When I was in college, I purchased and read a book
titled What Do We Mean When We Say God? It was a short book full of
quotes not from theologians and pastors, but from ordinary religious and
non-religious people about who God was, how they prayed to God, what they
thought of when they thought of him, or her, or it, or them, or whatever. The
answers were all different and most of them were thought-provoking. But of
course the Bible does not give us different answers about what is meant when
the word “God’ is said.
In the reading for this evening, the apostle Peter
explains what he means when he says ‘Blessed be God.’ He does not simply use
the word God, he calls God ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Therefore, we
cannot think of God without Jesus Christ and we cannot think of Jesus without
the Father. Both Jesus and the Father are what Peter means when he says ‘God.’
Peter goes on to say what the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ has done for us. He has given us a new birth into a living
hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In this world the
best we can hope for is to have a rich, healthy, long life surrounded by loved
ones. But we may not have any of these things. Moreover, all of these things
are constantly under threat. We may endure times of war and pandemic and
economic turmoil. Even if we remain free from these things, our life and the
lives of our loved ones will eventually be taken from us. Therefore life lived
only in and for this world is hopeless. It’s not that those who do not believe
in God walk around with what we call a sense of hopelessness, moping all the
time; it’s that if we think about it, without God, our hopes are bounded by
human possibility, the capriciousness of existence, and finally the finite span
of life. These are not living hopes, they are hopes that will eventually die.
But because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead
Easter morning, we have a living hope. There is more to this life than simply
riches, health, and length of days. The living hope is for a life that is lived
in God and a death that is the gateway to eternal life. If God gives us a prosperous,
healthy, stable life, well and good. But we should stop putting our trust and
hope that we will have a rich, successful, prosperous, healthy life and instead
put our central trust and hope in the life that God offers us through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ does a specific
thing by Jesus’ resurrection – gives us a new birth into a living hope. He also
empowers us for this life lived in hope. He gives us the Holy Spirit which comes
from him and Jesus Christ. So when we name God the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, we also name the Holy Spirit they share. This Spirit both protects us
in the faith and empowers us to love him whom we do not see.
We have a living hope – but, as St. Paul reminds us, ‘Who
hopes in what is seen?’ In the world we see only the hope that the world offers,
and the threats to those hopes. We suffer the changes and chances of life and
we also suffer because our hopes are not the same as the hopes of the world. Our
faith in Christ must lead us to make different decisions regarding the lives we
live in this world, and this can divide us from others.
The Spirit must protect us for the salvation being kept
for us, in which we hope and trust. This means we will have a different
attitude towards the political decisions of our times than other people. The patterns
that we see in the world, that we must love our fellow political-traveler and
hate those who oppose us is false. This would be true if the only thing that mattered
were this life. But because our hope is not in this life but is in Jesus, we may
love even those with whom we passionately disagree, and those who have control
of our lives on earth. We also must put partisan feelings aside and act based
upon our best thinking. Christian faith is always political, but it can never
be partisan. Because we listen to God’s commandments, and must obey the
commandment to not bear false witness against our neighbor, we must resist the
urge to label someone as a liar and only motivated by self-interest simply
because she or he is of a different political party. We must think in a
different way than the world.
Moreover, we are often called to lay aside our rights
for the sake of love for others. In this nation we treasure freedoms of which
our ancestors could only dream. But Christians do not hope in political
freedom, but in Christ. The Holy Spirit does not protect freedom, but faith
active in love, which can exist with or without political freedom. Therefore,
when we must, we can lay aside our rights for the sake of the love of others.
This is what the Church has done by suspending worship in the time of the
coronavirus. Out of love for others, we have accepted limits on our freedom. We
can lay aside every freedom, if necessary, except for the freedom to believe in
Jesus Christ.
Why do I speak of such things? Because when we hate and
defame our political opponents and hold our earthly freedoms as the highest
good, we are not putting our hope in what Jesus has done for us, but we are
going back to the dead hopes of the world without God, putting our trust only in
what we can do and accomplish for ourselves. That is to reject joy. Joy comes
from trusting above all in what Jesus has done for us and not the condition of
the world or of our lives. Joy is knowing what Jesus has done for us, and we
can have joy in good and bad times, under justice or injustice, in time of
pestilence and in time of health.
To have joy by the Holy Spirit in God the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ is salvation. This is salvation is salvation from sin, death
and evil. It is forgiveness of sin, victory over death, and also being
liberated on earth from false and evil ways of thinking and acting. It is being
protected for a life that looks at everything not from a human perspective but
from God’s perspective. That is the hope each of us should have on earth, to be
liberated more and more from patterns of false and evil thinking. Orthodox
Archbishop Anthony Bloom once told a story about his father, who was exiled
from Russia when the Communists consolidated power in the 1920s. ‘He said to me
after a holiday, “I worried about you” and I said, “Did you think I had an
accident?” He said, “That would have meant nothing, even if you had been
killed. I thought you had lost your integrity.” This might seem a little harsh,
but isn’t it true? All of us will die, and none of us know the day or the hour.
But to keep one’s faith and therefore one’s integrity is the main thing. That
is the living hope we have, that God saves us to live integrally, to be
integrated into Jesus’ life more and more.
Our first hymn was called Jesus Christ, My Sure
Defense. It tells us of God’s promises and what Jesus has done for us, and
each stanza ends: This shall be my confidence! Put no confidence in the world
without God, in which we find hardship and persecution, pestilence and partisanship,
and the end of all hopes in death. Instead, put your confidence in the one who
has given us a new birth into a living hope, and be possessed of indescribable
and glorious joy. Amen
