The Risk of Sounding Odd

Peter thinks Easter makes us capable of much more than we give ourselves credit

“You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.”

— 1 Peter 1.17-23

Several months into the covid-19 pandemic, the historian Tom Holland wrote an op-ed for the British newspaper, The Telegraph, entitled, “Church leaders should not be talking like middle managers in this time of crisis.”

Though Holland’s most recent book, Dominion, is about how the Christian revolution remade the world, he’s reluctant to describe himself as more than a cultural Christian. While Holland is reticent about what he himself believes, he’s clear about what he thinks the Church should believe and profess— especially during a pandemic.

Holland notes how the Christian confession of God taking on the flesh of a poor, crucified carpenter so transformed the ancient world’s attitude toward the poor and the weak, imbuing with divine image-bearing dignity and worth, it gave rise to hospitals, nursing, and medical care as we know them today. Prior to the Gospel, Roman hospitals had existed solely to segregate slaves and soldiers in their sickness. In Christendom, however, no longer was the compassion of doctors and nurses a privilege of the affluent. “The National Health Service has its roots sunk deep into Christian soil,” Holland writes in The Telegraph:

“Nevertheless, there is a paradox. Over the course of the millennia, the Church’s teachings on the obligation of the rich and healthy to care for the poor and sick have proven so successful that they no longer depend on the Church itself. Its ancient sense of mission – to care for the vulnerable and the weak – has been largely subsumed within the welfare state.”

Like many aspects of our calling, the unique vocation once performed by ordinary Christians— in this case, caring for the victims of plagues— has been outsourced.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas often jokes that you need only look at the architecture of Duke Medical School to know that, even for Christians, doctors are now our new priests. After all, hardly any churchgoer any longer believes an inadequately trained pastor could jeopardize their salvation, but they do think an inadequately trained physician could kill them.

Holland echoes the point in his op-ed, “The National Health System is now the object of our reverence."

But that hospitals are our new cathedrals does not mean the Church is redundant. At least, it shouldn’t be:

“The welfare state can provide care for the sick, but it cannot provide what Christianity, over the course of the past 2,000 years, has provided to so many countless people, and to such transformational effect.”

Therefore, by rights, the sweep of coronavirus should have presented Christian leaders with an opportunity. However this opportunity, Holland argued in his op-ed, was one that “all the mainstream churches seemed to be fumbling.”

Preachers and church leaders, in Holland’s judgment, sound more like the Public Health Department. Rather than the promises of providence and resurrection, the Church too often doles out reminders about hand-washing and bending the curve. If ever there were a time for the churches to speaking to a grieving and anxious people of “how the dead will rise into the blaze of eternal life, a time of global pandemic would surely seem to be it.”

“Parroting the slogans of the Department of Health and Social Care may conceivably help save lives,” Holland writes, “but it seems unlikely to win many souls.”

It is not the care of souls.

That is, it is not the peculiar work to which we have been elected.

We uniquely exist to proclaim a particular word— the word beyond the last word, the word which Peter proclaims in the lectionary epistle for the Third Sunday of Eastertide: “You have been begotten anew through the living and abiding Word of God, Jesus Christ.”

The apostle Peter’s epistle is an extended exhortation— a summons for the Church to take up, dwell in, and live out its identity as those elected by God in Jesus Christ, chosen to bear witness to the Risen Lord’s cruciform way in the world. Now, keep in mind, the apostle Peter wrote to his scattered churches during the imperial reign of Nero, a Caesar whose cruelty towards Christians earned him a numeric nickname by St. John, 666.

Needless to say, those Christians addressed by Peter lived during a time when the temptation was ever present to dilute their particular and peculiar calling. Peter would not feel compelled to exhort believers to hold fast to their vocation to embody the New Age inaugurated by cross and resurrection if some believers were not at risk of letting go of it.

Let’s face it, it’s always easier for us to demote King Jesus to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs, blend into the empire, salute the flag, conform to the crowd, and live like everyone else— but especially so in Peter’s day.

Nero sewed Christians in hides and set dogs on them.

Given the bewildering degree of suffering and persecution his churches endured, it’s remarkable the rhetorical tone that Peter the Preacher strikes in this epistle. Peter the Preacher never attempts no anodyne Hallmark card comfort. Peter the Preacher seems shockingly indifferent about indulging the questions of theodicy his listeners were surely asking. Why have such sufferings been visited on us?

Nero wrapped Christians in wax and struck a match to them.

And what does Peter the Preacher give them? Not platitudes about the victorious life.  Not three tips to triumph in your hardships. Not even pastoral care.

No, Peter’s message to his suffering people— it’s almost all exhortation.

Evidently, Peter thinks Easter makes us capable of much more than we give ourselves credit.

Get your head on straight. Fix your mind on the Kingdom drawing near. Be sober. Live as children of obedience. Put away all malice and guile and envy and slander and insincerity. Husbands and wives, submit to one another as Christ. When you’re around unbelievers, don’t let behavior screw up your message. Pray for the president you loathe.

Be holy.

In every realm of your life, be holy because you have been begotten anew by Jesus Christ who is the living and abiding Word of God.

You have been begotten anew.

The Gospel undergirds the exhortation.

The promise precedes the commands.

The logic is critical:

• In Jesus Christ, God has begotten us anew.

• Therefore, love your brothers and sisters.

• Therefore, live lives that corroborate your confession.

• Therefore, conform the community to the Lord’s commands.

Look people, I know you’re suffering, Peter means to say, but apart from the grace of God in Jesus Christ PERISHABLE is the last word stamped on every one of us. “All flesh is like grass,” Peter writes, quoting the prophet Isaiah, “all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the Word of the Lord— that is, Jesus Christ— endures forever.” And you have been born anew into him.

We all come into this world with an expiration date. Keith Richards notwithstanding, none of us is getting out of life alive, Peter says. PERISHABLE is the last grim word for every one of us.

Nevertheless!

In Jesus Christ, we have received a word beyond that last word. With verse twenty-three, the Apostle Peter returns to a theme he already introduced in verse three, being begotten anew.  And just so you don’t mistake this for another of Peter’s exhortations, just so you don’t mistakenly think getting born again is something you got to get up and do, Peter puts it in the passive participial form.

Having been begotten anew.

It refers to a prior act of God upon you.

You’ve probably seen the Romans Road Salvation Plan diagramed in the evangelical tracts. On the left, there’s usually a stick figure representing all of unbelieving humankind. Often beneath the stick figure it will say something like, “Our Problem,” and list Sin and Death along with the relevant verses. On the right side of the diagram, meanwhile, is typically a triangle for God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And between the two sides stands a steep, unsurpassable chasm. The more enthusiastic versions of this illustration put spitting tongues of hellfire at the bottom of the ditch.

The takeaway is simple, right?

A gulf separates humanity from God, a divide we could never hope to cross on our own. Fortunately, the cross of Christ spans the breach, bridging the distance from the human situation to God. If we wish to cross over, if we want to change our situation from sin and its fatal wages to fellowship and union with God, then we’ve got walk from one side to other by means of the cross. That is, we’ve got to repent and believe. We’ve got to have faith. We’ve got to be born again. Despite its staying power, there’s a number of problems with the image not the least of which is that this is not how Peter, or Paul for that matter, speak of our having been begotten anew.

The good news of the Gospel is impossibly better!

Jesus Christ has done more than provide you the means to cross over to the other side. The glad tidings of the Gospel are that Jesus Christ has taken you into himself and carried you. No matter who is listening to this, right now— whomever you are, you’re already on the other side.

You’re home free.

You’re safe in Jesus Christ.

All of us, every last one of us, whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or perceive it or not, we are already on the other side.

We have all been conceived anew by the Word, begotten again by the work of the living and abiding Word.

As the apostle Paul puts it to the Corinthians, “One has died for all; therefore all have died.”

Think about that— “One has died for all; therefore all have died.”

That’s a non sequitur.