TEXT: 2 Peter 3:8-15
A
Laughable Assignment
Complacency
– that smug and self-satisfied brand of contentment – can be the mildew of any
meaningful endeavor. Beginning
unobtrusively – a tiny spot in a shadowed corner or fringe – when the
environment supports it, it matures and spreads until the whole of the host
becomes a malignant garden of cynical unconcern and lazy disregard. What is is all there will ever be –
militant ennui – and it is the kind of thinking that has paralyzed businesses,
artists, parents, and certainly churches.
It had
evidently happened to Peter’s church. At
least certain voices within the congregation had started citing the status quo
as evidence that the church’s moral and spiritual vigilance could reasonably be
relaxed. “Look around,” they chortled.
“All these promises of Christ’s imminent return, but as far as we can
see, nothing! What’s changed? The ‘way of the world’ is still the way of the
world. It was fun while we waited, but
let’s get real – and more important, let’s just get used to it, and lighten
up.”
Overhearing
from afar, an aging and ailing Peter lowers himself into his desk chair and
heats up his pen. Mustering all the
privilege his seniority might afford, he challenges the spiritual indolence
infecting and undermining these complacent people of faith.
To those
who grant that God may well have created the earth but either then lost
interest or long since forgotten how to manage it, Peter asserts that God knows
how to punish the wicked and save the righteous, and will shortly remind those
who have forgotten. Then, in the lines
leading up to this morning’s reading, Peter loses all pretense of decorum, spitting
out the opinion that those who doubt that God is just as much “Omega” as “Alpha,”
are like dogs who return to their vomit; bathed pigs who return to the
mud.
“Besides,”
he zeroes in, “what you call ‘delay’ is just faulty arithmetic. God doesn’t count time the same as we. With
the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one
day. Not all “time” is created equal, and God has always operated on the basis
of ‘the right time’ rather than clock time.
And we
have some sense of what Peter is describing, although we have to think about it
harder than earlier generations. Time
has become a warped commodity in our culture.
Drive-through windows have made us impatient with the time-consuming
preparation of nutritious meals at home.
Television has taught us to expect the resolution of any issue – be it
comic or dramatic – in 30 minutes, or 60 at most, despite the fact that real
life doesn’t work that way.
Ø Ask Noah
if even a mini-series could adequately capture the realities of building an
Ø Ask the
Israelites, trailing that pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, if every
goal can be attained during the span of even a lifetime, let alone a Sunday
evening episode.
Ø Ask
Joseph how, allowed a 30-minute time slot, he might depict how he dealt with
his fiancé’s problematic pregnancy, their journey to enroll, the birth of their
son under difficult circumstances, and their hurried escape to Egypt and then
Galilee.
But that’s what we’ve come
to expect from all the screen time that occupies us: marital breakdowns turned around in an
evening; teenage discipline structured and satisfied before the
“And so,” Peter continues,
“respect God’s different sense of
time. But make no mistake; that day will
surely come, with tearing skies and deafening thunder; with melting mountains
and fiery heavens, when all will be revealed.
To the extent that the time between now and then is longer than we
originally thought, think of the extension as gift – as more time to conform
ourselves to the way of Christ; more time to imagine God’s intent and rehearse
it in the days that are ours.”
And then
Peter concludes with this: “Meanwhile,
wait in peace.”
Wait in
peace?! It’s like a nurse, slowly filling the needled syringe with the
necessary serum, telling the young boy with the exposed backside to “just
relax.”
How can
we possibly read the grumpy and unsettling forecast of Peter, and then jolly on
to live our lives in peace? Reach for
another shot of caffeine, maybe. Set the
alarm a little earlier, perhaps.
Nervously watch the skies for symptoms of the flames – understandably
so. But quietly, serenely ballroom dance
through the remainder of one’s days?
Hard to imagine.
We
aren’t inured to the very real possibility of the world coming to the end. Whatever naiveté we managed to hold onto in
the five or six decades since
Which
makes Peter’s exhortation to peacefulness sound all the more laughably
absurd.
Or, as
Peter, himself, might counter, all the more imperative. If I hear in his word the ancient concept of
“shalom,” – wholeness, well-being, health and mindful reverence – then there
are all kinds of ways of living in peace, even in the midst of our present
reality. It means living with gratitude
for every breath that is ours; with thanksgiving for every set of eyes into
which we are privileged to gaze and see reflected our own. It means living with grateful joy at the
sound of every baby coo and every childish laugh; relishing the warmth of every
hug, the magic of every winter crystal and the beauty of every springtime
color. And it means living with the
steady determination to love whatever we can touch, and mend whatever
estrangements we can influence.
But
finally it means discerning that while Peter’s message has singular
implications, he is ultimately speaking in the plural – or, to paraphrase his
words with my native tongue, “Therefore,
beloved, while y’all are waiting for these things…”
The plurality of that
simple pronoun means that Peter isn’t merely talking about the way we feel
inside or the state of our mind; he’s finally pointing his finger at the way we
behave with each other. “…strive to be found by him at peace.” “Get your relational houses in order.”
To be sure – and given all
the small and large issues that typically drive people apart – this may still
strike us as an assignment just as laughable, but much more poignant for its
possible attainment. Think of the petty
irritations that build to estrangement.
Think of the styles of communicating that amount to one party
bludgeoning the other with his or her point of view, rather than listening and
attending and seeking understanding.
And how such patterns can be unlearned, and changed.
I
think of Jesus’ instruction to worshippers who realize, even at the altar, that
they drag behind them a lingering estrangement.
Nothing is more important, he points out – no ritual pieties or duties –
than seeking reconciliation. “Leave your
gift at the altar and seek that person’s forgiveness.”
I
can feel the intensity of Peter’s pen on paper:
“Don’t let the heavens open and the sun shine down on you and reveal you
estranged from one another.”
Ø In this
season of military assertiveness and national defensiveness where diplomacy is
derided as archaic, weak and too time-consuming;
Ø in this
age of political malice and social extremism, where influence and power are
zero-sum games;
Ø in this
environment of rhetorical brutality in which words are incendiary devices, and
microphones, websites and television cameras the rocket launchers that wreak
more havoc than their literal counterparts; in which simple disagreement is
grounds for assault;
Ø in this
age of militant individualism where “nobody better tell anybody anything they
don’t want to hear…
…what would it mean to “be found
at peace”? Given the faith that God is
initiating a new heaven and a new earth, it likely means living under the
conviction that God would have it another way, and living according to the
expectations of the emerging world rather than the one that is passing
away.
It will
mean living under the conviction that I have as much to hear as I do to say –
if not more. It will mean living content
with the paradoxical reality that two people – or two nations – holding
radically different views of truth may both be right, and that the simple fact of
our differences is not, in and of itself, grounds for condemnation or even
fear. It will mean living with the
comprehension that “peace” is not only an outcome, but also the path and the
practices by which we arrive there.
Reflecting
on nature’s delightfully messy abundance, Zoologist Allen Young observes that
“A first killing frost of the season always sneaks up on me. I really don’t know when it will come, only
that it surely will.” (Allen M. Young, “Autumn”, reprinted in Autumn edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan
M. Felch, p. 45)
As,
we might add, the first blanketing snow.
Or, Peter might add, the advent of ultimate holiness. “…the
day of the Lord will come like a thief …strive
to be found by him at peace.”