RCL Year B (Lent 1) - March 1, 2009

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III

Christ Episcopal Church

Cleveland, NC

RCL Year B (Lent 1) - March 1, 2009

(Delivered on March 4, 2009 in the context of Evening Prayer)

Focus Text: 1 Peter 3:18-22

I don’t want to disrupt any preconceived notions, or un-teach what you may have been taught about the letters of Peter. But there has been a lot of different scholarship throughout the years that say som different things about the origin or writer of the letters of Peter.

Some say that it may have been a sermon given at a baptism or maybe a liturgy of the early church that was turned into a letter, but that line of thinking has long been abandoned.

The First letter of Peter is a real letter (an Epistle). According to the Oxford commentary on the Bible, "despite 1 Pet 1:1 (where the authors calls himself the apostle Peter), the author is probably not the apostle Peter" that we learn about in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It claims that the cultured Greek of the letter makes it perhaps the most literary composition in the New Testament.

The apostle Peter probably knew some Greek, but the 1st letter of Peter does not look like the product of the unlettered Galilean fisherman (Acts 4:13). It uses a sophisticated vocabulary, and its author appears to have some command of language, using the techniques of Hellenistic rhetoric. The writer is also intimately acquainted with the Old Testament in the Septuegent (or the Greek OT). We should expect the Galilean Peter to have been more familiar with an Aramaic or the Hebrew. (The Oxford Bible Commentary, p. 1263)

Compared to some of Paul’s writings, the letters of Peter are short, and the 1st letter Peter is believed to have been penned in the latter part of the 1st century, written in Peters name to give it authority and a claim to the apostolic faith. Regardless of who wrote it, it is an important letter that, just in today’s reading, gives us a smorgasbord of things that we can focus on, in many different and interesting ways…

Such things like Christ’s atoning death, the nature of his resurrection, the proclamation of the descended Christ, salvation, baptism, the authority of the heavenly Christ, the Apostles Creed, and the role of our conscience in the life of faith… So much that we could be here a year from now and still be talking about the “richness” of the content of this portion of Peter’s letter.

The lectionary repeats every three years, so in my own career, I can look forward to preaching this passage in at least 10 different ways prior to my retirement. All of you know that I can’t go on for an hour or more… some of you are probably thankful! Those of you that know me, know that I believe that a sermon is only about 2 things, it’s about Jesus and it’s about 10 to 15 minutes long. So I won’t belabor the point and try to weave all the wonderful imagery that we find in this portion of the letter into one sermon.

Tonight, I would like to focus on baptism. About who we are as baptized people, about the promises we make at baptism, and about the path we walk after we are baptized, and what that may mean to us…

Lent is an appropriate time to talk about baptism, because since the ancient Christian Church, lent was the period prior to Easter when the catechumens, (those who were not baptized), were trained in the faith, they were “catechized” or taught how to articulate their beliefs. The church still uses lent as a period of focused instruction, either as a time for counseling baptismal candidates, catechizing confirmation aspirants, or with some extra discipline of a program of sorts (like this one) to gain some knowledge and insight about our faith…

By it’s claim, the 1st letter of Peter was written to a suffering church that was in exile… a persecuted church that was dispersed over 5 provinces in Asia Minor. These communities were scared, and needed help understanding that God was with them, protecting them in their hardship, and guiding their paths. Like we sometimes do, they needed a reminder about who were as baptized people…

Peter offers them some direct teaching that sort of looks to us like the Apostles creed in places. In fact, if you put the creed side by side with this passage, this passage looks creedal with it’s statements “suffered, dead, descended, resurrection, ascended, right hand of God, and forgiveness of sins.”

All these are phrases that we see in the Apostle’s creed, the most widely accepted unified Christian statement of faith… accepted across most all denominations, both protestant and Roman Catholic.

As most of you know the Apostles creed is sometimes referred to by us as the baptismal creed, becoming the statement of belief or testimony of the faith, said by us or on our behalf in question and answer form at the service of Holy Baptism. The Apostles Creed carries with it a power in the statement and becomes our vow or pledge and reminds us who we are as Christians and followers of Christ.

In the creed, as in the verses of 1st Peter, we follow Jesus’ through his life, passion, death, resurrection and ascension, while maintaining a duel focus on what affect that has on us as his followers. It is almost as if these verses in 1st Peter answer the questions that a young catechumen would ask during a process of faith exploration… “Who was Jesus, and what does he mean to me?”

Peter outlines it with a cause and effect: Jesus suffered – so we are made righteous before God… Jesus was put to death – so we are saved from our sins… Jesus was resurrected – so we must do good… Jesus ascended into heaven – so we (and all things) are subject to him… It is the claim of the church in the creedal statements. It is the catechism that we are taught, or should be taught, at confirmation. It makes a claim on us like baptism itself! (G. Oliver Wagner – Feasting the Word)

Just as God saved Noah and his family, and all created life on this planet, he saves you and me though baptism, a ritual bath… not necessarily removing any dirt from our bodies, but washing away the sins from our soul, appealing to God for us to have a fresh start and a new life in Jesus Christ.

Baptism is our entrance, it is our rebirth into the body of Christ, the church. It is our entrance into a journey with the faithful… part of that journey is the journey that we will take with Christ during Lent to his suffering and passion. The journey that leads where we don’t like to follow… a journey of self discovery and ridicule, through the wilderness places of our lives, filled with wild beasts and demons…

We will probably never be able to understand what the Church that Peter was writing to was going through, or experience the persecution that it faced or the fear that it felt. We all live in a place in America where it is ok to proclaim what we believe, it’s almost “mainstream”… So if it’s ok, then why don’t we do it more?

Why don’t we do well at articulating what we know about the God that we love? Is it because we feel that we are in some kind of Christian Diaspora, or not connected to others through Christ because we worship with a dignified pageantry?? Or is it because we embrace the apostolic teachings through our tradition of education, not thinking that education is bad for our soul. Or is it because we use more or less water than other churches do when they baptize? Why do we look for our differences rather than our connectedness???

Regardless of what your means of measurement, or how you look at it, as Christians, we are all connected. Because of our baptism, we all make up the body of Christ… and as Episcopalians, we stand at our baptism or confirmation or at another’s baptism, we acclaim the words of our faith in the Apostles creed... These are the words of our faith that aren’t challenged by other Christian bodies. It’s what we believe, and it’s where it all starts…

So how fitting it is to start our ecumenical Lenten program with the first Sunday’s epistle that focuses on our baptism and our affirmation of faith. In my preparation for tonight, I stumbled across an affirmation of faith that was based on 1 Peter 3:18-22. I would like to share with you… This was written by G. Oliver Wagner.

Washed in the saving waters of baptism,
we give thanks for the ark of the church.
Joined to the faithful of all times and places,
we proclaim the suffering of Christ for the sins of all.
We rejoice and trust that:
the righteousness of Christ brings us to God,
the death of Christ proclaims God’s love,
the resurrection of Christ awakens our spirits,
and the ascension of Christ enthrones him as Lord.
Therefore, with a good conscious and obedient lives,
we proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ –
even if for that faith we must suffer. So be it!

When our Lord Jesus Christ was baptized in the Jordon by John, as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and heard a voice that came from heaven, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And when you were baptized in with the waters of salvation, the same water that delivered Noah and his family and all the animals of creation, the same water that parted in the Red Sea so that Israel could cross on dry land to escape slavery at the hands of an Egyptian tyrant – God continued in you the work of “the well beloved Son” in the world.

He gives us, in our baptism, the assurance of salvation, and passes the torch of responsibility to each and every one of us to go out and do the good work that Christ has given us to do… the mission of the church – to reconcile the world to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. In a way, with our baptism, the heavens are once again torn apart, and that barrier, that which separates us from God, is lifted…

So that all things and the whole of creation can be reunited with God. Jesus is the link, and we are his body in the world connected to him at our baptism, building up the kingdom and reconciling the world to God… It is our purpose… it is our faith… We proclaim Jesus Christ… so the world might know him and be reconciled to God through Him.

The letter of 1st Peter, here at the beginning of Lent, sets us on a journey that begins with our own baptism and points us to the cross… We travel through this season examining ourselves, but holding fast to who we are in our life of faith as baptized members of the body of Christ, the church. The Christ that the creeds confess and the Christ that reconciles the world to God.