live. We're odd. We're here to reflect God's glory, setting our faith and hope in God.
Peter instructs us to center ourselves upon our Lord Jesus. Remember what Jesus did for you. Verse 20 states that what God did through Jesus was "for your sake." Those are the great lengths to which God will go to love us, right to our Lord Jesus who "on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you.' " All that God has done through Jesus has been for us, even death on a cross. Now we live as Jesus' faithful and joyful followers, exiles, and oddballs for God. Amen.
