1 Peter 1:3-9
3 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, 4 and into
an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven
for you, 5 who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice, even if
now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7 so that the
genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though
perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and
honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Although you have not seen him, you love
him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice
with an indescribable and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the outcome of
your faith, the salvation of your souls.
It probably won’t come as a shock to any of you, but I am not the heir to
any family fortune. If my ancestors came to this country with any measurable
amount of riches it was lost through the generations, likely to booze, bad
choices, failed investments, and the general cost of living. My grandparents
weren’t wealthy folks with stockpiles of precious metals or shares in Fortune
500 companies. As for my parents, well they won’t leave much behind in the way
of financial assets when it’s their turn to (as the boys from Monty Python
might say) rung down the curtain and join the choir invisible. Furthermore, I’m
not exactly the bearer of some grand and powerful name. No, while the name
Thomas or Pair (my mom’s maiden name) may be known inside a hardware store or
two, a few part-houses, and a couple of gas stations in Coffee County, it
hasn’t really gotten me into any social clubs or afforded me the privileges of
expedited service and preferred treatment. That, however, doesn’t mean I
haven’t received any sort of inheritance in my life; it just means the sorts of
things I’ve been left aren’t the kinds of things that will make me sick with
money.
For example, in the nightstand by
our bed I have a plain, silver, zippo lighter that my maternal grandfather was
issued during his time in Korea. Pa also left me a collection of cheap pocket
knives and a steel box of filled with all kinds of belt buckles: I still wear
my favorite one from time to time, a silver buckle with a smooth, dark-green
jade in the center, the runner-up was a pewter buckle with the engraved
likeness of Arthur Fonzarelli winking, pointing his fingers, and saying,
“Ayyyyy!” I guess you could say my paternal grandfather left us his shop behind
the house, with the front-end pit. I spent a lot of hours in that shop learning
how cars worked (and sometimes even learning how to fix them). I’m sure if I
could go through all the little things, the extra possessions I’ve been given
over the years by my grandparents and even my parents they wouldn’t amount to
much—they might not even make a very big pile. Even if they did, though, those
things would eventually rust, rot, break, dissolve or disappear. Even if my
family had a great deal of money, even if my family’s name was engraved in the
façade of the big buildings of important institutions, even if I was left with
the sort of legacy of which empires are made…empires fall, buildings crumble,
names are erased and forgotten, and money, well, money gets spent and
eventually finds its way into someone else’s pockets.
To be fair though, we don’t really
earn inheritances do we, whether they are estates worth millions or old, dull,
pocket knives? Sure, there are those fanciful stories that make for good
screenplays of those eccentric old millionaires who pit their heirs against one
another as some sort of last-ditch effort to show their power and value within
the family structure. And I suppose it can be argued that those who receive an
inheritance can always be denied such gifts if their actions in life are not
smiled upon by the one doing the bequeathing. But in the end, those who receive
an inheritance do just that—they receive
it. It is freely given to them without any sort of precondition, without any
prerequisites.
Maybe that is why the author of this
text before us today chose the word “inheritance” when referring to the “new
birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
If this new birth is “an inheritance that is imperishable,
undefiled, and unfading” then that means it is the sort of thing that,
well, we cannot earn; it is something that is given to us freely. It is a
subtle but powerful truth to understand that the hope we have in the power of
Christ’s resurrection (a resurrection we continue to observe on this second
Sunday of Easter) is a hope that begins and ends with God. In fact, we hear how
this inheritance is “kept in heaven for [us], who are being
protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be
revealed in the last time.” Did
you notice the careful way that sentence is structured? The “you” in that
sentence, us, is always passive, always the recipient of action. While God, on
the other hand, is the active party, the one keeping things in heaven, the one
doing the protecting.
Now, I don’t want you to get out
ahead of me and think that all this means that we are lacking free will as
human beings—far from it. What I am saying is that it is important for us to
understand that God is the one from whom our hope in salvation originates. This
may seem like a statement of theological common sense, but I do think it is
something we seldom remember. You see, while many of us may claim that we are
saved by no action of our own doing, we live our lives as if our salvation is
something we have made for ourselves, as if we have lived lives of
righteousness in the midst of everyone else’s wickedness. We flaunt our
salvation as if it were the type of inheritance that projects us into the top
tax bracket despite living among the lower class citizenry. Far too often,
Christians have taken their freely given salvation and used it—not in the
service of their neighbors—but in the attitude of division, as if to say, “I am
saved and you are not; therefore, you are not fit to be near me.”
Whether we realize it or not, we Christians
have come an awful long way from the days of those first believers. We freely
gather together in buildings like this several times a week. We enjoy the
privileged position of the majority in society. Some of us even like to claim
that we live in a Christian nation—a thought that I am certain was no less than
outrageous to those early followers of Jesus. We’ve come so far, in fact, that
when we hear words like those in verses
6 and 7 (“In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to
suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious
than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in
praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed”) we honestly
believe that we “suffer various trials” when someone simply voices a different
opinion or when we’ve made poor decisions ourselves! Those words in verses 6 and 7 are not words that refer
to anything we as comfortable, American Christians might call “trials.” Rather,
those words are for Christians whose very way of life is threatened simply
because of their faith, for Christians who find themselves at the bottom of the
pile merely because they have chosen to follow Christ. Those words were first
heard by Christians who would have never dreamed they would be the recipients
of an inheritance, much less one that is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”
Even though we have come so
far as believers, despite our relative comfort of followers of Jesus, there is
still a word for us here. For while these early Christians endured trials of
the sort we will likely never experience, the apostle still calls them to
rejoice. Think about that for a minute. These early Christians, in the midst of
poverty, persecution, and all the pains and anxieties of the ancient world were
called to rejoice. They were encouraged to find joy in the midst of actual trials, because those
trials—however real, gruesome, and pin-filled they may have been—were only
temporary. Think how small those things we call trials in our lives may seem to
those who lived in the first century. Think how great their trials must have
been given the weight of those burdens you carry yourself today. Think of how
great the weight of all of life’s pains are, and then think of how great the
glory of God’s grace and love is!
Isn’t that the message of Christ’s
resurrection?! No matter the depth of or pain, the reality of trials, the
severity of our depressions, the weight of our burdens, there is hope! For even
when death seemed to have conquered God Almighty, resurrection proved
otherwise! What an inheritance! To know that no matter what this life may throw
at you, the love of God has already overcome it! Shouldn’t that inspire us to
see this inheritance, this salvation as something over which to rejoice, and
not something to wield as privileged power? For in the end, the true sign of
our salvation, the way that others know we have this inheritance in Christ’s
resurrection, is the love we have for God and others, a love that results in
tremendous joy: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do
not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and
glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of
your souls.”
God, “By his great mercy…has given [you]
a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead, and…an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”
God has given you the power to rejoice in the midst of whatever junk may come
our way, because God has overcome it all in the power of Christ’s resurrection.
May we who call ourselves Christians not see our salvation as label that separates
us from those we may think are below us because they do not share our
inheritance. May we then be people who truly respond to God’s love towards us
with love towards God and one another. May we be filled with an indescribable
and glorious joy as we follow the risen Christ. May you take hold of the
inheritance that God freely gives you today, an inheritance that is imperishable,
undefiled, and unfading.
Let us pray…
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