Easter 4                                                                                        1 Peter 2: 19-25

It would have been easier for me today if I had just gone along with the Good Shepherd theme and reworked an old sermon on that topic.  But our lectionary gurus saw fit to include the lesson from 1 Peter, perhaps because of that last phrase in the reading: “For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.”  It is a wonderful thing to know that we have returned to the shepherd and guardian of our lives.  We know that thinking of Jesus as the Good Shepherd alerts us to his ability not only to care for those who are his, but to convey to them the knowledge of the kind of life that is pleasing to God.  Ancient kings were known as shepherds because they were the source of just and life-giving laws for the people over whom they ruled.  To have returned to Jesus as our Good Shepherd means that we have returned, after a period in which we were living on our own, apart from God’s will, or doing what seemed good to ourselves, and now know ourselves to be aligned with the purpose and the will that guides the whole universe.  In other words, the Sermon on the Mount, the teaching of our Good Shepherd, is the revelation for us of the whole meaning of life and sets the direction for our discipleship. 

But in the verses immediately preceding this reference to our Good Shepherd, Peter offers some advice that I believe most of us do not understand or if we understand don’t really agree with.  How many of us really resonate with these words:  “it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.”  What does this mean?  It looks as if Peter is offering us nothing more than a life of continual suffering.  In fact, he seems to praise it as most in accord with what Jesus experienced.  We should be glad to suffer with Him, since His sufferings procured our salvation.  So don’t worry if people are mean to you.  Don’t defend yourself.  Don’t strike back and don’t mouth off.  Don’t seek your own rights: just grin and bear it.  In the end it will be alright, since Jesus was resurrected after the Cross.  Now I think we could follow Peter up to a certain point.  We have already heard the Sermon on the Mount.  We know that retaliation and hatred and self-seeking are not the Christian way.  But is this the whole story?  Are there no exceptions?  Are these absolute laws?  Are we really to be so passive that anyone can walk over us?

In the midst of trying to understand what is going on here, I looked back at the previous verse: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.”  This changes the focus of the passage.  This is advice to slaves who have become Christians and this writing takes its place within the kind of moral literature common in Jewish and Christian circles covering the duties of members of the household.  Yet, Peter’s advice is not normal.  He only addresses slaves, not masters.  Later he mostly addresses wives, and not much is said to husbands.  It is as if he is offering advice to the weaker parties in social relationships and telling them that they have to put up with it for Jesus’s sake.  So don’t worry if you have to suffer unjustly at the hands of a cruel master—you are gaining credit in heaven and will receive your reward when Jesus comes—or, more probably, when you die an untimely death from your mistreatment and go to meet Him.

The suspicion that arises in one’s mind at this point has to do with a common refrain throughout our checkered human history.  It sounds like the advice always given to the weak by the strong.  It is the kind of wisdom reflected in this old Greek saying: “the rich do as they will and the poor suffer as they must.”  Now it seems as if Peter has given a divine sanction to this idea:  that is the way the world is.  The slaves of this world will suffer, but if they do not rebel and are submissive and never say a harsh word in return, then even if they suffer unjustly when they are doing good, especially if they are Christian slaves, they will earn merit in heaven.  So, if you were kidnapped from your African village and made a cotton-field slave in the 1830’s—just put up with it: you’ll get your reward in heaven.  If you are a native American Indian whose land was stolen and you were herded with your family on to a reservation and live in poverty and humiliation, don’t worry.  That is just the way life is.  Trust in Jesus and you will have your reward later on.  Or if you are a wage slave in a factory that doesn’t pay you enough to live on and there is nowhere else to go, grin and bear it.  Do not revolt, do not talk back against your bosses.  Just offer it up.  Jesus still loves you and there is nothing else we can do for you, except perhaps a handout or two from time to time. If your livelihood has been destroyed by globalization and you have emigrated to try to feed your family and are an illegal alien with no rights, constantly afraid of deportation, you just have to live with it.  Trust in Jesus and in the next life you will have what you need to live.

If we read Peter like that, then of course something in us rises up in revulsion.  This is not fair, not just.  It is just acquiescence in the evil systems of this world and shows no compassion or love for the many who cannot compete in this world.  But, then, we would have misunderstood Peter also.  According to some of the commentary on this passage, there is a reason why Peter does not write much to husbands and nothing to masters in this letter.  It is because Christians at his time in the first century were the powerless—largely composed of the poor and slaves and, from the upper classes, mostly women.  Most of these people had few rights in their social orders anyway—and being Christians made them even more vulnerable.  If Peter had encouraged them to stand up for their rights, he would have been encouraging them to commit suicide.  Rebellious slaves were summarily killed—many crucified.  If Roman society had perceived the Christian movement early on as a radical social movement that would free slaves and press for women’s rights, it would have been crushed ruthlessly in the very beginning and we would not be having this conversation. 

It has even been suggested that Peter writes here to slaves as a kind of encrypted message to all his Christian friends: in case anyone outside of the Church read it, it would seem pretty tame and socially conservative.  But what he was saying to his Christian brothers and sisters was this: we have no civil rights and we know that this makes us all vulnerable to the whims of those who are in power.  So the only practical way forward is the way of being submissive to the ruling powers.  And this way, certainly, is the way of Jesus himself.  In the same circumstances we prove to be his disciples when we walk in his steps.  But note also: Christians were to continue in doing good: “so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”  In other words, there was to be no compromise with evil, with injustice.  If, while pursuing a life of goodness they suffered for it, then they knew that God was on their side and that Jesus would vindicate them.  This was not only the way to survival, it was the only way to live in justice and in confidence in Jesus, especially in his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, in their circumstances.  The unjust suffering of those who were being maltreated for doing good would at the same time be a sign to the consciences of those in power that amongst Christians there was no desire for evil but for good, no desire for power but for justice.  This was proved out in practice in those early Christian centuries.  There were persecutions of Christians on and off for more than 200 years.  It came to a head finally in the early decades of the fourth century.  What finally turned the tide was not that Christians took up arms and defeated their pagan persecutors.  It was the fact that the pagans could no longer cause the unjust suffering that the Christians were being exposed to.  They had finally had enough.  Their consciences wouldn’t let them do it anymore.  Christian non-violence had proved its case—of course, it took a long time for the conscience of their oppressors to become sensitive. 

We have seen the power of this way of doing things in our life-times.  Perhaps the greatest recent example was Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights protests.  They were non-violent protests against the unjust treatment of black people that were enshrined in evil laws and in a discriminatory social system.  At least in the leadership King provided, there was no returning of insult for insult; there was no violent revenge.  There was only a patient bearing of unjust suffering as an appeal to the consciences of people whose senses had been dulled and whose hearts had been hardened to the full evil of the system they took for granted.  And, of course, King paid the full price for his witness.  But the system changed and we are all better off for that change—which has come slowly but persistently.

Yet, I have omitted a vital piece of the story, and I go back now to try to fit it in.  If Peter’s writing in our lesson today is the charter for non-violence on the part of an oppressed or vulnerable minority, the social conditions that prevail have been completely turned upside down.  It was the Christian minority that was vulnerable in Peter’s day.  Now Christians in many parts of the world are actually in the majority.  We are the power structure now.  The laws that are on our books have been written by people who considered themselves, for the most part, Christians.  What would Peter say to us now?  How would he re-write his epistle if he were directing it to the 21^st century American Church?  I think that at the heart of his message would be this: make sure that you are not the cause of unjust suffering for those in your societies who are poor and vulnerable and powerless now as you yourselves once were.  If you have been healed through the One who suffered unjustly, how could you now allow unjust suffering for others?  Is it not in fact the case that contemporary Christians ought to have a passion to secure the rights for all those who are treated unfairly?

Of course, there is an issue we have not confronted and must now mention.  How much of our social system, even though officially voted for and legislated by those who call themselves Christians, is in fact based on anything recognizably Christian?  One of the things that makes me weep, as I look back into Christian history, is the fact that within only a few decades of the end of the great persecutions in about 314 AD, Christians, who had obtained political power in Greco-Roman society, were now engaged in persecuting others.  The Jews had once maltreated them; now they had power to maltreat the Jews.  The pagans had once persecuted them; now they had the power to harass the heretics.  The Church had become wealthy and powerful and the coalition between the Church and State which eventually led to some of the greatest cultural treasures of human history—from Dante to Gabrielli to the Cathedral of Chartres and King’s College chapel in Cambridge—often led to the unjust persecution of those who did not fit in, who had different ideas, or required the labor of slaves and serfs to support it.  Is that what Jesus intended?  Is that what it means to return to the Shepherd and guardian of our souls?  I don’t think so.

What we must be working for, it seems to me, is a new way forward, new ideas of what it means to be faithful to Jesus in social circumstances that are so different from those of the first century, still trying to be faithful to the spirit of those ancient words, but in fresh and creative ways.  These are not easy things to do but the idea of living free from sins and for righteousness or justice is a compelling one.  It just takes a willingness to thoughtfully name our sins and a creative way to think about righteousness in these early years of the 21^st century.  Our mission statement puts this at the very heart of who we are as a parish and I hope we can get a fresh conversation going about its import: “To share the Wisdom of God in all its rich variety, through our common life in the Body of Christ, so that the place where we live may be renewed and transfigured in God.”