1 Peter 1: 3-9
Quick Locator
| Readings | Related Pages | Resources | Information |
|
|
New Resources
Sermon Starters (Easter 2A)(2023)
In his book, Love Within Limits: A Realist’s View of 1 Corinthians 13, Lewis Smedes writes, “What all suffering really comes down to is the experience of anything we want very much not to experience. The key here is the phrase ‘very much.’ To qualify as sufferers, we must want to be rid of something with such passion that it hurts. Suffering is having to endure what we very much want not to endure.”A Living Hope
I once read a Guideposts magazine article written by Ann Curry, the television journalist who regularly appeared on NBC and PBS. Perhaps more than anything else, Curry is known for what she calls “humanitarian reporting,” which she defines as “finding those who are suffering far from the eyes of the world and getting their stories out, making people care about them.” What stuck in my mind were the two examples she gave of that. The first was about a boy who was born with a thumb fused to his hand. The other boys made fun of his birth defect, so he was miserable, but his parents were too poor to afford corrective surgery. A nurse happened to see Curry’s broadcast about the boy and she convinced a surgeon to perform the operation for free. The family invited Curry to the recovery room, where the boy proudly showed her his repaired hand and said, “Thank you.” At that point she writes, “I felt an incredible sense of fulfillment knowing one small thing I did helped make a difference in someone else’s life.” She also shared a story from the war-torn Congo, where she says, “The fighting and war crimes against civilians challenge every definition of decency. […] Yet even in this place of suffering, it is possible to find hope.” Then she describes a hospital meeting with an 8-year-old young woman named Sifa. Sifa’s parents were killed in front of her. She tried to run away from the murderers, but they caught her, chained her to a tree and then raped her. As a result, she became pregnant with the baby of one of her assailants. She carried that baby to term, but the combination of all those events was both physically damaging and emotionally devastating. As they talked in Sifa’s hospital room, Curry asked her, “Do you want revenge?” She replied, “No, all I want is to rise from this bed, thank the people who helped me and work for God.” Personally, I found that to be an incredibly powerful statement of hope in the face of overwhelming circumstances...
Resources from 2020 to 2022
Sermon Starters (Easter Sunday 2A)(2020)
On its website, the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation calls itself “an independent agency created by the Congress to maintain stability and public confidence in the nation’s financial system by insuring deposits …” The FDIC does that by, among other things, examining and supervising American financial institutions. Its website even boasts, “Since 1933, no depositor has lost a penny of FDIC-insured funds.” So material inheritances that come out of insured financial institutions are at least reasonably secure. But, of course, the same can’t be said for other material investments. It’s not just that recent events have battered worldwide financial markets. It’s also that, as experts repeatedly remind us, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” So financial advisers encourage investors to make good investing decisions based not on recent “scorecards,” but on sound strategies. Compare that to God’s beloved children’s heavenly inheritance. God’s past performance is one guarantee of God’s future “results.” God graciously insures our heavenly inheritance.
Resources from 2017 to 2019
Easter 2A (2017)
In one of the Narnia stories, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy finds herself in a spooky old house. She is a bit afraid but is exploring her surroundings nonetheless. At one point she finds a very old book. She opens it and finds one page that was blank except for some words at the top under the heading of “A spell to make invisible things visible.” She was not so sure she ought to try it but she does. Moments later she can hear someone coming up behind her and she turns around only to see her beloved Lion, Aslan, coming up behind her. “Oh, Aslan, it was kind of you to come” Lucy says. But Aslan had not come from anywhere. “I have been here all the time but you have made me visible” Aslan assures her...Easter 2A (2017)
In the film Boycott, about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King Jr. and local civil rights leader E. D. Nixon are standing outside Nixon’s house as it burns to the ground. Nixon knows that white supremacists are behind the arson, but he also seems to know that they will go unpunished. Adding fuel to the fire, the fire department has arrived at the burning house, but the white firefighters elect simply to lean against their trucks and look on while it burns. King arrives and stands beside Nixon, both of them helpless as the house goes up in flames. Nixon asks King how he can stick to his nonviolent principles—or if he even should—as he and his family are physically threatened and attacked by the powers opposing them. King doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, speaking slowly as though it pains him to do so, he quotes from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 39: “But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved” (NIV).
Resources from 2014 to 2016
Resources from 2011 to 2013
For Those Who Will Believe
I think it’s interesting that Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, thought a great deal of the passage we are sharing today. Throughout his long life as a pastor and professor of systematic theology, he labored continuously on a multi-volume work called Church Dogmatics, which takes up about 2 feet of space on my bookshelf at home. In the very last volume of that faithful, immense life’s work of thousands and thousands of pages – a volume called a “fragment” because it ended abruptly, unfinished, when he died – Dr. Barth took up I Peter 1 for the last time in the final few pages. Here is a portion of what he wrote: “According to I Peter 1:3 Christians ... are those who through the overflowing mercy of God ... are in his resurrection from the dead, begotten to a new and living hope... “... The object and content of this hope is the same Jesus Christ who in his resurrection from the dead is its basis ... [This hope] protects them against disenchantment by constantly and clearly differentiating itself from all else that [people] might wait and hope for, all their great little utopias.”...Seeing Jesus
I’m currently reading a book by Frank Schaeffer, who was a fundamentalist evangelist but who has grown into what I’m calling “Christian skepticism." The title of the book is Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion {or Atheism}. In the prologue to this book Schaeffer writes This is a book for those of us who have faith in God the same way we might have the flu, less a choice than a state of being in spite of doubt… this book is for those of us who are stuck feeling that there is more to life than meets the eye… If an angel showed up outside my office window and explained “everything” to me, I’d simultaneously question my sanity, be scared as hell, and feel mightily relieved, because believing in invisible things is tough...
Resources from the Archives
Go Claim Your Inheritance
I was born back here in these mountains. My mother was not married. And the reproach that fell upon her, fell upon me. The children at school had a name for me and it hurt, and it hurt very much. During recess I would go hide in the weeds until the bell rang. At lunchtime I took my lunch and went behind a tree to avoid them. When I went to town with my mother, when the men and women would stare at her and then at me, I knew they were trying to guess who I was. A painful time. About seventh or eighth grade, I guess I was in the seventh or eighth grade and I started to go hear a preacher. He frightened me in a way and he attracted me in a way. He wore a claw-hammer tailcoat, striped trousers and had a face that looked like it had been quarried out of the mountain. He thundered! I was afraid people would say, 'What's a boy like you doing in church?' So I just went in time for the sermon and then I'd rush out. One Sunday, however, some women had cued up in the aisle and I couldn't get out and I began to sweat and get cold and sweaty and wondered, Oh, oh, somebody's going to say to me, 'What's a boy like you doing in church?' And I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that beard and saw that face. 'Oh, boy!' That minister stared at me and looked at me and stared at me, and I thought, 'Oh, no! Oh, no! He's gonna guess.' He said, 'Well boy, you're a child of ah… You're a child of ah…. Ah, wait.' And the preacher said, 'You're a child of God. I see a strikin' resemblance! He swatted me on the bottom and said, 'Go claim your inheritance, boy!'"...