“God's Excellencies”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Text: 1 Peter 2:1-10
Christians are peculiar people. Now, before you start running for the door and wonder if you want to be tarred with that particular brush or maybe just in the back of your mind you are a little ashamed to think that you are peculiar or different, let me explain what I mean. Think about it for a moment. We are people who get up on a Sunday morning when many other people do other things. We gather together in houses of worship and places of prayer and we worship an unseen God. We hold on to virtues of forgiveness, justice and peace, holiness, and truth. Sometimes we do it at great personal cost, because we believe those things.
The highlight of our spiritual lives is when we gather and sing the Hallelujah Chorus celebrating the Resurrection of a man from the dead. When we gather to celebrate the great moments in our faith we do so by breaking bread and drinking wine and sprinkling water. We go out of our way to take care of our fellow human beings, and often we do so at great personal cost and hardship, and the greatest gift of all we give: our time. You see what I mean? Peculiar! Somewhat strange, somewhat different, but it has always been the case.
Ever since those disciples first gathered in an upper room to break bread with Jesus before his death and Resurrection, Christians have been peculiar, different, strange. I must admit that there are times when I feel that in our age I am born in the wrong time and the wrong place. But, mainly I feel particularly peculiar in a culture such as ours. And if, for example, I could go back in time, I could be comfortable. less peculiar; not stand out so much.
I might, for example, want to go back to the fourth century, a time of great fervency within the Christian community, when there was the writing of the great Nicene Creed, when it seemed that the Church was growing in North Africa and in various places in Asia Minor and throughout the world. Maybe I would feel a little less peculiar in the fourth century, except that near the end of the fourth century you could actually hear the pounding of the hooves of the Visigoths, who were about to overtake the Roman Empire and throw Christendom into chaos. Not a good time! We would still be peculiar.
Or, maybe that magnificent time in the 16th century, when the Reformation was at its highest, when the greats like Calvin and others were forming a new society in Geneva. Maybe that would have been the era. Maybe I would have followed in the footsteps of two rather unknown saints of the Reformation - Caspar Olivianus and Zacharius Ursinus, two relatively unknown men, who wrote what is now the famous Heidelberg Catechism. Maybe I wouldn't feel so peculiar if I was in Geneva and with the likes of those two men. Yet, as Victor Sheppard, in his wonderful book on Witnesses to the Word wrote of these, and I quote him:
More than 430 years after the publication of the Heidelberg Catechism, Christ's persecuted still find in it the substance their heads require and the stiffening their hearts crave if they are going to stand firm in the struggle against all principalities and powers. Designed to be memorized, the Catechism has readily sunk to the bottom of the minds of young people, only to effervesce years later when the assaults and seductions of adult life are threatening to bend them and break them. Question Number One that these men wrote: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” It asks it without an apology. But then, it provides an answer that millions have found not only fathomlessly profound, but also endlessly moving. I quote: “My only comfort is that I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ.”
You see, even back then in the Reformation, the writing of the Heidelberg Catechism recognized that Christians are peculiar, that they belong to something, someone different, and they need strength in the midst of the world.
And then, I think that maybe if I lived in the 1950s and 60s, I would be less peculiar. After all, in the 50s and 60s, particularly in Canada, the Church was growing, and we were building places of worship in suburbs and on street corners, and there was fervency and fullness to the Church that made it seem like it was on the cultural ascendancy, the cutting edge of everything that our society was doing.
In the post-war Baby Boom era, it looked as if Christianity was invincible. Maybe if I had been then, I would appear and we would appear less peculiar, less strange. But, in that era, with all the heady heights of Church growth and cultural glory and ascendancy, the Church was in fact becoming its very weakest, and was lacking in doctrine and in a solid foundation at times. So, even then, maybe I wouldn't be any less peculiar.
You see, the fact is, my friends, no matter to what page in history we may turn, what era we might arbitrarily decide to return to, the fact of the matter is by devotion, by conviction and by calling, Christians are peculiar. We are not part of the run-of-the-mill.
Now, in writing to the Church that was scattered throughout the Roman Empire, in this great Epistle of I Peter, those very sentiments were ably articulated. The Apostle Peter suggests that in fact the Christian community is facing persecution of the sword and rejection. It is uncertain about itself. And, in the midst of this persecution, he holds up the Christian community to be something different from the power of Rome and the power earthly principalities. He calls them the parapedemos. These are the aliens, the strangers, the sojourners, the travellers, the foreigners in the world.
We get the very word “parish” from that word parapedemos, because the idea of a parish is that the Christian community lives in a boundary, in a setting, and in a place in the midst of the world. A parish, according to the seventh century theologian, Archbishop Theodore, is to exist in the world, but is to define people, not just according to place and geography, but according to faith and commitment. We live in a parish: we live in a place in the world, but not of the world; ministering to the world, but not being seduced by the world; carrying out this strange and different thing that we do.
But not only that, this parish cannot be contained or constrained by borders and time. I love the phrase of John Wesley's that “the world is our parish” and that there are in fact no boundaries to the role of the Church and to the love of God. The peculiar, strange, alien, different people live in the world regardless of the boundaries or the territories.
You know what is really exciting, my friends, about our era right now? The close ties we have throughout the world because of communications. With the world becoming smaller, with us knowing what is happening in every nook and cranny of the universe, we see the identity of the peculiar people in places that hitherto we'd never conceived. We see God's people, peculiar people, set apart, standing up for themselves and the worship of God in Egypt, in Cairo. They are upholding their faith in Beijing. They are upholding their faith in Zanzibar. They are upholding their faith in the centre of Europe. They are upholding their faith in the midst of many cultures and religions and voices.
And, you know what makes Christianity so special and so unique? It does not require the knowledge of a particular language other than the vernacular to follow it. It doesn't require us to read publications that are inaccessible to ordinary people. It transcends cultures and places and languages and races. The parish of God is greater than the parish even of so much of the world, and it is one of the things that makes it so dynamic and exciting to belong to, for peculiar people who worship the unseen God, who sing the Hallelujah Chorus, who praise the Almighty, that seek to live in holiness, are all over the world. Wesley was right. The world is God's parish.
How should peculiar people live as a parish in the midst of the world? What do we need? What resources do you and I need everyday to be able to do this? Well, there are clues in our passage from I Peter. One of them is that we need a different diet. Don't misunderstand me, I am not going to be outlining in carbohydrates and proteins today. Who am I to be able to advocate such things? No! All I am suggesting is that the language of Peter is right. What we need to feed on is what he calls the “spiritual milk” of God's Word.
If we are going to live as peculiar people, we need to be informed and empowered and fed by the very Word of God. I read a fascinating myth not long ago. The myth goes as follows, and I know not its origin, but it is something like this. There was a village, and this village was experiencing a great problem. All the people in the village were going insane. The problem was they had no idea why.
Finally, they looked into it, and they concluded that it was the food that they were eating that was causing them to go mad. The fathers and mothers of the community had no idea what to do, because on the one hand, if they didn't eat the food that the community had, then the people would die, but if they did eat it, they would go mad. So, they tried to figure out what would happen, and finally, they concluded that it was better to eat and die insane than it was to not eat and die quickly.
All of a sudden, there was news from a neighbouring village. It had had a similar problem, but they had found that in the midst of the adulterated food that there was some good food. They realized that when they ate the good food, they didn't go insane. In fact, they did very well. Word got back to the first village that there was such a village, that it actually had good food and you didn't need to go insane.
The only problem was that there was not enough food to feed everybody. So, the mothers and the fathers of the community thought, “What are we to do?” They decided that it was better to have some sane people in the world and so some received the good food; the others would have to eat the bad food and would go insane. The reason they realized this is that at least the sane people would be able to let the insane people know what sanity was. They also realized that if everyone were to become insane, and you were to mix the foods, then no one would even know what insanity and madness was. What a story!
The story it seems to me speaks volumes. It tells us that there needs to be those who eat good food to let a world that is going mad know of its madness. If only madness is known then madness will become the normal. I think our culture has eaten some bad food. I think it has a bad diet, and I think that bad diet manifests itself with lust, it manifests itself with greed and avarice, it manifests itself with materialism and violence, it manifests itself with abuse, and it manifests itself by sometimes teaching our children that madness is actually good. It often provides bad food and a bad diet.
I was reading not long ago about the great tennis player, Djokovic, who is probably going to become number one. He could never understand why he could not become the number one tennis player in the world. Finally, someone said to him, “You need to remove gluten from your diet gluten. If you remove it you will double your energy. Try it and see if you improve.” Djokovic removed gluten. Since then he has improved immensely, and he is now on the verge of becoming number one in the world.
He was told. He had been warned. He had been on a bad diet. The bad diet was potentially holding him back. But for Christians, to even say to a mad world, “You need a new diet.” we need to be on the good diet ourselves. The good diet according to Peter is one of holiness. It is one of righteousness. It is one of following in the footsteps of Christ. It is one of prayer and devotion.
I love where some of the new mystics are taking us these days. The Richard Fosters and the Dallas Willards and the Henri Nouwens, they are right. They are saying, “We have a mad world that has forgotten prayer, has forgotten meditation, has forgotten the beauty of the presence of God, has forgotten holiness, and this is the diet that Christians should consume.”
There is one other thing that we need as peculiar people in our parish in this world, and that is that we need a different passport. Peter says, “Look, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation belonging to God.” The vision you see of the early church was that Christians, whether they were in Asia Minor or North Africa or in Jerusalem, were people who belonged to a nation, a nation that has its foundation in Jesus Christ.
That identity, that sense of belonging, that sense of ownership constitutes the foundation of our lives, and in the midst of a world that is often insane, this is our sanity. In a world that is often in violence, this is our peace. In a world that is often off the rails, this is our passage for the future.
There are some who say, “Do we really need to be that different? Can't we succumb to the whims of the world?” Look, we all do! We are all sinful. There is not one of us that is pure. There is not one of us that is unbroken in some part of our soul. There is not one of us that can stand up here right now and say, “I am completely devoid of sin.” No! We are a forgiven people. We are those who acknowledge the grace of Christ. We belong, not because of our own virtue, but because of our response in faith to our calling.
It is not a matter of our own righteousness; it is a matter of our faithful response. Our faithful response should include our righteousness and our desire for holiness. Then, I sometimes hear people say, “If that is the case, why can't God just make everybody Christian? Why doesn't God just say “Well, here's the whole world” and in one fell swoop provide everything that is needed and everyone will raise their hands and sing “Hallelujah to the Son!”
I love a parable that was told by Rabbi Ben Jochai. When he was asked once why God didn't provide the people of Israel with manna all at once, but actually gave it to them in parts, he said the following: “There was once a king who had a son, and every year the father would give an allowance to the son. The king decided that the only time he ever saw the son, and some of you parents will find this very familiar, was when he came to collect his annual allowance. The king thought, “This is all wrong! I am giving the allowance, but I have no relationship with my son!” So, he decided to give him his allowance on a daily basis to ensure that his son was always seeing him and he could always love him and be near him and care for him. Isn't that great?
That is what God is like. God doesn't just give the people of God the world in one great big sum! What God wants is our worship. What God wants is our adoration. What God wants is our love and our affection, and our faith, not because God requires it, but because God loves us. The people of God, the peculiar people are simply those who proclaim to a world gone mad, “Look, this God loves you! If only, you will come regularly and acknowledge him in your life!” That is why the peculiar people are actually God's Excellencies. Amen.