“Because I have been born again of incorruptible seed”
Good
Shepherd Lutheran,
Pentecost
8,
I
Peter 1:22-25
Rev.
Werre
Everything
has the smell of death in it. Everything winds down, gives out, goes in a
downward spiral. So our bodies sag, young love becomes middle age bickering,
summer vacation ends far too quickly, laughter dies away no matter how funny
the joke. Everything gives out, ends, everything perishes. Is there anything
more depressing than that? As Johnny Couger pre-Mellencamp put it in one of his
songs, that little ditty about Jack and Dianne, “Oh, yah, life goes on, long
after the thrilling is living is gone.” Everything perishes, decays. Everything
except plastic, I suppose. But that's depressing, too. Especially for people
like us, people who long for life, who long to live our lives upward. But
everything perishes. For everything is born of perishable seed. Including you,
including me, including that baby you hold in your arms. We have been born of
perishable seed. Seed that has death in it.
But then
one day a funny thing happened on the way to your funeral. You were reborn.
Perhaps at the baptismal font, perhaps in a barber shop as you read some church
pamphlet, perhaps across a kitchen table as your neighbour was telling you
about the Bible. Perhaps it is happening right now. The HS came into your heart
and worked an entirely different way of thinking about, well, everything; what
he worked in your heart was trust in what God says in his Word. And you were
reborn. But this time, it was with imperishable seed. Incorruptible seed of the
Word of God. So that what you receive from the Word stays fresh, as fresh as
bread just pulled from the oven. What you receive from the Word stays new, as
new as a car rolling out the factory door. As Peter wrote, “For you have been
born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable.”
But what
does that look like? So this grade school girl smiles a lot. She is a good
girl. But she has learned a lesson that every child learns at some point, that
it is painful when others don't like you; so she is careful to try to not get
anyone upset with her. This girl is in great danger. In four years she will have
a boyfriend. This boyfriend will want her to act like she is married to him.
And she will say no. And it will be uncomfortable, it will be tense. And a
voice will explode inside her head; it will say, “If you say no, he won't like
you!” Then it will say something to her that most of us have heard in our own
head, the voice will say, “The only way to be happy is if everyone likes you!”
This is a voice that comes from the perishable seed. And if you follow what it
says, you will perish. Things will become undone, you will be in the downward
spiral. This lie makes otherwise normal people crumble in the face of
criticism, pushes a mother to do more than she can realistically do to try to
keep everyone happy, has the power to get a Christian to do things he knows are
wrong but he'll do them anyway, just to try to get others to keep liking me.
But it never works. For this lie is from the perishable seed.
But this
girl has been reborn of imperishable seed. There is truth in her. As Peter
described it, “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth”. It
says, “This boy may not like you, but God does.” After all, that's what God's
grace is—his favour, that he likes you for Christ's sake. We are accustomed to
thinking of God's grace as his love, his undeserved love for us sinners. And
that is right. But it is also his favour. As our Father said of his Son at his
baptism, “This is my Son whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” (Matt.
3:17). What was the Father saying, but “I love my Son and I like my Son!”
God loves,
and likes, and this girl who trusts in his Son. He likes, and loves, her--not
because she said no. He would like her even if she gave in and said yes. Which,
if you think that makes it easier to give in to sin and say yes, then you don't
really know God's grace at all. Because God's grace is not given to those who
do right but to those who trust in the right one, Jesus Christ, and have
received the robe of his righteousness and his forgiveness at baptism and hold
on to it by faith. And that's the truth. And how you keep “obeying the truth.”
By the way,
we better clear something up right now. The Greek word for “obey” is hypakoa,
which means “to bend down the ear.” To “obey the truth” does not mean to jump
up and start doing things for God, it means first to sit down and listen, “bend
down the ear.” That is how you will get it. That is how the HS will change your
heart and keep working in it. And whenever the heart changes, so do the hands.
“Now that you have purified yourselves by 'bending down your eat to' the
truth.”
But now it
is time to move from liking to loving. Because “you have been born not of
perishable seed but imperishable,” Peter exhorts us to “love one another deeply
from the heart.” But that's not where our love for other people usually comes
from. Usually it's from our head more than our heart. Most of our relationships
are calculated, weighed, measured. Most of our dealings with other people are
based on an unspoken and often unrecognized rule: if you play nice with me,
I'll play nice with you; if you're not nice to me, I'm not going to be nice to
you.” Is that not the unspoken rule that we usually live by?
But that is
not love, it is not Christian, it does not come from the heart. But the Spirit
instructs us through Peter, “love one another deeply from the heart.” This is
not a command about how you should feel about each other. This kind of love,
the Greek word for it is agape, this kind of love is about being useful. When
it comes to the heart, remember, the ancient Greeks did not think of the heart
primarily as the seat of emotions; the Bible certainly does not. When the Bible
speaks of our heart, it's talking about the place where we set the goals we
live by. Only we Americans thinks of the heart as talking about our how we feel.
That's not it here. To love one another deeply from the heart means to have it
as your goal to be useful to each other.
So, the
little light in your car that warns you "one gallon left" starts to
flash. You make it to the gas station. You fill up. When you walk inside to
pay, after you have picked your jaw up off the ground when you looked at the
total, what is your goal? To be useful to the clerk. This cost of gas is not
her fault. Sometimes being useful is as simple as being pleasant and not holding
up the line. Sometimes it is more complicated than the Gordian knot, especially
when it involves matters of family. But the goal is still the same.
That's what
Peter is talking about when he says, "love one another deeply from the
heart." Be useful, make it your goal each day to be useful to those around
you. This you are capable of doing because you "have been born again, not
of perishable seed, but of imperishable."
The love of
God, like the forgiveness, you have received through the Word is imperishable,
it does not wind down, it does not decrease. It's like it says in Lamentations
3, "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his
compassions never fail. They are new every morning, so great is your
faithfulness." New every morning, brand new. So you get up. It's early,
it's beautiful, you can feel it is going to be a good day. You see the sun
begin to rise in all its glory. Now, it does not matter to that sunrise that
there have been thousands of sunrises before. This is a new one. This one is
fresh. It's as fresh and new as the very first sunrise when our world was born.
That is
what God's love for you is like. Each day it's as if he has never had to love
you before. Today its new, fresh, so great is his faithfulness. That is what
God's forgiveness is like for you. Each day it's as if he has never had to
forgive you before, for anything. Today, his forgiveness is new, fresh, unused,
like it still has the plastic wrap on it. That is what God's love and
forgiveness, and caring and salvation, and mercy and compassion, and everything
else is like. New every morning.
This is the seed from which you have sprung, this imperishable seed. Everything else has death in it. Everything else runs down, runs out. But not God's things. They are imperishable. That's why each day you can make a fresh beginning in trying to be useful to the rest of us, loving each other from the heart. That's why each day you can fight the lie that “everything has to like me before I can be happy”, and every lie that comes from the perishing seed. For you have been reborn not from perishable seed but imperishable. The kind that always stays fresh, new. And why even when physical death wins the battle over our body it cannot win it over our soul. For we are imperishable. Born of the imperishable seed of the Word. We will live forever, in heaven. Just as the imperishable Word says.
Amen.