Longing for Holiness Set your heart authentically on Christ.

Transcription

1 Longing for Holiness Set your heart authentically on Christ. 1 Peter 1:13-16 Rev. John H. Hice February 21, 2016 Royal Oak First United Methodist Church, Royal Oak, Michigan More One of the sermons I remember best was preached when I wasn t there. Peggy Lee had just come out with her first hit song in 11 years, Is That All There Is? Even though it hit the pop charts, it was more the kind of song that was played on my parent s radio station, and since WJR was on a lot, I still heard it a lot. Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that s all there is my friend, then let s keep dancing. 1 It was a song about being disappointed and reacting to disappointment by giving up and lower your sights and make yourself numb with distractions. Let s break out the booze and have a ball. Oh well. My mother told me about the sermon I had missed. She said Dr. Vosburg talked about the song and said the song was wrong; when you re disappointed you rather shouldn t give up. When you re disappointed, you can hope instead and live for more. Well, I think I said, it s your song. Funny how some of those moments stay with you. And maybe it s important that they do. Life can be full of disappointments. You can expect more and receive less less out of your efforts and things you think you ve deserved and didn t get, less from relationships and less out of your career. You might have expected more out of yourself and think you haven t live up to your aspirations. You can even expect more out of your spiritual life and realize it, too, is falling short. Then what? Oh well? 1

2 Living by Hope This week our Lenten study took us from John Wesley s boyhood home in Epworth to boarding school in London when he was 10, and then to Oxford University where he started college at the age of 17. Though he d been given a solid grounding by his parents, the distractions of the world were alluring for a young man like they often are. You might say he fudged like most of us end up fudging one time or another. Nothing we know of that was very awful but it was not the life his mother would have had him live. Disappointing. Until he d graduated and started working on his Master s degree, preparing for ordination, and came into contact with a book by Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. He read Taylor s reflections on a particular piece of scripture that called on Christians to do everything for the glory of God. Taylor wrote, every action of nature becomes religious, every meal is an act of worship as well as an act of prayer. 2 Something in Wesley awakened. Perhaps it was at first a disappointment. He could have looked at his life asking, Is that all there is? but instead of shrugging his shoulders and giving up he started craving something more. Maybe that s what Dr. Vosburg was saying is the right way to respond to disappointment. It s right because disappointment doesn t have to mean defeat. It can be a wake-up call to a healthy craving; a kind of dissatisfaction with mediocrity with a desire to reach for something better. A few years ago our New Wave Planning Team was engaged in a discussion about worship. That s when our youngest member offered a description of what new generations are demanding out of faith. She said if a church is going to be convincing enough for younger people to worship and belong, its people have to be authentic. Books describing the emerging church have been written about this. Young people aren t looking for a domesticated Jesus and a watered-down faith. They want a Jesus who calls followers to real change. They want a church committed to really loving God with all their heart; willing to sacrifice to end poverty and racism; ready to love others and genuinely forgive and accept despite differences of opinion, life style, or wealth. 2

3 They want real faith and real dedication that makes a difference. They don t want to settle for staying safe or comfortable or keeping things the way they ve always been. 3 They want authenticity. She said that if a church didn t have that, they wouldn t reach the new generations. Funny, how way back in the late 1720 s, that was just what young John Wesley s was saying, too. And that s what a follower of Peter, who was a follower of Jesus, was saying just before the turn of the First Century. place your hope completely on the grace that will be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed. Don t be conformed to your former desires you must be holy in every aspect of your lives, just as the one who called you is holy. Have faith in earnest. That s the kind of faith that means something. In fact, it s really the only kind of faith that means something. It starts out by claiming that we believe in a God that has done something awesome and promises even more. We ve already been given new lives by the power of God s forgiveness: what s to come is going to be an unprecedented gift of God that will change the whole world once and for all love, peace, healing of nations, God s glory everywhere. No room for disappointment. Promise powerful enough for us to live every moment of our lives in powerful hope. Hope so strong nothing can get it down. Wesley said we need to maintain a full expectation that all the grace of God will freely flow into our lives. 4 Peggy Lee sang, is that all there is? Our answer is no. So let s keep living. You can put everything into that hope and that faith not falling back into the distractions but pressing ahead. That s the message of the passage. 3

4 Be holy as God is holy. A God of hope means we need to be a people of hope. A holy God demands having a holy people. 5 Something needs to be said about that. People hear the word holy and they turn off because they think it means being either too delicate to face the bumps and harsh realities of the real world or just arrogant. It s really not about spiritual arrogance. Yesterday; 63º and sunny and I had a 30 minute window to wash the cars. Up to this point I had been driving around with a car that was filthy. It had accumulated a winter sworth of salt and every manner of dirt was just stuck all over it. Streaks were running down the sides. It was ugly. When I went over pot holes, who knows what piles were left in my wake. Then I washed the cars and I had a black, beautiful, shiny vehicle that in an instant became my source of pride. It struck me how quickly I could become judgmental! I d go down the street proud of my car and look at someone else whose vehicle was covered with salt and thought to myself, What a mess! That is not being holy. Holiness is anything-but. And scriptural holiness isn t about being withdrawn from the world and incapable of tackling the roughness of daily life. In fact, it s about having heavy-duty spiritual shock absorbers that enable you to endure the bumps while being absolutely set apart for God. That was appealing for Wesley: it means that Jesus actually meant what he said. And it means that we actually set out to do what Jesus told us to do. I was part of a large group of clergy gathered in a Washington church one day as an old bishop told us about a time he and a few other Methodists met with Mahatma Gandhi. They walked as they talked with him; and Gandhi said, So you re Methodists? I wonder what would happen if you Methodists actually did what John Wesley said. I ve read that Gandhi once considered being a Christian because he was so convinced about Jesus, but chose not to join a church when he was denied entrance to a Durbin, South Africa church because of the color of his skin. Christians, he concluded, did not weren t following Christ and so he saw no reason to join them. I Peter calls Christians to live by hope and not go back to the old ways of disappointment. Be actually be holy as God is holy. 4

5 So that became Wesley s quest as he led kid brother Charles and his few friends to actually live the Christian life. In their small group they learned to keep faith, encouraging each other from going back to old ways but live into a life of faith moreand-more. They came to practice a discipline of prayer and scripture reading, going to church and taking Communion, and caring for the imprisoned, the sick, and the poor (especially children). They made these things habits and kept them even when other students and faculty chided them and called them names like Bible moths and Methodists. Authenticity. Actually living the Christian life, totally, is what it means to be a Christian. Holiness I don t know how you can do that simply through your own effort. It seems like trying to accomplish that out of duty would just wear you out. My mother recently told me about going to see a friend of hers who is living in a retirement community. It s a friend she s had for most of her life. They went to young adults group together at church they d met their husbands there and took us kids on their picnics and to worship at church. Good Christians friends all through the years. So, my mother went to see her in the retirement home and she found her friend looking happier and filled with more peace and satisfaction with life than she had ever seemed before. Mom said she couldn t help but say what she saw and ask if there was anything different. Her friend said, Yes, there is. You see, I ve always been a Christian. I ve always believed in God. But until recently, I didn t understand that I also needed to open up my heart to God like I d opened up my head long ago. I didn t understand that I could also love God as well as believe in God. And once I loved God, God s love s been rushing in. Mom said, That s the difference. It s not just in the knowing. It s in the relationship. 5

6 You get into a real relationship with God and God starts doing the work you cant accomplish on your own. That s how you become authentic. That love is not something we can compartmentalize and say, we ll have that when we sing a hymn at church or in our thirty seconds of prayer we say before meals. That kind of love will be what we experience every time we come together and then keep on practicing every time we go, in Jesus name into all the world; letting our light so shine and our joy be so obvious that all who see us will come to praise God. Everything. When every action of nature becomes religious, every meal is an act of worship as well as an act of prayer. Wholly belonging to, completely in love with God. Authentic. That s what we want, isn t it? And if we want to be a growing church, I think it begins with all of us taking the same step Wesley took long ago. Authentic together. Holy, as God is holy. That s all there is. 1 Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Is That All There Is? Single released by Peggy Lee, Hamilton, Adam, Revelation (faith as Wesley lived it). Nashville: Abingdon Press pp Miller, Donald, Blue Like Jazz. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc. Copyright Wesley, John, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament London: Epworth Press. Copyright 1976 (this edition). p Bartlett, David L., The First Letter of Peter, The New Interpreter s Bible Commentary, vol XII. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Copyright p