Encounter: A SERMON: LITTLE WORDS, BIG FLAMES1: PSALM 51:1-10, 1 PETER 1:1-4, 13-16

It's those little words that are sometimes the most freighted. Does anybody here remember that line from junior high school days, delivered by the person that you had so hoped might be a girlfriend or a boyfriend: "You know I really like you, but I just want to be friends"? Oh, that little word "just"! Or consider one of those arguments, whether trivial or terrible, in a relationship that begins, "Honey, I love you, but..." Ooh, little word; dangerous ground! Or in the hospital waiting room, maybe you have heard that sad little word said by the doctor: "I'm sorry..." And as a child, I knew I was in trouble when I was summoned with a sentence that began, in that low and growly and tight tone of voice that I knew portended no good, "Son..."

First Peter does it to us too: Did you hear it in our scripture? There is first that glorious description of the gospel, of what God has done for you and me and the whole world: "By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading...protected by the power of God." How grand and glorious and soaring. Indeed what a marvelous God we worship. But then comes the little word, "Therefore..."

Uh-oh. Now Peter's gone from preachin' to meddlin'. I hate it when that happens. But it happens a lot in scripture. In fact I am going to go so far as to say that here we have the basic two-stage structure of so many of Scripture's teachings: "This is what God has done"; therefore, "this is what you should do." Examples abound. At the open tomb: "He is not here!" And we say, "Hallelujah indeed. God has defeated death." But then comes the second part: "Therefore, 'Go-and tell' the others" (Mark 16:6-7). Or remember the scripture that closes Matthew? "All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me." And we are elated by the good news that all those who claim earthly authority are only relative to the one true source of meaning and righteousness. But then, there's the second stage: "Therefore"-and here's that verb again-"Go and make disciples" (Matt. 28:18). Or how about that story that begins the biblical witness where God creates a beautiful and fertile world to delight the eye and smell and taste-and then says ("little word" alert!), "But...while you may eat freely you may not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (cf. Gen. 2:15-17).

And, as we have seen, tonight's two-stage scripture is this: "By his great mercy he has given us a new birth." But there's that second stage-what God asks of us. St. Peter tells us that our response to God, our obligation that follows that little word "therefore," consists in four things that we are to do: we are to prepare our minds for action; we are to discipline ourselves; we are to set all of our hope on Christ; and we are to shape our otherwise selfish inclinations under the goal of being perfect in the same way that God is perfect.

Wow. That's quite a list. And it would be grist enough for several sermons. But (unlike last year when several of you gently suggested to me that in terms of the time I took I had in fact preached several sermons all at once) tonight I want to focus on just two of those injunctions to us. And I want to do so in terms of our theme for this weekend. Our theme for this weekend is "Fanning the Flame." And the intent of those planning this annual meeting is that on this the occasion of our 150th anniversary as an organized gathering (or as organized as Disciples get), we shall go forth renewed and equipped and motivated to be speakers and doers of the good news. So let me dwell just a bit tonight on Peter's little word "therefore."

The first thing that I am struck by is what is not on Peter's list Do you notice that his list is all, as I learned to call them in elementary school, action verbs? There is nothing on Peter's list about having the exactly right beliefs. There is nothing, even more pointedly, about making sure that those with whom you associate have exactly the right beliefs. Now, Lord knows, I am in favor of good and substantial and morally credible theological thinking. For too often, under the onslaught of a culture that politicizes, individualizes, and makes shallow everything it touches, too many have opted "for an individualistic, self-centered approach to spirituality that ignores the community-centered nature of the gospel and treats faith as a self-help manual to prosperity and success,"2 in the words of writer Sara Juengst. She's right: reading solid things, thinking deeply in the company of others, and seeking to use our minds to paint the best picture of God rather than being satisfied with an insipid color-by-numbers portrait is indeed the mark of a mature Christian life. But nowhere on Peter's list is the notion that we must prepare our minds by making sure that those with whom we associate are "conservative" enough, or "liberal" enough, or have the "right" belief on some culturally identified litmus-test issue. No, Peter's curious phrase is that we are to "prepare our minds for action." The phrase literally means to "gird up the loins of our minds for running," and its reference is to New Testament times when if you were wearing a robe and wanted to run, you had better hike up your robe and cinch it tight. Gird up the loins of your mind for running, for action.

And even though admonitions to start running usually put me in the mind of Robert Hutchins's remark that I remember from somewhere, "whenever I feel like exercising I lie down until the feeling passes," I am nonetheless struck by Peter's formulation. And indeed my friends, it's time to run. Stately sauntering is appropriate for museums. Running is appropriate for the urgency of an emergency room. And surely we don't want to be museum-churches in an emergency-room world. When the Oklahoma City bombing and World Trade Center attacks occurred, one of the things that I was most struck by was the hundreds of people that sought to help the victims-often at great risk to themselves. And none of those victims who were helped ever first asked: "Wait a minute-what's your position on abortion or homosexuality?" And not a one of those who paired up with another person to extricate a victim first stopped to check out whether his partner had the "correct" views on how large the church board should be or whether drum sets should ever be found on the church chancel.

Now again, please don't misunderstand: I use this dramatic example not to say that views on homosexuality or abortion or governing structures or music or the host of other things that we contend about are not important. They are; and we'd better keep thinking well together and we'd better keep both confessing and assiduously avoiding the tendencies to play power politics on any of these things at the expense of good theology. And yet my point is the same, I think, as Peter's: in a world where so few have so much and so many have so little, it is a luxury not to hike up our robes and run to do the work of justice-even if we don't always exactly agree with everything that our fellow runners think. The point is that in a world where one out of five children go to bed hungry at night, walking at a museum's pace in a world of hurt with minds in low gear is an affront and a tragedy. The point is that in a nation where every hundred minutes a child under the age of fifteen is killed with a handgun,3 it is a moral imperative that we hike up our robes and run to deal with this urgent public health menace. The point is that in a culture where child pomographers now enjoy the greatest financial success of any time in history, we cannot afford not to run when so many of the "least of these" are menaced by such mendacity.

And the point is that our fellow runners will always have some beliefs that we don't like and don't agree with, but to divide or, worse, to use such disagreements as an excuse not to do those things we can agree on, is an affront and an offense to the God who has made us for one another, who has gathered us about a Table that unites us far more than anything should divide us, and Who weeps at so much of a world gone so badly wrong and in such need of folks like us to run to it a saving word.

Gird up the loins of your mind to run, to act. Indeed. And yet Peter knows that we will fall exhausted if we do not run without hope to power and fuel us; and it is to that injunction that I now turn. For indeed, Peter also tells us to "set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed." Little word alert again: "All." And with that little word "all," Peter has gone to meddling again. Do you know the joke that goes like this: "A farmer once had a pig. But the pig had only three legs. A visitor to the farm saw the pig and asked, "What's with the pig who's missing a leg?" The farmer responded that this was an incredibly wise and helpful and marvelous and brave pig, who had helped the family on numerous occasions. Sort of a porcine Lassie. But that didn't quite answer the visitor who said, "Okay, but why is one leg missing?" And the farmer responded, "Oh, you don't eat a pig like that all at once."

Now I don't tell that story because I am in favor of maiming farm animals, but to confess that I too have sometimes hedged my bets-just like that farmer who wanted to have both food and his living wonder pig. I too have not done what Peter counseled but have instead set some of my hope on God and some of it on other things. I too have preferred too often not to fully trust in God's hope "all at once," but have preferred prudence-like the roulette player who bets both black and red because then there'll be at least the illusion of some return. And even though you won't go forward, a hedged bet means you won't go back either. You can safely stay the same.

But Peter didn't counsel prudence. Instead he offered the astoundingly audacious advice that we are called to place all our hope on the grace of God. This is an astounding claim, made all the more astounding because it is addressed to a flock which was far away from home, strangers and exiles in the strange lands of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Bithynia, facing persecution and the threats of a hostile culture. And it's also an audacious claim that Peter is making here in what some have called the first "pastor's class curriculum" designed to sum up in a nutshell what the gospel is and what God expects of God's people. It's audacious because it expects them not to hedge their bets in a situation where one might expect that all this "God talk" might be perceived as nice but impractical, lovely but unrealistic, grand but naive.

But Peter leaves no out for prudence, or "realism"; he does not say, as the saying goes, "Trust in God but keep your powder dry." All your hope is on God. No betting on both, no hedging your bets.

And so what about us? Who may not be in exile in Pontus or Galatia but who most assuredly find ourselves in a strange and hostile culture? What do Peter's words have to say to us exiles in Redding or Porterville or Visalia or Sacramento or Concord or on the Peninsula or in the Valley?

Just this: if we do not put all our hopes in God, if we instead decide to hedge our bets by putting some of our hopes on our bylaws or our memories of the way it was or on our history or our tenure or on the way we've always done it, then that flame of light and heat that we are called to fan into a fury, a flame which God intends to be a beacon of hope to those who are hurting and helpless and hopeless will instead be a tiny thing increasingly capable only of illuminating the shadows of our own insecurities and fears and worries.

But, as LaTaunya Bynum so eloquently reminded us a few years ago from this pulpit, when you are speaking about the flame of the living God, the notion of a "controlled burn" is-and should be-an oxymoron! So, my friends, let us indeed-even amidst the worries and the fears we have about money or attendance or buildings or conflict-set all of our hope on the grace of God. That is what God is inviting you to do this day and every day: set all your hope on God. Be an individual, be a family, be a congregation that takes this hope and multiplies it, shares it, shouts it, lives it. May our congregations stake all their hope on God by continuing to take joy in lively worship which always has as its goal the reaching out to new people who do not know what God can do in their lives. May we stake all our hope on God by continuing to offer a safe haven and models of integrity and faithfulness to youth who live in such perilous and scary and tempting times. Let us stake all our hope on God by making it our first priority to remind those at our doorsteps who are deluded by lies about what will make them happy that it is in Christ Jesus that there is true peace and true sustenance and true joy.

That little word "hope" is, paradoxically, both a fragile and a mighty thing. When it is staked on something puny, it is a fragile and flickering light. But when it is staked on the grace of God that is with us, come what may, then there is, my friends, nothing more powerful. Martin Luther knew the power of that little word, the power of hope; he put it this way in his hymn, "A Mighty Fortress":

The Prince of Darkness grim,

we tremble not for him;

his rage we can endure,

for lo, his doom is sure;

one little word shall fell him.

That word above all earthly powers,

no thanks to them, abideth;

the Spirit and the gifts are ours,

thru him who with us sideth.

Let goods and kindred go,

this mortal life also;

the body they may kill;

God's truth abideth still;

God's kingdom is forever.

"God's truth abideth still." It has done so in this Regional Church for a hundred and fifty years through the ministry of thousands of folks who indeed girded their minds for action, who sought common cause to heal a broken world with the balm of grace even when they disagreed, and who knew that whatever the mortality of their own lives or the lives of their congregations that God's truth and God's hope indeed "abideth still" and always. That legacy is the flame that we fan tonight and this weekend. Yet that flame also illuminates and guides our future. And may we, God willing, fan that flame ever more brightly; may it never be said of us that we hedged our bets on this flame of hope. May it never be said of us "they managed to have a controlled burn."

My friends, if you would pledge this night to recommit yourself to gird up the loins of your minds to action, if you would pledge this night to stake all your hope on the grace of God, then say, "Amen."

Say "Amen."

May it be so!

1 This sermon was preached at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Northern California and Nevada. Rev. Blaisdell was Regional Minister at the time.

2 Sara Coven Juengst, On the Road Again (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 32.

3 Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. See www.psrla.org/gunviolence.htm.

Charles R. Blaisdell

Pastor, Hilo Coast United Church of Christ

Honomu, Hawaii