Peter is one of my favorite Bible characters. He’s the one who always opens his mouth before his brain has switched into gear and that’s a failing I have a lot of sympathy with.
Remember when the disciples were alone on the boat out in the middle of the Sea of Galilee and they saw Jesus walking toward them on the water? Matthew tells us that they were “scared out of their wits. ‘A ghost!’ they said, crying out in terror. But Jesus comforted them, ‘Courage, it’s me. Don’t be afraid.’ Peter, suddenly bold, said, ‘Master, if it’s really you, call me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come ahead.’ Jumping out of the boat, Peter walked on the water to Jesus. But when he looked down at the waves churning beneath his feet, he lost his nerve and started to sink. ‘Master, save me!’” [Mat 14:26-30] He meant well, but he couldn’t follow through.
Not too long after that, Jesus asks his disciples that crucial question, “Who do you say I am?” And again it’s stout-hearted, clear-sighted, self-confident Peter who answers “him, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” [Mat 16:16] This is, of course, as we find out as the plot unfolds, exactly the right answer. And Peter could have left it right there and basked in Jesus’ approval... That’s where Jesus says, “God bless you, Simon Son of Jonah! You got that answer straight from God! You are Peter the rock, and this is the rock I will build my church on...” [Mat 16:17-18] But no, Peter - being Peter - has to keep on going. When Jesus starts explaining to Peter what being the Messiah, the Anointed One, really means, what with sacrifice and all that unpleasant stuff, Peter doesn’t like it. Peter tries to argue with Jesus. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” [Mat 16:22] And that’s the end of his moment of glory. From one minute to the next Peter goes straight from being the recipient of Jesus’ approval to being the target of some pretty fierce criticism. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” [Mat 16:23]
The gospels are full of Peter’s well-meaning blunders, and we really don’t have time to list them all, from not wanting to have his feet washed to falling asleep in the garden of Gethsemane to reaching for his sword when the guards arrest Jesus. But the one we all remember most clearly, and which Peter no doubt remembered and regretted bitterly for the rest of his life, are his three-fold denials while Jesus was on trial for his life. Only the previous evening he had sworn undying loyalty. “Even if everyone else falls to pieces on account of you, I won’t,” he had said. And when Jesus doubted his fervent protestations, he repeated himself: “Even if I had to die with you, I would never deny you.”
And yet he did.
All [the time Jesus was before the high priests] Peter was sitting out in the courtyard. One servant girl came up to him and said, “You were with Jesus the Galilean.” In front of everybody there he denied it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” As he moved over to the gate, someone else said to the people there, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.” And again he denied it, saying “I swear, don’t know the man.” Shortly after that some bystanders approached Peter, “You’ve got to be one of them; your accent gives you away.” Then he got really nervous and swore, “I don’t know the man.” Just then a rooster crowed. And Peter remembered what Jesus had said: “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly. [Mat 26:69-75]
Our hero. Simon Peter, the crumbling rock. That’s the man who wrote the letter we’re looking at today. He’s a man who knew about fear, and about failure. He knew the shame of broken promises. And he knew, better than anyone else, how the hearts of his people would quail when the pressures around them rose. And I suspect they knew he knew. They could listen to him, because he understood. But he also knew, better than anyone else, that not only would Jesus forgive their faintheartedness, he would also give them the courage to last through the night.
Let me explain what was going on. Peter was writing to a whole constellation of little churches in what is now Turkey, broken up into five Roman provinces. After Rome finally took over the area, after fighting over it for generations, one of the ways they brought it under the Roman cultural umbrella was by settling retired Roman soldiers on the land. There were great trading centers like Ephesus and Smyrna on the coast, and little towns in the interior like Lystra and Derbe. So there were long-time residents living next door to first-generation immigrants from all over the empire, from Scotland to Ethiopia, all worshiping gods as diverse as their languages and customs. And you know how it is when lots of different people groups with lots of different customs try to occupy the same space.
Ethnic strife doesn’t always look like Serbia. Or Syria. If you look back on America’s own history, you’ll remember that each wave of immigration throughout our history brought a new group of people to look down on. There are still O’Tooles and O’Malley’s in Boston and New York whose grandparents saw signs saying, “No Irish need apply.” Later the Poles and Italians got the same treatment; do you remember Polack jokes? Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics are struggling with the same phenomenon today. During World War I German citizens changed their names for fear of mob violence, and during the second one - well, we’re still recovering from the shame of what was done to the Japanese.
There is something in us all, every human society everywhere, that needs an underclass to look down upon. And it’s usually the ones who look the most different, the ones who haven’t been absorbed into the local culture. But there is nothing so apt to attract the wrong kind of attention as being a group that just doesn’t want to fit in.
Peter addresses his letter to people who don’t fit in. In the first place he calls them exiles, they may even be refugees. And that makes sense, because Christianity attracts people who are suffering dislocation and uncertainty, when the normal course of their lives isn’t working and they are looking for some way to make sense out of it all. Some of them might have been Jews when they first heard the Gospel, but probably most were originally Gentiles, perhaps the ones called “god-fearers” who hung around the synagogues, learning about the Hebrew God and the law.
They didn’t belong. They didn’t belong anywhere. They didn’t have local family and friends and organizations. Few - if any - had the resources to buy acceptance into local society. They couldn’t seek refuge in the synagogues; the worldwide Jewish network didn’t support this new movement. They couldn’t join the local organizations, laborers guilds or funeral societies, because they were all organized one god or another. And as Paul found out on more than one occasion, the local deities and their worshipers - not to mention the people who made their living hawking religious supplies - resented the exclusive demands of this new God, realizing perhaps what the Christians themselves did not realize at the time: “There ain’t room enough in this town for the both of us.” And to cap off the whole volcanic mess, Peter was writing shortly after Nero had become emperor. Like several other emperors after him, Nero found it convenient to blame the Christians for everything from the tight job market to riots in the streets.
They weren’t the targets, yet, of much official attention. But from their neighbors they could expect anything from housing discrimination to random violence. Because they didn’t belong.
Some people think that this 2000-year-old situation is so different from ours that Peter has nothing to say to us. But is our situation really all that different? Although we Christians are not yet a minority, at least in this country, we live in a multi-cultural, multi-religious society. Gods of all kinds abound, and it is in the interest of every competing deity to diminish the authority of Jesus and the validity of Scripture.
These are challenging times. We are not yet, as a rule, called to actual suffering, but we are certainly called to a certain level of discomfort. And so I think that Peter’s letters are applicable to us as well.
Paul tells us in Romans that Christians should “boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us." [Rom 5:3-5] Paul and now Peter are both talking about the formation of Christian character. And they are both talking about a Christian character that is founded upon a “sure and certain hope.” Peter starts with hope, and Paul ends with hope, but both rest on it. And remember that Biblical hope is not wishful thinking, something that might or might not come about. Biblical hope is a certain outcome that just hasn’t happened yet. Our hope is based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, to which we witness during this season. Paul tells us to boast, and Peter tells us to rejoice. There must be something to this.
Now, Paul tells us to boast in our sufferings, and Peter tells us to rejoice even though we are suffering what he calls “various trials.” There is a difference there. But I don’t think it’s a very big one. Because Peter goes on to say a number of very important things about those sufferings:
First, they are temporary. It may feel sometimes as though they’ll never end, but they will. Second, God protects us always, even when we may not be aware of it, and find ourselves tempted to wonder if God might not have forgotten us. And thirdly, they have a purpose. Peter tells his readers,
“You have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith-- being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire-- may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” [1Pet 1:6-7]
The churches in these persecuted countries grew by leaps and bounds because their faith was being refined from the raw ore into the real thing. From little glittery specks that can hardly be seen for all the gravel and sand they are mixed with, a 24-carat faith was forged in the heat of their trials, a faith that could not be hidden. It shone with an unmistakable pure gleam that threatened the rulers of the world, and eventually overcame them. The same thing is happening in countries around the world today, countries where Christianity is prohibited and Christians attacked. They know what Peter and Paul were talking about, and prove in their lives that these words are still truth. And some here, in what used to be comfortable, tolerant America, are displaying that same kind of hard-earned faith.
Does this mean we should actively pursue suffering? I don’t think so.
I watched an old black and white movie last weekend, The Song of Bernadette starring Jennifer Jones. It’s the story of the French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous who saw the Virgin Mary at the local dump. The spring that she dug there has since become the shrine of Lourdes, a center of pilgrimages for healing to this day. Anyway, one of the subplots in the movie was the jealousy of an older nun who had suffered all her life, deliberately seeking hardship because she believed with all her heart that only through suffering could she come to know God. She got it backwards. She should have sought God first, and simply endured the suffering if it should come. Because not all suffering leads to God.
This letter is not written to comfort those who are suffering the ordinary “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” This isn’t about failing an exam or having an unpleasant boss or even about getting an audit notice from the IRS. Everybody suffers those things. There’s really not much one can do to avoid them beyond exercising ordinary prudence and good judgment. So, although we are called to respond to these trials in a Christian way, that is to say with love, patience, etc., we have to recognize that we are not suffering because of our faith. It is also important to realize that having people make fun of you for being a prude or narrow-minded is also not what Peter is talking about. But sometimes standing up for what is right, for Jesus' name, for God's word, can bring painful, real world consequences. It is all too easy to avoid that kind of suffering simply by hiding it, by not taking a stand, by going along with the crowd.
Peter knew all about that. When he was afraid for his life, he denied Christ.
There is one environment in the Western world where you can be sure to find active discrimination against God-fearing Bible-believing Christians, and that is on college and university campuses. Students strongly committed to living their faith will more often than not find themselves socially and intellectually excluded. They will find their moral standards ridiculed, even attacked. They may be branded as anything from dinosaurs to hate-mongers. The reason for that is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a threat to the intellectual establishment. And the temptation to keep a low profile or even compromise in order to gain acceptance is very strong indeed. Some observers believe that even Christian colleges and seminaries are compromising on core beliefs in order to gain acceptance by the secular intellectual establishment.
One of the commentators that I read as I was preparing this sermon believes that our lack of suffering as a church is due to a lack of nerve on our part to challenge our contemporary world. But I think that is beginning to change.
Peter knew all about lack of nerve. And that is why he urges his readers not to let the world push them away from their primary allegiance to Jesus Christ, because it is only as we focus on him, on what he has done for us already, and what he has prepared that awaits us at the end, that we can endure.
Suffering for the Gospel is not a gift granted to every one of us. And suffering is not the goal anyway. God can refine our faith so that it shines like the sun in any circumstance he chooses. No, we don’t have to suffer for our faith. But we do have to live for it. Paul says in his 2nd letter to Timothy, “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” If we never grate against a sinful world, how true to Christ are we being? The contrast between a holy Christian life and the permissive, anything goes stance of our world ought to generate sparks. It’s beginning to, in some quarters. In our world, where every minority has its own “anti-defamation league,” only evangelical Christians are fair game. And since all cultures everywhere seem to need an easily recognizable class of villains to boo as soon as they come on stage, it looks like it’s our turn again. Maybe not as bad, yet, as it was in Peter’s day. But some of us are beginning to get a glimpse of what being a social outcast feels like.
If you’re out in the world rubbing shoulders with common or garden variety pagans on any sort of regular basis, when’s the last time there was a clash? When was the last time you had occasion to speak out, or stand up for truth, or righteousness, or purity? Or have you ducked or backed away or simply not known how to answer?
You don’t have to suffer to shine. But you do have to stand up.
