I guess, I shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus believers have gotten it wrong in ways way
worse than Q-anon folks, who after all think they’re protecting vulnerable kids.
Do you remember from history who
criticized Dr. King when he got sent to jail in Birmingham? Church leaders did. They got upset at his
disturbing the peace of their fair city. And during
the 1930s, lots of church folks supported the Nazi party too, supported it gaining
power even.
And, gosh, I don’t want to think about the
countless Christians who worshipped on Sunday (some even preached), and then
brutally beat people they owned on
Monday. And Christians did that for
hundreds of years! And I still haven’t
talked about the sex abuse scandals or how the church mistreated women or
excluded gay, lesbian and trans folks.
It’s a mess.
But here’s the strange thing. That’s not
the whole story. That’s not the whole
story at all. Right now, lots of Jesus believers are standing strong against
the lies of the conspiracies. They are
standing up too, often at great cost, for those who have been abused by the
church, and the church itself is facing those wrongs and working to heal the
wounds of those it has hurt.
And of course, thousands of Christians
stood and marched with Dr. King, who after all was a fellow believer. And millions
of Christians have given their lives to stand against not only Nazi Germany but
so many other brutal and oppressive governments from Russia to China to South
Africa to El Salvador to Argentina. The list could go on and on. Christians
led the fight to end slavery, and slaves themselves found in the Gospel a message
of hope and liberation, even power. You
go to any God forsaken place in our world, you’ll find Jesus people there
serving and loving, healing and helping.
Heck Christians invented hospitals and orphanages. Before Christianity, they didn’t exist. Christians opened schools that changed, in
wondrous ways, the lives of millions. In
Christianity, from the beginning, innumerable women took leadership and found
fulfillment and empowerment in the message of the gospel. In fact, you could argue that no other religious movement has brought more significant and positive change to the
world than Christianity. Yet at the
same time, Christians have, again and again, gotten it so tragically,
horrifically wrong.
So, what makes the difference? How can the gospel transform folks in such
beautiful ways, lead them to inspiring and joyful lives of love and mercy, and
on the other hand, lead others in the opposite direction? More
crucially, how can the gospel transform you towards such a life of joy and love
rather than trapping you in a life not like that at all. In these words, God shows you the way. Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.
So, how does it happen? How can the gospel bring such powerfully
positive, even revolutionary change in people’s lives and the world at large,
yet at the same time lead others to bring suffering and pain to others, often
in terrible, even horrific ways? In these words, God shows you. For the gospel only grows one way. The gospel has to grow from the inside out. And
anything else not only doesn’t lead to the gospel, but often leads to its
opposite.
Right at the beginning of this passage, Peter gives
you the key essence of the gospel. If this isn’t here, if this isn’t growing
inside you, then, you might have something but it’s not the gospel. What does the truth of the gospel generate in
you? It generates genuine love, a love
that goes beyond romance or friendship. No,
this love goes to a level of commitment, of caring, of self-forgetfulness that
is breathtaking in its scope. It’s why Christians took a rarely used Greek
word for love, agape, that carried this meaning and made it the centerpiece of
everything they believed. Paul even
said, if you don’t have this love, you don’t have squat.
It’s
why the contemporary Christian writer Mark Yaconelli gave this advice. He wrote:
Anything
that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other
people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow
the Rule of Love – and you should stop doing it.
And that is awesome
advice, if you can do it. But of course,
no one can. And Yaconelli knows that.
No, he is assuming something. He
is assuming that the folks to whom he gave that advice have had something
happen inside them, something that enables them to live out this rule of
love. Peter
assumes the same thing. He even points to what it is. He says to them. Don’t you remember? God
has literally reconceived you. He even uses a version of the same word that
means to conceive a child. In other words, God has conceived you again
with God’s own seed. God has come inside
you and made you something radically and wonderfully new.
Now how does this seed
come? It comes through what I’m doing
right now, through sharing this message.
You see I’d love to tell you that what I end up sharing here comes from
all my hard work, but it doesn’t. Now
don’t get me wrong. I do stuff.
I study. I reflect. I pray. But
in the end, I’m always surprised at what comes out.
It’s like I’m in a
kitchen, and God is leading me to all the ingredients. All I do is mix it and put it in the oven. And, voila, this beautiful gospel comes
out. Now, I’ve still gotta be in the
kitchen. I’ve got to listen for all the
ingredients. I’ve got to mix it
together. But in the end, it’s always,
always God. Oh, but there is something I’ve
gotta know always. I’ve gotta know what the
gospel tastes like. And the only way I can
know that is if I’ve tasted it before. I’ve had to have the experience of it
changing my life.
But God did that too. That
change that the gospel did in me, I didn’t do anything. God did. God does that for everyone. Think about it. Nobody conceives themselves. Nobody decides to be born. That happens to
you. It happens inside you. You have no control over that at all. Now this spiritual conception can happen
instantaneously or gradually or something in between. But however it happens, you’re not in
control. It is happening to you. And
human beings don’t like that. We don’t
like not being in control.
So instead, lots of folks
opt for the in-control plan. They do try
to conceive themselves. How do they do
that? They create all sorts of rules and
guidelines to live in love. It’s like
they create a gospel mask to wear but it doesn’t work. Nothing has changed on the inside. So, it’s not real. It’s fake.
And lots of folks can tell it’s not
real. Those who can’t are usually wearing the mask
too. And the mask-wearers might even convince
themselves, it’s the real deal. But it’s
not. And deep down, they know. They know nothing has changed on the
inside. Underneath the mask lies more
fear than ever. So, their mask doesn’t
lead them into love. It leads them into
rigidity and fear, into self-righteousness and judgment, into the very opposite
of the gospel. And Christianity has been infected by this
fake gospel again and again, so much so that many have been tricked into
believing it is the real thing.
But does that explain all
the mess that Christianity has caused?
Boy, wouldn’t that be easy. All
those bad people, they weren’t really Christians. But, here’s the problem, some of them, maybe
even a decent number of them, had experienced the gospel. God had changed them. So, what happened? Well, two things happened.
When, God reconceives
you, it doesn’t stop there. God doesn’t
wave some magic gospel dust over you and voila, you become Jesus the sequel,
this perfect, loving being. No, like
any newly conceived and eventually newly born being, you’ve got to grow into
who God has conceived you to be. And
that is a process, and like any growth process, it’s a messy one.
I remember hearing about this
dinner party that the famous Catholic writer, Evelyn Waugh attended. And as the evening went on, Waugh’s brilliant
wit got to be pretty cruel. And the
hostess appalled, asked how such cruelty could come from this avowedly catholic
Christian mouth. And Waugh replied. “You
have no idea how much worse I’d be, if I wasn’t Catholic.”
We’ve all got our stuff
that God is working on. We’re all works
in progress. But does that excuse it? Does that excuse all the pain and brokenness
we’ve brought to others? No, God
requires more. And Peter points to
it. He tells them. Now, that God has reconceived you, you have
work to do. You have to get rid of all the guile, malice, all
the crap that lives inside you. You have
to grow up, and that requires work.
I mean, when you were a
kid, you were a bit of a mess. We all
were, even the best of us. Do you
remember how one moment you could be so full of joy, and the next moment be
devastated? You’d get an ice cream cone,
and it was the best day ever. Then you
dropped the cone, and it was the worst day ever. Nothing could console
you. No ice cream, no matter how good
could equal the one now fallen, melting on the sidewalk.
Or do you remember how
people had to teach you not to interrupt?
Why? You couldn’t conceive how
anything could be more important than what you had to say. It was all about you, and when you found out
it wasn’t, you were upset. And boy do
kids struggle with listening! They get
distracted so easily, especially if it’s something they don’t want to do or where
they might fail. And kids, well, they
often don’t think things through.
When my parents moved
from the house we grew up in, there were still scorch marks on the carpet in
the downstairs bathroom. How did they get there? I wanted to see what would happen if I threw
pieces of toilet paper in the space heater.
It turns out I didn’t really
think that through.
And kids to move past all
that have to grow, need to mature. And
when God reconceives you, it requires a sort of growing up. You
have to move towards resting in the love rather than getting caught up in the
fear. You have to move from a sort of
spiritual narcissism to a place where you don’t think less of yourself. But you do grow into the freedom of thinking
of yourself a lot less. And you learn to start listening to the God
who is speaking to you all the time.
Prayer and silence, other spiritual practices help with that. But to grow, to grow past all the fear and
self-defending that holds us back, God here tells us we must do more. We must rigorously, boldly let God lead us to
think things through.
Tragically, when
Christians don’t do this, we miss so much of what God is trying to tell
us. For years, I never really thought through
about how God could send people to hell forever and still be a God of
love. And when other Christians in their writing challenged
me to think that through. I realized. The Bible doesn’t say hell is forever at
all. When Christians saw Africans
enslaved and thought that through, they realized how evil slavery was. It’s why the great abolitionist, Fredrick
Douglass, as a slave became a Christian because he saw that his owners were
blind to the very liberation the gospel proclaimed. He thought it through even if they didn’t.
But too often, we don’t
do this enough. Heck, we didn’t do it
with this passage. Most translations of
those last verses we read, translate Peter’s words as “long for the pure
spiritual milk so that by it, you may grow into salvation.” But that’s not what it says. It says instead, “long for the pure milk of “logikos,”
where we get the word logic in English.
But most translators thought he couldn’t mean that. But he did.
Peter knew the word for spiritual in Greek, but he chose not to use
it. Why?
He wanted us to think things through, to ponder the height and breadth
and depth of the gospel, of God’s incredible love for us. Peter knows that’s how you grow. And as you grow like that, God becomes
bigger, more wondrous, more beautiful than ever before.
What do I mean? Well, let’s do a little pondering with a reflection
on God called the “Analogia Entis.” That’s just Latin for analogy of being, but it
just sounds so much prettier in Latin – analogia entis. Now
when you use an analogy, you are taking something everyone understands to describe
something that may not be so easy to understand. Remember Forest Gump? Life is like a box of chocolates - you never know what
you're gonna get. That’s an analogy.
Peter uses an analogy right
here when he talks about longing for the pure spiritual milk. He is saying crave knowing God as deeply as a
baby hungers for her mother’s breast milk. By the way, the Bible clearly has no problems
thinking of God as a nursing mother. If
you’re uncomfortable with feminine images of God, think that through a
bit.
So, the analogy of being
tries to figure out why everything that exists, well, exists. Why is anything here at all? So how does it happen? It’s all a gift. Everything
that exists come as a gift, constantly flowing from the source of everything. And Jesus comes as the ultimate expression of
that gift. Think that through for a
moment. Everything that exists in every
moment exists as an outpouring of God’s love into the world, a gift God yearns
for you to receive. Everything around
you, in you, is a gift, even your very breath.
Drink that in. Think it through. See
how it grows how you see God, how you see yourself, how you see everything and
everyone, how everything gives us a glimpse of the indescribable beauty and
wonder that is God, a God who even gave his life as a gift of love to you. And as
you do, as you think that through and so much more, it will grow you more and
more into salvation, into becoming the beloved mature child of God, God created
you to be. So, pray it through. Think it through. Taste God’s love. Let it nourish you. Let it grow you into salvation.
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