The Weight of God's Love

This morning we came to this wonderful passage from 1 Peter in which he reminds us that time and history belong to God. “If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.”

Peter reminds his people that their time now is one of exile but that world history is framed by God’s redemptive plan, for Jesus was destined before the foundation of the world and is now, at the end of the ages, revealed for the sake of those living in exile. This is Peter’s way of saying to his people and to us that if we really want to know what time it is we are to look not just at our watch or calendar but at God’s redemptive work in the world. The events of history, whether our personal history, or world history find meaning and hope in their relationship to Jesus’ promise to redeem. In Jesus, God has written a story into the fabric of this fallen world that is from the pattern of the world to come; the threads of that story will mend and repair all of what is now torn, tattered and frayed. It is the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the story of what God is doing in the world is the story that can make sense of our lives, the story that can give us hope, the story that replaces futility with meaning, the story that leads us to human flourishing. The resurrection of Jesus has marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of the world to come (as Paul puts it: “if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, everything old has passed away, see everything has been made new”). So if you really want to know what time it is don’t just look at your watch, look at Jesus.

Similarly, Peter teaches us in this passage that if we want to know how much our life is worth, we should look at the cross (you were ransomed not with perishable things but with Jesus’ own life). What Peter is saying to you is this: God has shown you how much he loves you in the self-giving love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ and this is to remind you of the precious worth that you and all human beings have in God’s sight. The challenge right beneath the surface of what Peter is saying is this: live into that worth! To be sure, there is sober language here (reverent fear, and language of judgment) but this gravitas is not to make you feel like you are living under a cloud of God’s disfavor; it is rather to get you and I to be jolted out of the sort of complacency that can put us at ease with a life that is less than what God intends for human beings and less than what he has designed us for. As we come to the communion table, is it time for you or I to have a moment of epiphany with regard to what is animating us in our lives? Do we live as though God has ransomed our lives with the life of his son, or do we live as though our life is our own to manage according to our own selfish desires, hedonistic impulses, or whims? Have we determined to have a recreational view of sex at the expense of the sort of relationships that reflect God’s love for human beings.... has our approach to building wealth for the future made us immune to the needs of those around us who have less than we do.... has the hurt we have experienced from the cruelness of others caused us to withhold love and forgiveness from those people and from others too? God wants us to remember that he has more for us. He wants us to grow in self-giving love so that the norm for us will be life in a community that is more and more characterized by the love that we have for one another deeply from the heart (as Peter puts it in this passage), the self-giving love of Jesus.

Addendum:
When we think about what it means to be jolted out of the sort of complacency that can allow us to settle for less than what God intends for us it is important to get our heads around how God wants to shape the affections of our heart. I suggest that the parable of the prodigal son gives us some good clues as to what God wishes to teach us about not settling for a pattern of sinful, self-destructive, and selfish behavior. In the parable, the son remembers there is a better life and imagines that he can get a bit of it back by coming home in the role not of a son but of a hired hand. It is the father in the story that will have nothing less than his return as a cherished son. Miroslav Volf’s words about the father in the story are memorable: "....eyes that searched for and finally caught sight of the son in the 'distance' tell of a heart that was with the son in the 'distant country'... the father kept the son in his heart as an absence shaped by the memory of the former presence. When we say things at Grace Chicago Church like, “God is not hanging over your head in a cloud of disapproving judgment”, the goal is not to make it seem as if it does not matter what we do or how we live. We are simply suggesting that a better way of responding to the gravity of God’s love for us is by training each other and ourselves, to respond to the weight of his love, instead of imagining that what God wants from us is so much cowering and grovelling. Again Volf is helpful: "If God does not find what is pleasing in an object - if human beings have become ungodly - God does not abandon the object in disgust until it changes its character. Instead, God seeks to re-create it to become lovable again... God is not just generous even to the unrighteous; God also forgives their unrighteousness so as to lead them through repentance back to the good they have abandoned."

Questions for discussion:

1. When you think about “what time it is” do you think hopefully about what God is doing in the world or do you get stuck in a pessimistic frame of mind and feeling of heart? What can bring us to hope - what sort of practices, etc.? Does it surprise and/or annoy you that God wants you to move from despair to hope?

2.. What sort of habits might you ought to put into place or re-solidify that can create occasions where it will be more likely than not that you are called to take stock of your response to the gravity of God’s love for you?

3. Can you think of an “ah-ha” moment that you had regarding the depth of God’s love for you? Did this epiphany help you think about some aspect of your life differently than you had before? If so, how?

4. If a friend came to you and said I am having trouble figuring out whether my goals around building wealth have distracted me from the needs of those who have less than I do and asked you to help her figure out whether or not that was the case, what sort of conversation might you have? What is the sort of prayer you might craft for her to use in her discernment process? What passages of scripture would you encourage her to reflect upon?