We begin our study of I Peter this morning.  I Peter has speical significance for my family.  When we left communist China in 1949 my father maintained his ministry by preparing books that would help the Christian church in their forthcoming persecution.  And the first book he chose to write was a commentary on I Peter. And after two years of painstaking work the volume appeared: and there is a vivid memory of my boyhood as each Sunday afternoon following church and dinner, we would go down to the Kowloon post office and send four or five copies to different pastors: never with a return address, scattered all over the country in order not to arouse suspicion.  That book is still in print, and thirty-five year later there are those who will witness from a church that grew from one to ten million members during terrible persecution that that commentary, and the message of I Peter, helped them stand tall and strong amid unspeakable suffering for Jesus Christ.

I Peter was a particularly appropriate focus for a church anticipating suffering.            Persecution, it reminds us, is nothing new to Christians: the believers to whom this letter is addressed were (verse 6) experiencing "various trials". Christians living in the five provinces of Pontus , Galatia , Cappadocia , Asia and Bythinia were experiencing the full fury of Nero's madness against Christians.  During that period between 64 and 67 AD, when this letter was probably written, being a Christian meant putting your life on the line.  Dying for Jesus was a reality in each congregation: one could look out over a Lord's Day service and each week see some person who had been taken off, probably never to return: widows, children without parents, congregations without pastors or elders.   And in that situation Christians continually asked themselves: "Is it worth it?" They suffered from a sense of rejection, alienation, marginalization.  Their value as people was continually threatened: a civic nuisance, a scapegoat for all that was wrong, followers of a weird cult that had as its central tenet a crucified Galilean.

Today our situation is no less demanding: living for Jesus takes its continual toll on each of us in a society that fundamentally rejects our lifestyle, our values, our priorities. Being a Christian, one teenager  remarked to me recently, can really mess up your life. It is easy for us to become defensive as Christians.  At work we struggle with different attitudes to work, to ethical issues, to what's important. We see that in our witness as Christians: I believe that one of the reasons we are so weak in speaking a word for Jesus - sensitively and at an appropriate moment - is that we are slightly embarassed by being labelled as "religious".  We mistake apologetics for being apologetic.

When I worked with Inter Varsity I used to say that our chapters were filled with students half of whom had been brought up in Christian homes and wished they hadn't and the other who hadn't been brought up in Christian homes  and wished they had!  I used to marvel at the impact two or three conversions to Christ could make  on a weak or apathetic group, cowering in the shadows, defensive and retreating into a holy huddle: suddenly they would discover that their faith was worth dying for, and even more important worth living for.  Think of what three or four people suddenly transformed from being polite, sophisticated pagans to dynamically alive followers of Jesus could do for Newton Presbyterian Church!

Like Christians of the First Century, as we approach the Twenty-first we need to be reminded of our identity, our value, what there is that makes us special.  Why we can hold our head high, struggle to be salt and light in a society that rejects our witness, resist the temptation to compromise, trim our sails, adapt to the lcd of our society, our culture.   What these opening verses of I Peter says to Christians under seige in Asia Minor it says to us today.

How does the writer respond to this need - as the ads for Speedy Muffler King says -for "a  little respect".   He first reminds them (verse 2) that they are chosen, predestined by the purpose of the triune Godhead, the will of the Father, the Spirit confirming it by making us holy and the Son allowing it all to happen by the sprinkling of His blood.   

Then as "exiles of the dispersion", he goes on to say, you and I have been given salvation - a key word here in verses 5 and 10.  This salvation that is ours, that makes us people with a unique value, and the uniqueness of our salvation is given in three ways:

I A SALVATION OF HOPE (vs 3 - 6)

We are a people of hope. Now hope has a unique definition for Christians: it is never "wishing" or "dreaming" but always a reality.  That is why hope is further defined (verse 3) as a living or a lively hope.   The society around those early Christians was decadent and demoralised, pleasure-seeking and pleasure sated.   Hope had died, but we read here that as Christians you and I have a hope that lives because its Lord is now alive.  And that hope is ours as recipients of a new birth - and by our adoption into God's family our hope is an inheritance that cannot be taken away from us - it is :"imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven".  And in the meantime you and I are guarded through faith as we anticipate with hope the apocalyse to come: the ultimate revelation of God's final salvation at the end of time (verse 5).

II A SALVATION OF JOY (vs 7 - 9)

Our salvation is not only hope-full, it is also joy-full.  Joy must likewise be redefined. Joy is not an emotion but rather a settled awareness of what we possess as Christians.  Joy is always, for that reason, strangely paradoxical for the Christian.  It certainly was for those to whom this letter is written: hounded, beaten down, ridiculed, suffering unemployment and privation for their faith, the outsider might have felt that they were anything but joyful.  But there was an element of celebration to their faith that was more than whistling in the dark.  In spite of (verse 6) suffering various trials, they are to have their eye on the prize, and so  see beyond the present suffering to the glory which yet awaits them.  Jesus is with us: but His glory that awaits us is far more radiant than anything we have experienced thus far.  Hence our "unutterable and exalted joy".

III A SALVATION REVEALED (vs 10 - 12)

Or, as Phillips translates it "a joy that words cannot express and which has in it a hint of the glories of Heaven". The joy beyond language requires celestial harmonies. The greatest of all our unique privileges is that God is there and that He is not silent - to paraphrase Francis Schaeffer. The prophets could not imagine the full impact of what they predicted: the suffering Servant of Isaiah Who would also be the Ancient of Days of Daniel. Like Daniel^[i] they were silent, in awe, at the message they received: a message which the apostles delivered in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from Heaven. And now angels stand on tiptoe marvelling at the wonder of the facts as they have been shared with them!

When I come to this passage I think of one person, a distinguished minister who found his way to my church in Toronto after his retirement. On December 19, 1983 , I received a call from Dr. Charles Boyd: "Don, come quickly, my wife has had a cerebral hemorrhage." For three months he and I sat beside the bedside of this unique woman: who had supported his ministry, managed his finances, graced his manses with her hospitality. I considered them to be a childless couple, and I knew they were very close. During that long vigil I would take out my New Testament, and the passage he chose was always the same: "Read about our lively hope." When the funeral came, one stormy March day, I inquired as to what he would like me to preach about. "A lively hope", was the inevitable answer. It was well into the summer before we could inter the body in a cemetery in rural Ontario , and he and I and the undertaker drove out to the hillside and committed his loved one to the ground "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead". And then he became reminiscent. He spoke of forty plus years of ministry, of the heartaches and the pain, the joy and the accomplishment. We went to the family plot, and he showed me his parents and his grandparents. He pointed to a sister who had died while still a teenager. And then he let me into the most private part of his life, a secret he had told no one about in our church: the grave of a baby daughter, lost at birth, an only child. As we drove away from the cemetery I asked his whether it was worth it all. "Don," he replied, "emphatically yes because we have a lively hope."

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By His great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead ... things which have been now announced to you by those who preached the good news ... things into which angels long to look." 

              (2) The Difference Faith Should Make

                                                                    ( 1:13 - 2:3)

What difference does it make to you this morning that you are a Christian?  What distinguishes a believer in Jesus Christ from other people?  Is a church member unique?

Dorothy Sayers answers that question in a lighthearted way.  Speaking of the seven  deadly virtues of the  average church members she characterizes how the world outside tends to identify believers in Jesus Christ: respectable, childish, mentally timid, dull, sentimental, censorious, depressed in spirit.

What difference should faith in Christ make?

Peter has begun his letter by speaking of several unique notes of Christian belief.  Now, in this second section, he speaks of unique notes of Christian character.  He has used indicatives in verses 3 through 12, he now resorts to imperatives.  "We have been born anew to a lively hope" he states categorically in verse 3; "in this you rejoice" he reminds them in them in verse 6;  "the things which have now been announced to you" he declares in verse 12.  Three beliefs that make Christian doctrine unique: our lively hope, our paradoxical joy, and our wonder-filled revelation.

Now he passes to three specific aspects of a Christian's lifestyle.  What marks  a Christian as unique in the way she or he lives?  Peter itemizes three: a yearning for holiness (verses 13 - 21), a warmth of love (verses 22 - 25), and a thirst for knowledge of the Bible (chapter 2, verses 1 -3).    I know no better description of the difference faith should make.  And in each of the three we have a description of the quality of life that should be ours, how it can be ours, and why it is so important that it should  be ours.

I HOLINESS (verses 13 to 21)

It is significant that holiness starts Peter's description of the difference our faith should make.  To the early Christian holiness was a priority, a given.  The Jewish tradition had laid great store by it, but with the numbing reality that what God demanded they could never attain. The Christian now saw in Jesus both reality and attainment.  The vision of those early apostles was filled with the wonder of having talked, walked and shared the life of a perfect -  the only perfect - Man.    They had seen Jesus, and nothing could ever be quite the same.

So the word of this paragraph is a quote (verse 16) from the Old Testament, from the Torah: "You shall be holy, for I am holy."^[ii]  And it is reinforced by the recognition (verse 20) that Jesus Christ, anticipated before the world began,  was made manifest now, at the end of time, "for your sake".

What does it mean to be holy?  How would describe a holy person?    Peter does so in variety of ways.  Holiness is first and foremost, "obedience" - we are called (verse 14) to be "obedient children" - literally "children of obedience", children whose whole desire is to please our heavenly parent^[iii].  What is more, holiness is a steadfast commitment to not be conformed to the "passions of our former ignorance" - a mindless  indulgence, a gratification of natural appetites, done out of ignorance of God.  So we are reminded that true holiness is ultimately imitative - as he who calls us is  holy, therefore we are to be holy in all our conduct.  "You shall be holy" - God stated categorically and Jesus exemplified perfectly - "as  I am holy."

Robert Murray McCheyne, minister of St. Peter's, Dundee , a hundred and  seventy-five years ago, once stated: "My people's greatest need is ... ".   What would you state the greatest need of Newton Presbyterian Church to be?  Some might say: "an improved building", "a greater budget", "more members", "more committed leadership" - even a  new Sunday School superintendent or treasurer!    Murray McCheyne finished that statement "My people's greatest need is my personal holiness."   And J. I. Packer, in citing that incident concludes:

"Should Christians be able simply to shrug off the quest for holiness, as if it  were a matter of secondary importance?  According to the New Testament, at the very heart of our Christian living should be a passion in all things to obey God, imitate our Savior, resist sin, and please our gracious Father.   Nothing can alter that priority."^[iv]

So he describes how we are to go about this: we are to "gird up our minds", or as Phillips paraphrases  it, "with our sleeves rolled up".  The image here is of a  freeflowing Easter garment tucked up between the legs and rolled under the belt to make it possible for a person to indulge in strenuous physical activity.  We are further to do it with sobriety or self control (Moffat has it "keep cool"!)  Abstinence from wine is a metaphor for moral alertness.   Thirdly we are to do it hope-fully - as ours is a lively hope, we are to hope - literally the meaning of "fully" - to the very end.  And finally (verse 17) we are to do it with fear - not timidly but with reverence. The fear that is, according to the Old Testament, the beginning of wisdom^[v].

Why? What is our incentive?    Simply this: that Jesus Christ died.   Yes, my friend, Jesus died that we might be forgiven, but he died also that we might be holy.  His  "precious blood" was shed that you and I might live a godly life.  He offered Himself as a Lamb without blemish, that we might be sheep without spot or wrinkle or any such thing: that is our hope as we look toward the Judge: that we will come to the judgment with the reality  of the finished work of the cross:  completed that I might not only have my sin pardoned, but that I should - with confidence and whole-ness - strive for that holiness "without which no person shall see God".

II LOVE (verses 22 to 25)

Holiness, then, must always be the number one priority for the believer. It is only as the vertical is straightened out that we are able to sort out the horizontal.  Phillips  makes clear the connection between the first  paragraph, verses 13 through 21 and the second, verses 22 through  25, in his paraphrase: "Now that you have, by obeying the truth, made your souls clean enough for a genuine love of your fellows, see that you do love one another, fervently and from the heart."

"Our souls clean enough for a genuine love our fellows" - is that not often the block to love?  We love, further, because He first loved us: and the great incentive to love is that Calvary love which exemplified Jesus' commitment to us on the cross.

What then is this love?  Peter describes it for us as "love of our brothers and sisters" and "loving one another".  It is a love that breaks down the barriers of malice, deceit,  hypocrisy, envy and slander which marked our previous experience.  And in so doing it unites us to each other: both as we love others, whom we now accept as brothers and sisters, and as we love one another: a mutuality of shared love, a "quiet understanding".

How then are we to love each our sister, brother, one another?  "Earnestly", "from the heart".   The word "unhypocritical" is always used to describe love in the New Testament.  We are to love - NIV margin  - "from a pure heart".  It is an agape love which sacrifices willingly and cheerfully for the other

Why  should we relate in love to each other?   Two reasons are given here: we have been cleansed, purified, refined through our rebirth (verse 22).  As Bonhoeffer says, I relate to you my brother, you my sister, in a totally new way.  I relate through Jesus Christ.  You and I have both been reborn. We have a new Parent, a new family, a new biological connection. Secondly, (verse 18) we have been born again and a seed has been planted in our hearts and growth is assured. The word of God to which he will come back in the next paragraph.  And so he quotes from Isaiah  40:6 - 8, to show the perishable nature of flesh, and the imperishable nature of God's word.  The imperishable word of God is the sure foundation of our life as a community.

It is said that Peter encourages Christians, rather than berating them. And what an encouragement that would be to them: that the good news had been preached to them, that in spite of all their suffering, their heartache, the word of God would be firm and secure in their lives, and would result in its promised fruit.

III THIRST FOR BIBLICAL KNOWLEDGE  (chapter 2, verses 1 to 3)

So, we progress to the third difference faith should make.  What is this?  Peter describes this as a longing for the  spiritual milk of the word, a craving for the pure mother's milk of the word: thirst for the unadulterated milk of the word.   That is, Peter reminds those to whom he writes, the only way that they will grow.  And that growth comes from its teaching about Christ and the Bible.

How then do we develop this thirst for the Word of God?  We grow up to it and we crave it - as a baby does, almost by nature.  The yearning for knowledge, deeper truths of God's word is both a sign and a gift of the Spirit of God within us, an evidence that we are Christians.  We want to know more about God's truth, discovering its hidden depths, the Word of God is something that we seek  earnestly: "Your word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against You", the Psalmist declares.

Why? Because we have developed a taste for the Lord.   Psalm 34, verse 8,  asks us to taste and see that the Lord is gracious.  One taste of that nectar and we are addicted, we cannot be taken from it.  We desire above every other good the very best: the Word of God and the Christ Whose truth and Whose presence comes from it.

I remember how, as a newly reawakened teenager, I was given the familiar "B Pack" of the Navigators.  Six verses that I was expected to learn.  How I Peter 2:2 and 3 stayed with me!  I wanted to grow, I had my notebook, my Bible, my alarm clock.  Nothing could take me from the Scriptures.

Then there comes a time when that first enthusiasm fades.  How tragic when Christians stop evidencing a hunger for Scripture.  So often it is tied to a cynicism about the church, and inevitably results in a lessening desire for holiness.    In our home in Toronto, in a back bedroom, there was a place where the previous owner, a father of three, measured the growth of his children every six months.  You could see the pencil marks with the dates.  Then, three years before we bought the house they had stopped.  The family had broken up, the mother had taken the three children back to New Zealand, and we were told he would never see them  again.

I wonder if our heavenly Father looks on our growth, sees it spurting ahead, and then sees it stop permanently and forever.  What makes the difference between a child of God whose growth is consistent and one whose spiritual life atrophies and dies?  One thing only: the desire for God's word.  When that is there, love for the family is heightened, and holiness becomes evident.  Without it, we are victims of arrested growth, of stunted development.

"As he who called you is holy, be  holy yourselves .. love one another earnestly from the heart ... like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk."

               (3) Constructing A Faith Community

                                                                    (2:4 - 2:10)

My grandfather, a building contractor in the Worcester area, developed a lucrative sideline in the teens and early twenties consturcting churches. You can see churches he built all over the central part of this state: a massive imitation of Quebec architecture in Gardiner, a graceful congregational meeting house with a slim colonial spire in Worcester, or an impressive stone edifice in Grafton.

Building churches, he warned me once, was not all that easy: you had to be careful what you chose to bid on.  Catholic churches were, he maintained, fine.  Priests -  at least in those days - decided everything.  You knew exactly where you stood.  Plans were followed carefully, building specifications were completely predictable. Protestant churches were another matter. Trustees would change their minds, designs would be altered in mid course.  Money payments would sometimes be on schedule, other times you had to wait for a decision from some obscure subcommittee.   Pastors, he warned me, really have little clout.

Ninety-five year old grandpa came to stay with us when we were first married.  Our job of "grandpa sitting" was in addition to the hazardous adjustments of matrimony and church planting.  A congregation was being established in suburban Toronto, and I had been asked to plant it as the founding minister.   How do you construct not just a building but a faith community?  Grandpa observed that serving as organizing pastor was even more hazardous than being a church building contractor!

I will always be grateful for those almost eight years of church planting in Scarborough.  Revisiting the church recently reminded me that there is no more satisfying task in ministry than starting a church from scratch.  No one can repeat those last words of the Presbyterian church:  "We've always done it that way before."  But it is a frightening thing to work without precedents, without seasoned and mature leadership, without a building, without even members, elders, or a budget.

I can relate to Peter the pioneer pastor: he too - in common with all the apostles in the First Century -  was a church planter.  Jesus had said to Peter that He would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.  But the building of a church would be a slow and painful process: First Church, Corinth, would hide a nest of incestuous congregants.  Thessalonica would have a group of lazy malingerers waiting for the second coming and in the mean time sponging off the generosity of others.  Ephesus would lose it first love and the Galatian circuit would desert the doctrines of grace in favor of works.  Peter is eying the churches in the five provinces of Asia Minor: they are an unprepossessing lot, those early Christians.  Most are slaves, few have any social graces.  Racially they are an uneasy mix.   Some were well taught Jews, but many are Gentiles with little background.

Peter has emphasized the need for growth: that faith should make a difference in our lives.  We need to develop in holiness, love of our brothers and sisters, and in our hunger for God's truth.  But growth is always in community: and so he goes on to remind them of the importance of the church as the proper place for spiritual nurture.  To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, Peter asks what life we have as Christians that is not life in community?

The doctrine of the church is the most neglected teaching among so-called Bible instructed believers.   Dismissed as a "parenthesis" between the first and second coming of Jesus, the church is often thought of as a nice supplement to the basics of Christian diet.  But it is never the main course.   Church attendance - particularly when we are away on holiday or it's too hot - is a "take it or leave it" proposition.  And making active participation in a community of believers a number one priority for my discretionary time is an option.  Further, who among us really cares about the wider church: our denomination, other local evangelical churches that remind us that we are a part of a larger whole?

Peter, in these seven verses, constructs his argument of the importance of the new covenant community by digging back into its roots in the old covenant.  I suspect that a great deal of our fuzziness in ecclesiology - the doctrine of the church - is caused by our colossal ignorance of the whole of God's revelation, and particularly the Old Testament.  You cannot understand the corporate nature of believers until you grasp the continuity between the two parts of the Bible.  Neglect of the Old Testament has created an abysmal indifference - carelessness - about the new Israel of God, the new covenant community we call the church.

In building that new covenant community, Peter says that three things are essential:

I CORNERSTONE (verses 4 to 8)

In starting construction of a faith community Peter - predictably - tells us you require stones.  Peter had become a rock, or stone, on which Christ would build his church.  The waffly, indecisive, impulsive, even reckless Cephas would be transformed by contact with Jesus into Petros, the rock.

Peter now mines the "stone" imagery out of the Old Testament, using three kinds of rock.  From Isaiah 28:16 he finds a cornerstone, from Psalm 118:22 he locates a "cap" stone, and from Isaiah 8:14 he uncovers the stone of stumbling.

The cornerstone, Isaiah had told the proud princes of his time, would endure while all their proud construction would be destroyed.   Jerusalem might be demolished, but in Zion God would lay a stone "chosen and precious" and whoever believed in Him - note the change from the impersonal to the personal - would never be put to shame.  Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of a new covenant building: he sets the parameters, determines the plumbline, ensures that everything else is level.   Make even a minor error in determining the position and level of the cornerstone, and soon the miscalculation becomes apparently as other stones become more  and more obviously out of sync.

But this cornerstone has been rejected by the builders, for it is a stone of stumbling, of disobedience.  Psalm 118 and Isaiah 8 are quoted to make the obvious point.  The stone chosen by God has been rejected by humankind.  But God has chosen others to build His new covenant community: living stones, alive in Jesus the cornerstone.   Jesus Who died, Who now lives, the beginning of God's new construction program.  

Some years ago following a funeral, I am told by a local undertaker, a minister slipped on the steps coming out of church.  "Jesus Christ!" he swore, and then looked around in obvious embarrassment at the congregation as they heard him swear.  "Well", he apologized, "that's the first time I've used that name in this church and as long as I am here it will be the last."    No wonder that religious community withered and would die if it were not for generous endowments of earlier pious parishioners.   But it is not only the religious liberal that neglects Jesus: we need to ask ourselves - in the words of A. W. Tozer - is Jesus  Christ Captain of this church or simply a member of the crew?  At  every board, committee and Session meeting - each severed relationship, each angry word - we must ask "Where is Jesus in all of this?"

II IDENTITY (verses 9a and 10)

Having laid the Cornerstone Peter then, in a single sentence, establishes the identity of Christ's new covenant community.   And again it is to the Old Testament that he goes for his imagery, conflating passages from Exodus 19:6 and Isaiah 43:20 and 21.  Four couplets roll off his tongues as he describes who God's people are, what is their nature and status.   And then he summarizes it with a quote from Hosea the prophet.

"But you" - compared to those who have stumbled, the disobedient - are the true inheritors of all that God intended for His elect race, His chosen ones.   Yours is a dignity because of your union with Christ, your solidarity with the Cornerstone.  You are a "chosen people" and a "royal priesthood". God has taken the initiative, as King he has established a people who would all be priests to Him. Christ has set the mark, established the plumb: they are chosen because He was, priests because He is. Our dignity is ours because we are His.

We are also set apart.  That is the meaning of the two further doublets.  We are "a  holy nation" - in the meaning of the word "holy" that we saw in chapter 1 as those "cut off"/  We are holy because we are a "a people belonging to God" a people with His stamp of ownership.   We who were - in the words of Hosea as he took Gomer the prostitute to wife - not a people but now by God's mercy, and through His grace, we are a people.

III PURPOSE  (verses 5b and 9b)

And what is God's purpose in all of this?  Look at the banner above us: "that you may declare the wonderful deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light."   Ours is a "holy" (verse 5) or "royal" (verse 9) priesthood.  we are called to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament offered daily sacrifices in the temple in anticipation of the one Sacrifice, Jesus the Messiah.   We now offer sacrifices - "living" sacrifices according to Paul in Romans 12, offering our faith^[vi] as a "fragrant offering"^[vii].     As Hebrews reminds us "Our constant sacrifice to God should be the praise of lips that give thanks to his name."^[viii]  And we are called - if need be - to be willing to give our lives  as "a drink offering" on the altar of martyrdom as Paul did^[ix].

And for what purpose?  That we might declare the praises of the God Who has brought us out of darkness to light.  The literal translating of "declare" is to "advertize"^[x] who Jesus is and what God has done through Him.  For he has called out of darkness into light, and we are called to send and share the Light amid the darkness around us.  That is the grand and glorious calling of the church, and let us take that banner into the world around us during this coming week.  We are the church, built on the Cornerstone, given a unique identity, called to this purpose, fulling this design.

The story is told^[xi] of the founder of the British Broadcasting Corporation, a devout and godly man.  Lord Reith chanced on a committee meeting where a number of young avant garde were preparing a program.  "We're preparing a program about the church," they replied in answer. "We think it is high time that people in this advanced, technological generation recognize that the church is an anachronism.  It belongs to past history.  It is a curio.  We are preparing a program to discuss how we may give the church a decent burial." Lord Reith stood up to his full six feet, five inches, looked down on them and said to the one who was the most outspoken: "Young man, the church of Jesus Christ will stand at the grave of the BBC."

You and I need not worry about the future of the church, in spite of what we are told.   A community of faith will be here a long time after you and I are gone - unless Jesus comes before.  Whether Newton Presbyterian Church - or your congregation if you are a guest here this morning - will be around directly relates to each one of us taking seriously our responsibility to be all that God intends for us as His people.

"But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

  (4) Christians As Citizens, Employees, and Spouses

                                                                    (2:11 - 3:7)

I

ME

MINE

MYSELF

The four words had been chiselled in a granite monument.  At their base there were thousands of people with their arms held up in worship.   And at the bottom in very small letters the cartoon had the simple inscription: "Speaking of American cults...".^[xii]

Narcissus has been described as the "first American Adam".  You may recall the ancient myth of the cruel scorner of love.  At last one of those he had wounded prayed a prayer to the gods: "May he who loves not others love himself."  Nemesis, whose name meant righteous anger, undertook to bring this about.  As Narcissus leaned over a clear pool for a drink he saw his reflection and fell in love with it.  "Now I know what others have suffered from me, for I burn with love of my own self - and yet how can I reach the loveliness I see mirrored in the water?  But I cannot leave it.  Only death shall set me free."  And that is what happened. He pined away, leaning perpetually over the pool, transfixed in one long gaze.^[xiii]

It's eleven years since Christopher Lasch described ours as a culture of narcissism. Five years ago in the best selling Habits of the Heart Bellah and his team of sociologists concluded that "American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation."  And the year before Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue notes how in our society rights language has come to replace virtue language.

Americans, these analysts tell us, regard people and society at large as opportunities for our individual growth.  Even our language betrays this: we "make" friends, we "work" on our relationships. I am so preoccupied with my individual development that there is little real value "for you" except as a place for me to grow.  Friendship means the pursuit of personal goals. "Marriage is seen as a relationship that facilitates my growth (my rights) rather than an opportunity for service and mutuality (my responsibilities).  Even the family is commonly seen as a place where persons can develop into self reliant individuals.  In the larger society, competition is one of the primary means of social interaction ... Teamwork ordinarily is understood not as a genuine social exchange, but as a group of individuals working toward a common goal."

 How Does America Hear The Gospel? is the question inevitably raised.  Bill Dyrness in a recent book with that title concludes that "the major single problem for American social life is the problem of relationships - we do not understand them and we cannot maintain them ... Our failing marriages, our profound loneliness, and our desperate search for ourselves - these are also evidence of this tradition."^[xiv]   And into this environment we Christians must make a radical declaration: "God does not mean us to be individuals at all, in our cultural sense of being self-sufficient ... In the biblical teaching we are made to image the God whose being is fellowship and love among Father, Son and Holy Spirit .. we exist as human being only in community - first in families, in social groupings, and supremely in the family of God."

            Peter has spoken of the church as a community of faith. He now proceeds to discuss life within the other communities in which God has set us: specifically the state, our place of employment and the marriage bond.  And he does so - as he explains in the opening verses 11 and 12 - in order that nothing might ensnare us from pursuing that holiness he has spoken of so strongly^[xv].  But he is anxious also that our "noble lifestyle" (the literal Greek translation of "good conduct") may be such among outsiders that - negatively -they cannot slander us, or - positively - they will have cause to glorify God. Christians were misrepresented from the night of Jesus' betrayal as disloyal to Caesar, upsetting the commerce of cities such as Philippi or Ephesus, or being generally antisocial because they did not have any idols^[xvi]. Perter hopes that their conduct in social relationships will be so exemplary that they will come to faith as God visits them in the day of their salvation.

One word describes that kind of magnetic, winsome, behavior to the outsider.  "Submission."  It is the recurring theme of our passage: "Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men." (verse 13, NIV)  "Servants, be submissive to your masters" (verse 18)  And finally (chapter 3, verse 1) "Wives ... be submissive to your husbands."

Our hackles are raised.  We find the whole idea of submission, particularly in the marriage relationship, offensive.  (Let us be clear that Peter, and the New Testament generally, uses the principle of submission as a general principle for all human relationships that are God-honoring and Christ-glorifying.)   Submission is contrary to the ethos of our American culture.  Jesus' noble lifestyle was revolutionary, seditious. But let's be sure before we react that we understand clearly what the Bible means when it speaks of submission.

In our language we have two voices, active and passive. "I hit you" and "I am hit by you" mean two very different things.  But in Greek, the language of the New Testament, there is a middle voice. "To submit" is always used in that sense.  It does not mean "absolute obedience.  Submission is what I do to myself: it is a quality of loyalty, commitment. Paul denounces the Sanhedrin when they arrest him^[xvii] but when he discovers his strong language is targeted at the high priest he apologizes because he has submitted to him out of respect for the institution.   Submission could be described as mutual respect between people who are joined together with interconnecting responsibilities.^[xviii]

 Submission is the revolutionary new principle of conducting inter-personal relationships that Christianity introduced.  It cuts across all the humanly constructed barriers of race, gender and class.  Indeed "submission" becomes almost impossible to define until one Person represented it.  Jesus Christ is the Model of submission.  And at the end of chapter 2, from verse 21 through verse 25, Peter holds up Jesus as the Exemplar of submission.   I proceed to that section first because only then can one grasp how we are told to conduct ourselves as citizens, employees and spouses.

"To this you were called": we are to submit because in doing so you and I are walking in the steps of Jesus the crucified, suffering Servant Messiah.  Typically Peter goes back to the Old Testament - specifically Isaiah 53 - to remind us of our Lord's submissiveness.  He begins by quoting verse 9 of that passage and then explores the way in which Jesus was able, throughout all His suffering on that last night and day of His life, to submit to the cruellest of abuse and torture.  He refused to retaliate or threaten.   He left His vindication to the ultimate judgment of God.    And he took on Himself, in that suffering and in His death, all of the wounds of our broken relationships, bringing them healing and wholeness.  As our Shepherd He gathers us up in His arms so that we stray no longer into the bypaths of our own insistence on "rights" and "individualism" and "narcissism".

"The cross is always ready for you and awaits you everywhere," one medieval saint declared.  We are ready now to grasp what Calvary submissiveness means as citizens, as employees (or employers) and as spouses:

I CITIZENS (verses 13 - 17)

We are told to be subject to the civil authority, whether caesar or caesar's representative, the Roman governor.  Now at this point, at (what was likely) the Neronian persecution, these were stupendous words.  Peter speaks in terms of a government as being to restrain crime and wrong-doing and to encourage civic righteousness.  In doing so, implicitly he limits the right of the state to constrain the conscience of the believer.

But his anxiety (as he has stated previously) is to avoid scandal. Christians have been falsely accused of being seditious (verse 15).   Their freedom in Christ is a freedom to live under the discipline and restraint of the civic authority.   Their liberty is not libertinism. Indeed - as Peter summarizes his argument in verse 17 - theirs is a fourfold ascending order of obligation: to "show proper respect to everyone", to love their immediate community of faith, the "brother/sisterhood", to fear God as they honor caesar.

II EMPLOYEES ('SLAVES') (verses 18 - 20)

Those addressed here are described as household servants.  Many (or most) of them would be slaves, subject to all the petty tyrannies that slavery involved.  Here the same two principles apply:

The example of Jesus facing injustice on the way to Calvary is specifically commended. Even when they are "enduring pain" - "struck with a fist" (literally) they are to receive it as Jesus did that last night.  The very word^[xix] reminds them of Christ standing before the high priest as he was sentenced to be crucified.  They are to undergo punishment in His name and as He did. 

The other principle is that in our work we are God watchers not clockwatchers.  We look to God Whose "approval" is our ultimate concern, and who is our ultimate Employer as we seek to glorify Him in the calling which He has given us.

III SPOUSES (chapter 3, verses 1 through 7)

Or as Warren Wiersbe titles this section: Wedlock or deadlock?  Principles applied  in the previous sections now are applied within marriage to three distinct groupings:

(1) a believing wife married to an unbelieving husband (verses 1 and 2) - who were in an extremely vulnerable situation.  They had no rights and were basically the chattels of their husbands.  Easily divorced they could, at the whim of their partner, be thrown out on the streets where their only refuge would be a life of prostitution or the generosity of the Christian community.   In that situation they are to be "submissive" - mutual respect, a commonality of interest.   They  are never to nag, always to give the lie to the scandal that a Christian - like the Bacchanalian rites proscribed by the Roman senate - was out to destroy the fabric of marriage.  

(2) a believing wife married to a believing husband (verses 3 through 6). They are to avoid pandering to their husband's sexual appetites by elaborate hairstyling or haute couture.  Instead their beauty is to be spiritual - "a gentle and quiet spirit".  Marriage is to based not so much on rights but on responsibilities - never a fifty-fifty proposition so much as each partner giving one hundred percent.    Again the Old Testament is cited, specifically the example of Sarah who at one point called Abraham "Lord"^[xx] but at another God told Abraham to "listen to her"^[xxi].

&nbs