1 Peter 3:13-22
Easter 6 - Year A
"One Good Friday a number of years ago, we stood on the ground of an Anglican Church, which is located right beside a busy road. Cars whizzed by as we strained to hear the liturgy over the noise. One sentence popped right out for me. "Is it nothing to you, who pass by?" And the answer was quite clear. None of the drivers so much as turned their head to give us a glance. Christians today suffer from the most insidious of persecutions. We are simply ignored. So Bev [Ralph's spouse, a pastor] would like us to look at this passage and ask ourselves what Peter's advice to us might be when "we are met with indifference while living out our understanding of God's love."
[from RUMORS. It comes to your e-mail box every Sunday morning. There are instructions at the end of each issue telling you how to get off the list if you no longer want to receive it. Here's all you do. Send an e-mail to rumors-subscribe@joinhands.com . Don't put anything else in that e-mail.]
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/may2002.html
"Be ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks why you're living the way you are, and always with the utmost courtesy.... [Jesus] went through it all...to bring us to God."
Said as politely as possible, progressive Christians have an experience of the openness of G*D and have a fire lit within them to aid others to also experience the expansiveness of G*D's presence. The polite part of that is that our experience does not trump the experience of others. G*D is larger than our experience and we rejoice when people are aided to their own experience of G*D, whether that be through the gift of progressive Christianity or through some other gate. Our key concern is not that our way is validated by others, but that everyone come to the joy of G*D's presence. We look forward to growing through the witness of other's experiences and that we might, in thankful return, be a source, stimulus, or catalyst of their continued growth.
We are living the way we do for we have found it fruitful and desire to share it with others that G*D might be ever more clearly encountered.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/may2002.html
Baptism is an appeal, a sign of openness to wholeness (having our intentions and our deeds correspond and thus having a good conscience regarding our living).
To get to this sense of being born from above, resurrected, it is important to note the possibility of resurrection in the first place. With Jesus our imaginations are widened to include resurrection and to work backward to anticipate our own resurrection, someday, and thus the ability to be born anew today.
As we have known from of old. Baptism is resurrection. The lack of resurrection is a sign of the lack of baptism (even if one has been duly watered). Remember your Baptism and be Reborn from above.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/may2005.html
1 Peter 3:13-22
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:8-20
John 14:15-21
"Now, who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?" (1 Peter 3:13)
It's probably that old unknown God Paul stumbled upon and defined in one way. Unfortunately, unknowns are multivalent. They can roughly slouch in many directions, not just Bethlehem or Empty Tombs (to mention one set of parentheses).
It may even be that Advocate of a Spirit of truth, not receivable by the world.
In these instances we find harm set in opposition to good, very Greek. Our Hebrew Psalter brings another perspective that harm is not from something other than "our" God, but is directly related to G*D. We are tested and tried, burdened, trampled, overcome, and, yet, brought to a spacious place beyond such duality. [Yes, there is a duality here of ourself and G*D that needs to be furthered looked at on another day.]
How do you understand your own state of being these days? Particularly if you are finding it confused or adversarial?
- - -
praying without iniquity
a heartfelt desire
trips me up every time
for steadfast love continues
too rooted for one
with a head full of cloudsmaking up offering after offering
I plot an acceptable sacrifice
of property or guilt
attributing it to this god or that
searching for someone to receive
that which I don't understand
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
Sometimes we leave ourselves orphaned by not doing what we know we should or doing what is unhelpful. This is in many ways a worse kind of orphaning than that of being left by what we understood as family.
A key here is the universal issue of suffering. We will do almost anything to avoid it, including orphaning our better self. Both Jesus and Buddha ask us to both embrace and detach from suffering as it is in that impossible place of detached embrace that we find a new way through.
As we begin a new round of United Methodists in General Conference there appears to be some additional suffering ahead. The next days will clarify some of it. We'll see if the ark continues to hold together or whether the offal of our accumulated traditions will finally sink us. More details in days to come.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html
“Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?”
Well, anyone with a me-interest larger than a your-interest.
And so the necessity of a statement that has enough experience to know how real it is that good intentions are no guarantee of security - “You are blessed whether or not you suffer as you do what is right”.
Be ready to keep on doing what your gentle and reverent hope leads you to, even as demands are made to prematurely prove or reluctantly deny your hope.
If I might argue with Peter for a moment, baptism does not save. It sets one on a course of living out an assurance of belovedness.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/05/1-peter-313-22.html
The religious right in United Methodism is just a little ahead of schedule in making their quadrennial appeal to equate a unique discrimination against LGBTQ people with Christian teaching (or doctrine as the original motion in 1972 had it). They are spelling doctrine differently these days, “discipline by majority vote”, but everyone knows it means their understanding of G*D is the only valid one and so they should be in charge of everything. (Reference 1, Reference 2)
Their technique is to whine when caught being discriminatory and turning that around to claim they are the ones who are being discriminated against because they can’t keep their favorite “eternal truths” of the Bible. Then, in nearly a next breath, there comes forth an accusation against others that they are violating one “truth” they hold to be “self-evident” and of some “natural law” and so everyone else should self-deport from the purity of United Methodism (as though it ever were so!).
We’ve been here before. I suspect their only acceptable “win-win” scenario is if they get to win, period. To this end they have previously set up an alternative publishing house to divest from the denominational publisher, an alternative mission sending agency to disrupt the breadth of mission work and limit it to a narrow interpretation of evangelism, and an alternative women’s organization to diminish the effective teaching and compassion of United Methodist Women. It would be interesting for someone to track these regular missives that try to sound so concerned, but for anyone with a long-memory know are part of a larger movement to reduce life to rules.
Related to this passage, there is a question to be raised with every part of the church, “Is it really better to suffer for doing good?” Appeals such as the above are always ready to claim that I have suffered enough, thank you, and now it is time for me to get mine. Amazingly, it is always the right time for me to get mine.
A second question also needs to be raised, “What about all those who suffer at the hands of those so righteous in their doing good that they exile and shun their own children who do not live up to some arbitrary ideal?”
Now to separate the suffering of one’s self for doing what seems to be good from the suffering caused to others for doing what seems to be good. I’m betting that Peter here might say that causing suffering for another is qualitatively different and worse than one’s own willingness to suffer for another.