The Living Word of God
a sermon based on 1 Peter 1:17-23
by Rev. Randy L. Quinn

One of the modern inventions that we all use without much thought is the refrigerator.  We keep fruits and vegetables there.  We keep our milk there.  We keep our left overs there.  It amazes me the amount and the variety of stuff we put there!

But the freezer compartment is really the most interesting place to look.

I looked through ours the other day.  There were the normal things like ice cubes and juice concentrate.  But I also found some of last year's strawberries and some chunks of apple, I think, that were surrounded by frost.  And when I looked in our larger freezer, I found some odd cuts of meat that we'd bought on sale, a Costco lasagna, some smoked salmon, and a few extra loaves of bread.  I also found frozen snack food that we bought when Tonya was living with us two years ago.

I realized that we put things in our large freezer thinking they'll keep forever.  But they don't.  Especially when there is a power outage.  Or, as happened to us a few months ago, the freezer gets inadvertently unplugged!

That day we learned what it means to have perishables in the house.  Things that hadn't been used in time had to be thrown away.

Some things are like that.  Perishable.  Temporary.

In fact, most things that we see are temporary.  Every thing we see is perishable.  It's all transitory.

We'd like to think that our cars will last forever.  But they won't.  Some of us make use of things longer than others of us, but in the end, everything has a shelf life beyond which it is of no use.

Sometimes that 'shelf life' is measured in days and weeks, sometimes it's measured in months and years.  There are even some things whose 'shelf life' is measured in decades and centuries.  But it all comes to an end.

Even Silver and Gold, Peter says (v 18).  Even these most treasured of metals will all pass away.

I used to be an avid coin collector.  Now I just have some coins that I've collected -- and if you didn't already know, there is a difference.

When I was a coin collector, I could tell you how much silver wears off a dime in a year of circulation.  It can't always be seen, but it can be measured.  And over time, the faces on the coins become flat and obscure.

Where that silver goes, I can't explain, but it does go away.  That's because coins are perishable.

Our problem is that we keep trying to accumulate things that are temporary.  We spend our energies accumulating "things".  Things like coins, or houses, or shares of stock, or cars, or land.  And we forget how perishable those things are.

Even those people who claim not to be accumulating things find themselves focussing on the temporary.   Sometimes, rather than accumulate things, we try to set sporting records or set a goal to become known world wide as an expert in a particular field.  And we forget that all this is temporary, too.

In the comics this week, was a line from a weather forecaster who was giving a long range forecast.  He said, "the sun will fade and life on earth will cease to exist".  Now that's a long range forecast!

The most permanent parts of our lives -- the sun and the earth -- are temporary, whether we want to believe it or not.  I'm one who believes we need to be good stewards of these gifts, no matter how temporary they may be, but all of the energy being spent on "Earth Day" is energy spent on our temporary, transitory, and perishable home and I think we need to acknowledge that fact.

There is only one thing that is permanent.  There is only one thing that is imperishable.  And that one thing is God.  God, who was and who is and who ever will be.

This God, this eternal and everlasting part of our lives, who will serve as both judge and jury, invites us to participate in the eternal things of life.  God invites us to experience everlasting life.  God invites us to a renewed life full of hope and promise.  God invites us to focus on the imperishable, on the permanent, on the eternal.

And that, says Peter, is what is so remarkable about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

He revealed to us the eternal and immortal nature of God and at the same time, he invited us to participate and experience it ourselves.

Yet we continue to seek the eternal, the permanent, the immortal by pursuing temporary and transitory things and ideas.  We know we can't attain it this way, but we still strive for it.  This is what Peter calls "the futile ways [of] our ancestors" (v 18).  It's the only way we know.  We learned it from our parents and their parents.  We learn it from each other.  And while we know it's futile, we still seek the eternal through the perishable.

 

There were two women who were very close friends.  One of them owned a very expensive pearl necklace.  She let her friend borrow it once, and while no one can ever explain how these things happen, her friend lost the string of pearls.

The woman who had lost the pearls borrowed money to buy a new necklace for her friend without telling her what had happened.  For several years, she took extra jobs and worked as much overtime as possible to pay off the loans.

In conversation later, the woman who owned the pearls made a comment about them.  In the discussion that followed she admitted that the real pearls are kept in a safe; the ones she had let her friend borrow were fake pearls.

The woman had been working hard for no reason.

And often, I think we respond to God's grace the same way.

We think, for instance, that by coming to church every week we can gain God's favor.  Or we think that by giving of our time or our talents or our financial resources that God will look kindly upon us.  In our best moments, we recognize the fallacy of our actions but insist on trying to find a way to give back to God, as if we can repay the debt.

But the truth is that only by the grace of God are we allowed to call God "father", that only because of the priceless gift of God's son are we made right with God.  It's not our doing.

Our response is two-fold, then.

First, we acknowledge the source of our eternal salvation, the one eternal and everlasting factor in our lives, the grace and love of God.  We bow down in humility and thanksgiving as we accept this gift.

We gather in worship, not so we can become right with God, but out of gratitude that God has provided reconcili­ation.  We give, not so we can earn God's favor, but with thanksgiving for the things God has given to us.

The other thing we do in response to God's love is to love one another.

The story has been told of a man in England in the early 1700's.  He had been out of work and living in the streets when he took ill.  Two doctors came upon the man and spoke to one another in Latin about the man, thinking he was uneducated and would not understand them.  They were in agreement about their opinion:  he was a vile man whose body could become the subject of their own experimentation.

They intended to do some exploratory surgery­ on him, just to see how his body worked.  Imagine their surprise when this man responded in fluent Latin, "do you call vile a man for whom Christ died?"

God sees every person as a child.  God sees every person as having worth and value.  And through Christ, the seed has been planted to allow us to see as God sees.

Our response is to love one another.  Not in words alone, but in deed.  By sitting with a stranger in church.  By holding the hand of a child who is lost.  By walking with a lonely widow.  By listening to the heart aches of a teenager.  We are to "love one another deeply from the heart," says Peter (v 22).

Loving from the heart is a process of looking past the current circumstances and settings, it's an attempt on our part to see the person as God sees them.  God, who sees us from the perspective of eternity, looks at us with a sense of hope for transformation and repentance.  God sees beyond our current crisis to the ultimate perfection of our lives by faith and grace.

In Christ, we have been made pure.  We were purified to live life differently, to love one another effectively, and to care for one another intimately.

But in order to do this, we must learn to look at the eternal, we must begin to see the imperishable, we must focus our eyes on the permanent.

On Friday evening, members of this year's Disciple Bible Study class met at the nearest Synagogue.  We joined them in their Sabbath worship service.  I can't speak for the others in our group, but I was particularly impressed by the ancient prayers used in the service.  They seemed so relevant, so pertinent to our lives today.

I came away with a clear sense of the eternal nature of God, a nature that continues to provide meaning in any and all of life's circumstances.

And it's that sense of the eternal that God invites us into, not only in our worship together, but in our daily and every day lives.

How and where we experience the eternal in our midst is in and through Christ who is the "living and enduring word of God" (v 23).

Amen.