April 3, 2005 Des Moines

TEXT: 1 Peter 1:3-9

EASTER'S LARGER PERSPECTIVE

This is a down-to-earth Sunday. The lilies that graced the chancel have been taken home or delivered to various shut-ins. The candles that guided our reflections on Good Friday night have been boxed for another year. The music is a little quieter today, and attendance is a person or two down. There IS a touch of melancholy to the Sunday after Easter - like taking down the tree after Christmas.

It's not that Easter is boxed away. The resurrection is still very fresh and real - the scent of lilies still lingers – in our imagination if not our nostrils. The message and its power still live on, and the empty cross reminds us of the continuing gift of new life. But we are back to the more routine. We are back to “normal Sundays”, and worship with a simpler air. The hymns are still as glorious and the message as much of a thrill, but routine has reappeared and the problems that go along with it.

All of which makes Peter's letter an appropriate reading for today. Peter is concerned with life on the "morning after", years and even decades past the cross and the empty tomb, and people who hadn't been a part of the original story. "Though you never knew Jesus," he compliments them, "you love him. Even though you do not see him, you believe in him. And you rejoice with unspeakable joy because you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the reward of your faith which is eternal salvation."

His letter is addressed to a church still in its formative years, and struggling to survive the terrific waves of persecution and dispersion. Rome had burned in A.D. 64, and Nero, trying to dodge the blame for the catastrophe, chose the Christians as his scapegoat. Already the victims of slander and suspicion, they made convenient targets. Their talk of eating and drinking someone's blood in the Lord's Supper branded them as cannibals, and the kiss of peace and the "Love Feasts" were misconstrued as orgies of vice and lust. They were accused of breaking family relationships when some family members became Christians and others did not. Already so branded, then, it was not difficult to pin on them more.

And the consequences were horrendous. Roman and Christian historians alike record the abuse that ensued: how the "Christians were sewn into animal skins and set upon by hunting dogs, tearing them limb from limb. They were covered with pitch and set fire to while still alive to light the evening festivities."

Against this kind of daily threat - which soon spread into the provinces, Christians struggled to sustain their faith...as people who had come to see themselves as different; changed because they followed a risen Christ - very much and often painfully IN the world, but just as surely not OF it. The church of the time in-between - between the time of Christ and the kingdom completed toward which we are pointed. To such a church this letter was written, and to such disciples who peopled it, living long after dew-dusted sunrise discoveries of Easter had past...

...People not so very much different from us who believe, even though we have not seen him; who have faith, even though we have not touched his hands or his side. While the persecution has certainly past - or maybe just become more subliminal, the realities of distance, difficulty and routine remain.

We have celebrated life's perfection, but the life around us is not perfect. The world is full of hopeless cases that sadden and frustrate and demean: the nuclear paste is out of the tube and will not be stuffed back in; devastating diseases appear faster than their cures, and addictions are epidemic; poverty is spreading, greed and selfishness are pervasive and morality is on the skids.

And to speak at a level more personal and within our reach, there is sickness in loved ones desperate and deep, and health in others being squandered and abused. There are people starving for relationships that sustain, and others of us taking for granted the ones that we have. And though Christianity is talked about and praised – defended in principle and invoked from every side – practicing it still not very popular work; the veneer, even here, is thinner than we think. Faith in action is as suspect in America as anywhere else.

So what does it mean to be "Easter People" now? If, as the kids sang last week, “Every morning is Easter morning from now on,” what does it mean to be children of the resurrection in this day and age - from a vantage point such as ours. Where do we find hosannas now in the "dig it out" details of today? How do we occupy faithfully and creatively this time that stretches in-between?

Peter's answer to those in the early church is just as well an answer to us. In the wonderfully indirect way that he will use throughout the course of this letter, Peter does not really answer the question at all, he simply begins to sing. He sings of the joy in which we live because of the Christ who has come. Never denying that pain is really pain or struggles fatiguingly severe; never suggesting that if we only believed everything good no matter the pain, sooner or later it would finally cease to hurt, Peter offers more than such psychological smoke and mirrors.

"Yes," he agrees, "there is plenty in life to suffer, and the honest truth is, more will be on the way." There are obstacles and persecutions formidable and real. But, he remembers, "there are other and larger truths overshadowing, and every bit as real.

"We have been given a new birth into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead! The inheritance to which we are born is one that nothing can destroy or spoil or wither." Or as the Amplified Bible puts it, an inheritance "beyond the reach of change and decay."

Whatever else is going on around us; whatever else may find us in its midst, we are finally framed and formed by this immutable truth, and reinforced by this invincible strength. We have not been orphaned like babies left anonymously at some stranger's door. We are "guarded," he tells us, through faith by the very power of God; so that while sufferings will not avoid us, they will not finally destroy us. Through them, Peter encourages us, our faith is tested and purified - like gold in the assayer's fire - in ways that finally bring more glory to God.

We have, in other words, this confident hope about who we are and where we are going and the power of the one who will lead us there. We have this confident hope that pain and disappointment and death are not the very last words; that even the obstacles that we encounter can, like Good Friday crosses, be transformed into Easter's empty tomb.

We live, as children of the resurrection, not so much AROUND the things that plague us, but THROUGH them, and are better for having made the journey. We have, you see, this larger perspective. We know more than that which is before our nose, and we live in the light of our inheritance. It's true that the fanfare has, for the most part, died down and the trumpets have been put away. But the truth that they proclaimed and the joy by which they blew has never been more real. Ours is a living Christ who brings us living hope. We are but called to remember.