Sermon 23rd September 2012

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Adjoa Andoh-Cunnell, continues our study series, Created to Become Like Christ, looking at the book of 1 Peter.  

Got any plans for the rest of the day?? Well Cancel them! I could be quite some time on this morning’s passage.

I could be…but much to the relief of many I suspect, I won’t be…

but maybe if we were all as hungry as a new born baby for spiritual milk, as Peter encourages us to be, we would stick around all day pondering and discussing and praying around these 12 verses from the second chapter of Peter’s first letter to his fragile fellow Christians, scattered across what is now Turkey.

And we could find plenty to keep us here! there is so much in these 12 verses.

Well for my allotted time we’ll be continuing our series on becoming more like Christ as the apostle Peter encourages us to do in his first letter to early Christian communities.

Peter has so much he wants to communicate, to teach, to warn, to encourage and to inspire.

His letter would most likely have been carried back and forth over great distances across Turkey and read out to gatherings of Christians in their early church groups, only some 30 years after Christ’s ascension.

Can you imagine the excitement for those listeners! To receive a letter written by Peter, the same Peter who had lived and travelled with and witnessed Christ at first hand! The same Peter who had heard Christ’s teachings, seen his miracles, felt his love and denied him out of fear, seen his death and resurrection and been filled with his Holy Spirit!

I’d definitely want to hear what he had to say to me.!

I was on a demonstration this week for the release of 5 Cuban men imprisoned under the most severe of circumstances in America. I was one of many speakers gathered outside the US embassy, and the last person to speak was Aleida Guevara - Che Guevara’s daughter.

 On that evening the astonishing fact of meeting someone, hearing them speak (and sing!) someone so intimately associated with this iconic man Che, this caused an excitement in all of us there, that it would be dishonest to deny.

How much more exciting then as a Christian in those early treacherous years when the faithful were constantly under threat, frequently isolated and needing strong guidance and encouragement, to hear from Peter, a beloved disciple of Christ!

And that excitement can continue for us some 2000 years later!

Cameron began our study by giving us an overview of Peter, an older more mature & Godly disciple than the man we met in the Gospels,

an overview of the circumstances in which early christians lived and worshipped at the time of writing this letter

and an overview of Peter’s intention in writing to those early christians.

Then we focussed ways forward raised by Peter, which are required for faithful living in hard times as we learn to grow more like Christ; first guided by Gill we focussed on Christ as our living Hope and how we can follow his lead as hope givers, then Trevor looked at what it means to Be Holy in a daily way and today I want to look at how we become those purified purposeful living stones reflecting Christ as the cornerstone of our faith.

In this morning’s passage Peter gives us

a ‘how to’ on becoming more like Christ ,

A reminder of who we were and who we are now complete with references to Jewish scripture

And names us according to that great two fold quality that we hold as Christians.

For not only does Peter call us

GN

‘the chosen race, the King’s priests, the holy nation, God’s own people’

NIV

 a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession

But also

 GN

‘strangers and refugees in this world!”

NIV

foreigners and exiles

Peter makes a connection between us as strangers and refugees /foreigners & exiles, and

 GN

‘the stone which the builders rejected as worthless’

NIV

The stone the builders rejected

Knowing that we as Christians are in Peter’s words the ‘chosen race, God’s own people’ means that WE, rather than being worthy of nothing more than rejection, will follow in the path of the one who

GN

 ‘turns out to be the most important of all’

NIV

The cornerstone

As the NIV has it

Peter  is aligning us with Christ the rejected cornerstone.

He calls us to come to Lord Jesus, The Cornerstone, THE living stone, as living stones ourselves, serving as holy priests. Strangers and refugees /foreigners & exiles, and yet also the cornerstone.

But what is a cornerstone? And from our position as Strangers and refugees /foreigners & exiles how are we to become Holy priests /a Holy priesthood?

Well, The cornerstone is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation, important since all other stones will be set in reference to this stone, so determining the position of the entire building.

So we as believers in Christ, are to set the course of our lives in reference to Christ and this in turn will determine the position in the world of his living church.

In this way Jesus as the Corner-stone, unites us all, the whole community of believers, into one eternal church, and bears the weight of the whole structure.

So how do we become this Holy priesthood serving Christ in the world?

Do we aim for holiness and set our life’s course by this cornerstone or do we stumble over it weighed down by all the behaviours and values we have that are of the world, but not of Christ?

As Cameron reminded us, it had never been easy being a Christian – but it became incredibly dangerous when the whole machinery of the Roman state bore down on believers, as happened around 64AD, when Nero blamed Christians for starting the great fire of Rome.

So when Peter writes to these GN ‘strangers and refugees’/NIV ‘foreigners and exiles’, they may well have been just that, but in also setting themselves aside from worldly priorities for Christ, as Peter urges in Verse 11, they and we become refugees and strangers from worldly goals and attitudes, that hinder our growing in Christ.

Is this hard work? is it a sacrifice?

What are we giving up?

As he opens this chapter Peter is incredibly to the point

 GN

Rid yourselves, then, of all evil; no more lying or hypocrisy or jealousy or insulting language.

NIV                                                         Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.

It’s one sentence but a tall order.

If we think about our daily interractions with the world, with other people , our friends, our loved ones, our work, the council, our neighbours, our shopping habits, the thoughts and conversations we have with ourselves about what’s happening in our lives, can we truly say we have ridden ourselves of (GN) - all evil, lying, hypocrisy, jealousy or insulting language –insulting language?...me when I’m driving - ouch..chats that are basically gossip?

(NIV )malice,deceit, hypocrisy, envy, or slander of every kind…slander?... me when I’m driving - ouch….

chats that are basically gossip? – ouch….

GN

The ‘then’ in Verse one is helpful, as in

‘Rid yourselves, then, of all evil;’

NIV

The  ‘therefore’ in Verse one is helpful as in

‘Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice’

because it points us back to what we have been told by Peter in Chapter One about growing in Christ

Lets look again at the end of ch1

GN

23 For through the living and eternal word of God you have been born again as the children of a parent who is immortal, not mortal. 24 As the scripture says,

“All human beings are like grass,
    and all their glory is like wild flowers.
The grass withers, and the flowers fall,

25 

    but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

This word is the Good News that was proclaimed to you.

NIV

‘For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For,

“All people are like grass,
    and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,

25 

    but the word of the Lord endures forever.”[c]

And this is the word that was preached to you.’

In coming to Christ we have been born again, born into a new life. In V 2 Peter tells us

GN

2 Be like newborn babies, always thirsty for the pure spiritual milk, so that by drinking it you may grow up and be saved.

NIV

V22 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation,

We are to crave to thirst for that spiritual nourishment in order to grow, and emulating the sacrificing forgiving Love of Jesus is central to that spiritual growth,.

Love is the powerful healing response to all that Peter warns us against. Yet the reality is, that it is a struggle to shake off the habits and the norms we absorb all around us.

In the book The Developing Christian, theologian Peter Feldmeister addresses this struggle. He quotes The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky who wrote

Love in dreams is easy; but the reality is a dreadful assault.

Feldmeier responds to this as follows:

‘Love assaults our egos, our desire to dominate, to control. It exposes our fears.

Love’s risks are real because our fears, our anger and our greed seem so real to us.

But love’s possibility is freedom from these very things that imprison our souls.

It is the freedom for joy, the freedom for true peace, the freedom for unity – even in our diversity.

Love’s possibility is nothing less than being recreated in the image of Love’s Divine Son; that we, by God’s grace, might look like him, act like him, love like him, and become his very light to the world.’

In taking up Peter’s challenge to rid ourselves of all evil/malice we are in fact freeing our souls to grow as God intended them to, freeing our deepest selves to become who God made us to be.

In this way Faithfulness and freedom are inseperable

Paul writes in Galatians ch 5 v1 ‘For freedom Christ has set us free’

For St Augustine the souls deepest identity was something that cannot be separated from grace. Understanding that God in us was “deeper in me than I am in me.”

St Irenaeus wrote

‘The glory of God is the human being fully alive, and the life of the person is the vision of God.’

Do we want to live as God’s vision, to be his Holy Priesthood?

The first requisite is our desire for change,

 to know that life with God, with Christ as our model,

is the change we need in order to be our whole true selves.

When we are thirsty / craving that spiritual milk to transform the way we live and who we live our lives for, then we can begin the process of growing into the selves God created us to be, fully alive, his vision made real in Christ.

.

I read audio books from time to time and I’m in the middle of recording one for the RNIB, the Royal Institute for the Blind.

It’s called A Piece Of Cake and is the autobiography of a black American woman called Cupcake Brown.

Flicking through when I was first asked to read the book, I groaned outloud at the prospect of this long book dealing in what I call ‘misery porn’.

By which I mean a book where the most appalling things happen to an 11 year old girl once she finds her mother dead following an epileptic fit.

Her biological father appears for the first time and according to Californian law has custody priority over the rest of the family Cupcake has. She is given into his care, he promptly farms her out to the most brutal of foster mothers with whom he splits the welfare checks and then disappears. Thereafter the next 15 years of her life are filled with brutal rapes, prostitution, addiction, criminality and being at the mercy of a hopeless welfare and legal system which does nothing to protect a vulnerable grieving child. So far so misery porn  - but slowly a quiet voice begins to pop up every so often in her head, and when Cup listens to it she always manages to avoid circumstances that might lead to her death,

but this is not enough to change her dreadful life.

Not enough, until she catches sight of herself one day when her circumstances are so reduced she has been living in a dumpster for days filthy and high on crack, venturing out only to prostitute herself for the price of her next rock or strong alcohol.

When Cupcake catches sight of herself in a shop window looking unrecognizable, a feral animal, all she can do is stare and the word that comes to her is simply ‘help’.

 She has long since abandoned any hope in a God who would allow all the terrible things that have happened to her, to happen, and yet and yet.

In her moment of utter despair she turns to the only possibility left to her – God and in that single word Help her life begins it’s transformation.

And at this point misery porn transforms into a slow painful story of redemption and a growing lifelong relationship with God and the many ordinary saints he sends into her life.

Now for many of us our own stories and paths may not be so dramatically dreadful, but for some of us they may have their moments, and for all of us, I have no doubt that we have had our times of calling Help! in the absence of anywhere else to turn.

We like Peter’s early Christian bothers and sisters are on the same path as Cupcake Brown. Perhaps we are not fleeing the persecution of the brutal Roman Emporor Nero, perhaps we are not battling with alcohol and drug addiction and all the horrors surrounding them, but the desire to change our lives, that transformation and growing in our new life in Christ, is no different, and Peter’s words for the early Christians across Turkey, for Cupcake Brown and for us hold the same power and urgency.

AS Cameron told us at the start of this series Peter, was utterly committed to equipping God’s people so that they could stay standing firm in faith and hope and trust through the very hardest times.

In Chapter one peter tells us

“GNB

You were chosen according to the purpose of God the Father and were made a holy people by his Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be purified by his blood

NIV

[You] have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood”.

We are answerable to God for how we are living out His purpose, that we should become more like Jesus. 

And in Jesus’ resurrection God meets all our struggles with a definitive yes to us.

Yes life is stronger than death, yes there is hope beyond suffering, yes love will overwhelm hate, yes Christ’s peace will endure.

My favourite hymn, come ye disconsolate has the line

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot cure

Peter writes to us

GN

V3“You have found out for yourselves how kind the Lord is.”

NIV

3  you have tasted that the Lord is good.

And the risen Lord Jesus’ constant greeting to his disciples was “Peace be with you”

So as we grow in the risen Jesus we know that we have his peace and so we are empowered to extend his peace to the world.

GN

So as we prepare to stand and sing Refiners fire

My prayer this morning is that we will heed Peter’s guidance and set ourselves apart for our Lord ready to do His will, and in doing so free our deepest godliest , truest selves to shine, knowing how utterly we are loved, knowing our purpose in growing more like Christ is to be his Living Stones, to extend his loving peace to the world, and in so doing return ourselves to the human beings we were created to be.Amen

And so let’s stand to sing.

NIV

So as we prepare to stand and sing How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds in A Believer’s ear

My prayer this morning is that we will heed Peter’s guidance and hold Jesus as the Cornerstone by which we set the course of our lives, the Rock on which we Build, our Shield and Hiding place, and in doing so free our deepest godliest , truest selves to shine, knowing how utterly we are loved, knowing our purpose in growing more like Christ is to be his Living Stones, to extend his loving peace to the world, and in so doing return to the human beings we were created to beAmen

And so now lets stand and sing