Shiloh Lutheran Church
State College PA
Third Sunday of Easter, 2017
On Wednesday morning this past week, I was in a training session at work. It lasted all morning, and about halfway through I thought “what is the point of this? Why are we sitting through this training when we could be making much better use of our time?” I was, at the time, bored and frustrated. I truly had more pressing things to do. But even so, this is a good question to ask ourselves from time to time, especially as Christians. We become comfortable with the gospel, and it begins to seem commonplace; we think we understand all we need to know to get safely to heaven, and we begin to drift spiritually. There are so many urgent things calling for our attention. When that begins to happen, it’s a good thing to stop and ask ourselves, “what am I doing here; what is the point of this?” And this passage in 1 Peter is a good place to go for answers.
First, consider what it took to redeem us. Peter says we were redeemed “from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers.” They were redeemed from idolatry, from a life in which they worshiped idols, empty gods that had no power to save them. Their worship was empty and vain, and since we were created as worshiping beings, the quality of our worship affects our whole life. Idolatry permeates every part of our being, so that our lives become empty and vain, like our worship. William Barclay quotes one ancient writer: “Suns can rise and set again; but once our brief light is dead, there is nothing left but one long night from which we never shall awake.” (The Letters of James and Peter, p. 187). This is the background to our redemption, and it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of it. We’ve been redeemed from an “empty way of life,” a life of alienation from God, separated from the very purpose of our creation, a life lived under the shadow of death.
The word “redemption” refers to the freeing of slaves by paying a ransom price. In the ancient world, when people were reduced to poverty they would often sell themselves into slavery to pay their debts. But in Israel there was a provision for slaves to be set free if someone paid the full price to the owner and then, in an act of kindness, gave them the gift of freedom. So when Peter says that we’ve been redeemed, he’s saying that God has set us free from our old slavery by paying the ransom price. And he tells us, in verse 19, what that ransom price was: not silver or gold, but “the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” This says something about the depth to which we had fallen, the extent of our lostness. In order for us to be redeemed, it was necessary for Christ to shed His blood. But it also says something about how much God loves us. He values us so highly that He was willing to pay this incredible price to redeem us from our slavery to sin. In order to redeem us from our slavery under the shadow of death, the futile way of life inherited from our ancestors, Jesus endured a shameful death and then rose victorious.
Next, consider what this redemption has accomplished. God’s purpose of redemption is not a last-minute effort to fix a problem that’s gotten out of control. Jesus was “chosen before the creation of the world.” God’s purpose of redemption is rooted in eternity. It’s certain and stable; He’s not going to change His mind about it. It’s rooted in eternity and “revealed in these last times for your sake.” And what this redemption has accomplished is reconciliation with God. Once we were separated from Him; there was an impassable gulf between us, which we were powerless to cross over. When Paul says, in Ephesians, that we were “without hope and without God in the world,” he means this in the strongest sense. We were hopelessly lost, lost without any hope of recovery. And now, our “faith and hope are in God.”
This is at the very center of what it means to be the Church. I've often read advertisements from churches, promising all sorts of things to people: that they won’t be subjected to a boring sermon, that they won’t have to look at stained glass windows or sing any hymns, that they’ll be given something they can put to immediate use in the coming week, that they’ll go away feeling refreshed and uplifted by the positive, practical sermon they’re going to hear. These churches are appealing to peoples' felt needs, trying to get them in the door. But our primary calling, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ, is not to make people feel good, to shield them from the horror of seeing a stained glass window, or even to offer them what they think they need. We don’t know what we need, much of the time, and getting what we want is often the worst thing that can happen to us. Read, sometime, about how winning the lottery has affected the lives of those who've suddenly acquired large amounts of money. What we need is to be reconciled to God and then to learn how to live our lives under His lordship, as people who’ve been redeemed from the empty way of life we’ve inherited from our culture.
The reason our old way of life is empty is because it goes against the very purpose of our creation. We were created by God, in His image, with an innate longing for His fellowship. As St. Augustine said: “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Or the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism on the “chief end of man”: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We live in His world, which was created to reveal His glory. Everything around and within us points to Him. But when we’re alienated from Him, we ourselves, and everything around us, are out of sync, disconnected from the purpose of our existence. There’s something missing, something that we know, in the depths of our hearts, ought to be there. Things just aren’t what they should be.
That’s the whole point of the book of Ecclesiastes: this world is empty and meaningless without God. Here’s how the book begins: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message).
In the introduction to Ecclesiastes in The Message, Eugene Peterson makes this observation: “Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts–but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.” One group resigns itself to the meaninglessness of existence, and just goes through the routine. The other group fights against the sense of meaninglessness but never arrives at anything better, and they end up destroying themselves in the process.
The problem is that we’re alienated from God, disconnected from the purpose of our existence. No matter what we do, no matter where we turn, we keep coming back to it. I think one of the reasons we live at such a frantic pace in America today is that our busyness is a way of avoiding this realization as much as possible. If we can just keep busy enough, maybe we won’t have to face the truth. And when this spirit comes into the church, as it very often does, it’s because we’ve forgotten who we are and who God is. It doesn’t much matter whether we’re keeping frantically busy with our work, our recreation, or our church activities. We’ve forgotten what it means to have been “redeemed from the empty way of life handed down” to us.
We need to stop and remember what Peter says in verse 21: “Through him [through Christ, who was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake] you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.” What was once true of us is true no longer. We’ve been reconciled to God. We’ve been reconnected with God, who raised Jesus from the dead and glorified Him; we’re no longer “without hope and without God in the world;” our faith and our hope are in God. We’ve been restored to the original purpose of our existence, which is to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We don’t need to keep going at a frantic pace to drown out the meaninglessness of our existence; we need to slow down and cultivate the presence of this One with whom we will share eternity.
This leads to the third point, which is to consider what it means to live in this world as people who’ve been redeemed by the “precious blood of Christ.” Does it mean that everything in our lives suddenly falls into place? That all friction is removed from our relationships and that our financial struggles suddenly disappear? That our difficulties at work or school go away? That, as the hymn refrain goes, “at the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light, and the burden of my heart rolled away; it was there by faith I received my sight and now I am happy all the day”? No, and it also doesn’t mean that we’ve entered a training program which will eventually lead to all these things. It’s a good thing to cultivate wisdom in how we order our lives in this world, but even when we do this, the difficulties will still be there. The primary mission of the Church is not to teach us how to live successful lives in this world (contrary to much of the literature in self-help Evangelicalism).
Listen to what Peter tells his readers at the beginning of this passage: “live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.” Or, “live in reverent fear during the time of your exile” (NRSV). Our primary need is not to know how to fix all the details of our lives, but to know who we are and who God is. Our lives are quickly passing by and soon we’ll be in the Lord’s presence. We may continue to struggle in many areas until the end of our days. The people Peter is writing to were suffering persecution; their daily lives were difficult and painful. Living as people who’ve been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ means: 1) living reverently in the light of the fact that we’ll soon be standing in God’s presence; and 2) remembering that we are strangers, people who don’t fully belong to this world. Our true home is elsewhere. Our hearts long to experience the fullness of our redemption, and this longing motivates us to live reverently, because we don’t want to be ashamed when we’re standing in God’s presence.
Living as people who’ve been redeemed “by the precious blood of Christ” means recognizing that we are “strangers and foreigners on the earth,” as the author of Hebrews says, “for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them” (11:13b-16). We cultivate this reverence, during our time of exile on this earth, primarily in worship and prayer. As we offer worship to God and seek Him in our daily lives, we find ourselves longing for the day when we will see Him face to face.
That’s what we’re celebrating during this Easter season. Jesus is risen from the dead, and because of Him our “faith and hope are in God.” We’re no longer strangers and aliens to the kingdom of heaven. Heaven is our true home. We’re living in exile, longing for our homeland. Does this mean that we find no pleasure, no enjoyment at all in the things of this world? No, not at all. God gives us good gifts here to enjoy, and He wants us to receive them thankfully. But these good gifts lead us to God, not away from Him. They're meant to lead us to worship and praise.
The singer-songwriter Steve Earle starts out one of his songs with the line, “There ain't a lot that you can do in this town; drive up to the lake and then you turn back around.” It's a boring place. There's nothing to do here. It would be so much better to live somewhere else, someplace with better entertainment, more diversions, more exciting ways to fill up the time. Life is boring unless you can find exciting things to do.
Some forms of Christian spirituality deliberately turn away from, or minimize, these kinds of diversions, not because they're bad in themselves but because they can so fill our minds that there's no room left for God. This is a valid approach; but it's not the only one. Some Christians, like G.K. Chesterton, have cultivated the ability to find delight in simple, everyday things, knowing that the whole creation points to God and is a sacrament of His presence. When we learn to experience God through His creation—which includes the people He's placed in our lives—we're able to live in anticipation of the hope God has given us when we will see Him face to face and will experience all His blessings in their fullness.
And the reason we have such a glorious hope for the future is because Jesus, our risen Savior, has paid the price for our redemption and has set us free from the “empty way of life” we received from this fallen world. “Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in.... It’s because of this sacrificed Messiah, whom God then raised from the dead and glorified, that you trust God, that you know you have a future hope in God” (The Message).
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