Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 Peter 1:13-25. This sermon discusses a concept referred to as the “Cosmic Christ.” If you would like to learn more, consult The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr, the meditations on the subject that his Center for Action and Contemplation published, or this blog post by Paul Axton. The concept is well-known in eastern Christianity and is an important part of Franciscan theology.
Last week’s Gospel lesson was about Jesus showing himself to his disciples. It’s remembered as the story of Doubting Thomas, but I have long thought that Thomas gets a raw deal. NOBODY believed that Jesus had risen. Jesus showed himself to ten of his disciples, and after a few moments of disbelief, they realized what had happened. Thomas wasn’t there, so he was left in that pre-revelation state. “Yeah, right, guys, Jesus came back from the dead. Quit kidding around.” As soon as Jesus shows himself to Thomas, he believes, and indeed surpasses the other disciples in his response.
But in a sense, we are all like Thomas. I have not personally seen Jesus. None of us saw him in his human body, though some people I know have had visions like Paul did. For the vast majority of us who have not literally seen Jesus, believing in a risen Christ is really hard. It requires a suspension of all our normal ways of making sense of the world. The only reason I can accept the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts is that so many people risked their lives, and lost their lives, because of a story that is so ridiculous nobody would make it up. Literal bodily resurrection just wasn’t something that people even considered in that era.
We believe that through Christ, we have salvation. Indeed, Jesus’s actual Hebrew name, Yeshua, means “salvation.” A challenging theological discussion is, what about all the people who lived before Jesus did? Did Jesus go down to Sheol and raise them? Or are they just the victims of the bad luck of being born too soon?
We see in today’s text a hint about God’s plan of salvation. With echoes of the opening chapter of the Gospel According to John, we read that Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was manifested in these last times for our sake. This is an incredible insight for the first century. Jesus was a man who was born at a certain time in a certain place, but Christ transcends humanity and was known from before Creation. We see hints of this same understanding in Peter’s affirmation that Jesus is the Christ, and in Paul’s writings to the Ephesians and Colossians.
Irenaeus was a bishop in the second century who wrote Against Heresies. At that time, Christianity had many different understandings about who or what Jesus was. Aside from the mainstream view, there were Gnostics and Marcionites. The Marcionites believed that the God of the Hebrew scriptures was different from God the Father of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus said no, they were one and the same. Christ was known from before the foundation of the world, and God the Father led and taught the Israelites until the world was ready for Christ’s revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. The Gnostics viewed the material world as inherently corrupt, an existence from which we seek to escape into the eternal realm of spirit. Irenaeus taught that what God created is good, and humanity is very good. All creation is ultimately destined for glorification.
Our glory comes through participation in God’s plan for redemption of all creation. Christ was present at the beginning. In fact, the universe was the first incarnation of Christ. Christ was the logos, the Word, the divine ordering principle that structured the creation of the universe. Christ was and is in all things. Whenever the spiritual world and the material world are in contact, Christ is there.
But Christ was hidden. God was revealed to the ancient Israelites, but they weren’t ready yet to understand God’s ultimate plan. They could picture God as a pillar of fire or a pillar of cloud or a burning bush or a still, small voice. They could imagine gods as inhabiting idols. But it took centuries for them to be ready for a God who was united with a human being.
Finally, when they were ready, Christ was incarnated through the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was the fullest revelation of God, as a human who was fully united with the eternal, cosmic Christ. Jesus lived as an example of holiness. He demonstrated God’s love with his deep understanding of each person’s needs and the obstacles that each person erected between themselves and God. He demonstrated complete obedience to God’s will, even unto death.
His death was the end of that phase of God’s revelation, but the start of another. God had tried to teach the Israelites about the ultimate fate of the world and their role in it, but was ultimately unsuccessful. So Christ came to teach them more personally and individually about holy living. Through his death, he taught about self-giving love. Through his resurrection, he taught about the ultimate goodness of the world.
Because resurrection isn’t something that happened just once to Jesus, and isn’t something that only happens when we die. Resurrection is the process of renewal, the restoration of glory, the sanctification of our lives. When Christ was raised from the dead, he revealed this coming of glory into all things, and invited us to participate in glorifying our world.
What is the purpose of salvation? We are saved. What are we saved from, and what are we saved for? There is one way of reading the New Testament that implies that we need to follow Jesus’s teachings closely in order to earn our place in heaven. Strangely, some of the Christian traditions that teach, on the one hand, that our salvation is assured if, and only if, we pray the sinner’s prayer and profess our belief in Jesus ALSO teach that we must purge sin from our lives and quit drinking and dancing and such in order to be “real” Christians. There is another way of reading the New Testament that implies that really, accepting Jesus as our Lord is all that we need to do, and nothing else matters. To that teaching I would say, what’s the point of even living then? Traditions that say that nothing matters in this world are basically reviving the old Gnostic heresy, the belief that our goal should be to escape from the corruption of the material world.
Today’s reading, though, affirms the inherent goodness of this world. We are to become holy people. We are saved so that we may become more holy. We are saved so that we might reveal Christ who is in us. This is not about becoming sinless, which is impossible. We all fall short of the glory of God, try as we might. Becoming a holy people means aligning our lives more with God’s love. It means loving each other as if we were a family, one family that encompasses all people. It means shining forth with God’s love in those dark places of the world.
All around us, we see people in despair. We see people suffering from poverty, from addiction, from natural disasters, from violence and war. We see people suffering from loneliness, from family estrangement, from grief and fear. Homelessness is a serious problem with broad impact and no good solution. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the suffering of the world. How can I say that the material world is fundamentally good when it seems so bad? How do I find the hope that Amy spoke about last week?
In one translation, verse 17 of today’s reading says, “live out the time of your sojourn here in reverence.” This is our temporary home. We are like the Israelites who lived in Egypt, or who wandered in the wilderness, or who were exiled to Babylon. We are living in a broken world so that we may learn how to love more broadly and deeply. Yet just as in Egypt or the wilderness or Babylon, God is with us. And so, as God told Jeremiah, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” The world will one day be fully transformed, but in the meantime, our calling is to make ourselves holy by seeking the welfare of the world we live in and praying to the LORD on its behalf. In this way, we will participate Christ’s work, begun at the foundation of the world, exemplified in the second incarnation that was Jesus of Nazareth, and continuing through the centuries since.
In the season of Easter, we celebrate the reality of Christ’s resurrection. He promised that he would always be with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sanctification is not a task for us to do alone. It is a process by which we allow Christ to more fully inhabit us. We surrender control of our lives and let God direct us. We turn from serving ourselves to serving others. It’s a process that is never finished, one that proceeds as two steps forward, one step back. Yet we have been given this assurance, that God will never abandon us. Israel and Judah were exiled because they stopped trying to follow God’s will, but God did not abandon them forever. God was with them in their exile, and God accompanied them as they returned, and God ultimately came to them in the person of Jesus. Like the ancient Israelites, we sometimes need God to shake us and grab our attention, but remember, God’s presence is never lacking, only our awareness.
And as we grow in Christ, we will be more able to see Christ revealed through the power of love. We will become more aware of the inherent goodness of the people we meet and learn to love them as fellow children of God, rather than fearing or hating or shunning them. That creates a positive spiral, where love breeds more love, where compassion breeds more compassion, where small acts of kindness lead to transformative relationships. In that way, we become a more holy people, clothed in Christ, living our sojourn here in reverence of Christ who is all and in all. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download