1 Peter 3:10-18
John 15:1-8

To read our passages from 1 Peter and the Gospel of John together is important. The wisdom of the church through the years to read these passages during the Easter season should not be lost on us. Here is the good news that makes sense only in light of the resurrection of Jesus. If we do not live differently because God the Father has raised the Son from the grave, then, well, we aren’t living within the fullness of reality that God has brought to pass. It’d be like me living like Carl had never been born – and, believe me, I’ve tried. But it just doesn’t work – there’s the big hairy, cut kid that drives me around every now and then, and I might as well enjoy the freedom that Carl brings me, freedom to laugh, to love, to share wisdom, to learn wisdom. God has raised Jesus from the grave, and the situation of life has changed for all of humanity in Him. And our readings point the way for us to live in the newness of the resurrection.

1. And it seems to me that the first point begins quite simply in 1 Peter 3:15: Sanctify Christ in your heart as Lord.

Such a simple phrase, but it is very profound. It’s kind of strange language for us today, though. Sanctify: set apart, make holy; Christ: as I tell my class, Christ was not Jesus’ last name. It is the term for the Jewish king, the Messiah: Lord: a wonderful term: it means someone that you are placed under; it could be one’s head of household, one’s boss; but more, it was the term used for the Emperor. In your heart: here is the seat of our affections, the origins of our desires, the place of our passions, our emotions, our will. To sanctify Christ in your heart as Lord is to live with your desires, your allegiances, your passions centered on Jesus, the Jewish messiah, crucified and raised, as the center of all human existence, indeed, the social, political center of true humanity. Sanctify Christ in your heart as Lord.

To hear why it is so important to live with Christ sanctified in our hearts as Lord we have to identify ourselves with the receives of this letter, sojourners, resident aliens, a group that has its fundamental social and political loyalties to a place outside the political, social world in which we live, so that one is not given privileges or trusted with responsibilities. That’s us, friends. I read today in the paper that America’s most prominent philosophy, Richard Rorty claims that unless “religion” is kept “private” then it is a danger to democratic nations. And he’s right. But confessing Christ as Lord means you can’t keep it private. It sets us apart as a people who just live life differently. I listen every now and then to a Los Angeles talk radio station. I hear that a group of “citizens” of the United States have taken upon themselves authority to “protect” imaginary lines in the desert called a “border.” Then I sat with a pastor of a Church of the Nazarene who told me that half of his congregation were people these supposed “citizen heroes” would take out of his congregation. He just needed to protect his people from the “Minutemen”. He just didn’t recognize the citizenship of this world. Yet the power to conform, to assimilate, is always at work. As a minority group we have to not conform in ways that matter amidst the world in which we live.

That is why the prepositional phrase “in your heart” is so important. Our passions are not separate from our intellect, our rationality, but the heart here recognizes the importance of our desire. To know what is good is not sufficient in itself; if we desire false goods don’t help us much either. Our desires must come together in the true Good, the Triune God, for us. To love Christ is real attachment. He is not dead; he has risen. The Spirit has been given so that we might love him in faith. Even in his absence, Christ is materially manifest to us in the consecrated bread and the wine here at the Table and in the bodies of the poor in the world. We face pressures to conform to the loyalties of world around that can subtly shape our desires. We see in our lives in everything from behaviors like gambling and vulgarity to more powerful, subtle responses of getting even, constant complaining about others faults, to deep set prejudices that life is about my comfort with prejudices attitudes against the poor, those of different skin pigmentation, different first languages. Desire for Christ as Lord reshapes, keeps allegiance central, adds to discernment to order the goods of our lives correctly, because we discover how to use all that God has given us in light of loving God in Christ because Christ has been sanctified as Lord in our hearts.

The message is so simple and so profound for us: Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Set the desires of your affection in Christ so that the rest of your life might find its proper order in God!

2. Why? As a group that does not live with the same allegiances as those around us, suffering will come our way.

Okay, let me just come clean. This passage presupposes that those living faithfully for Jesus Christ are going to face unjust suffering. There. Live with it. Become a Christian, learn how to suffer for the right things. And then, learn to react, not to legitimate those who are reviling you, but to shame them by your goodness seen in not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you have been called.

Following Christ does not reduce your suffering; it is not a means for upward social mobility amidst groups who do not sanctify Christ as Lord in their hearts. Suffering will come, will come from at least three different areas: (1) socially, politically from not sharing the same allegiances of those around you; (2) from engaging in the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, showing hospitality to the outsider; giving drink to the thirsty, visiting those in prison; clothing the naked, overseeing the sick; burying the dead; (3) living locally as a member of a congregation, a local church of Jesus Christ. In some ways, we can handle the first the easiest. When we are blatantly dismissed for our commitment to Christ, it’s easy to handle because, well, it’s just so clear cut. It’s frustrating, but clear. The second, suffering by engaging in the works of mercy, we often deny by pretending that this is a call just for a few, not for all Christians. But then, getting involved, engaging these works opens us into the problems of discovering that we have different social, political allegiances because we discover Christ amidst the poor. We suffer with those who suffer. We want to get angry with those persons and whole systems that make such friends suffer; we hurt that we cannot wiggle our noses and make everything better. It’s easy to get angry, depressed, exhausted, worn out, lose hope, become cynical, become disappointed, even mad, when those we try to walk with don’t want to walk as we would like them to. We want to fix everything, rather than let the love of God change us by forming us into persons who learn to love God in everything because we have sanctified Christ as Lord in our hearts.

But maybe the third, the suffering from living locally as a member of a congregation, even this congregation, is the hardest. For you will suffer when you live locally as a member of a congregation. It is interesting that the v. 9 follows v. 8, the exhortation to the congregation to live in the unity of the spirit, sympathy, love of the sisters and brothers, to have a tender heart and a humble mind. This doesn’t make the moral failings of the body of Christ and individually, it members, right – never! Yet when you live as part of a whole group who has sanctified Christ as Lord in their hearts, the rest of our passions may not have been formed to our center. Each individual brings experiences, perceptions, patternings not consistent with Christ into the life of a congregation, or even just needs to learn how to let the different members be molded into one body. Even leadership can fail, may I say, not trying to do so, by lack of wisdom or even our own sin. We can so easily become jaded, complain about “them”, “that church”; we can never allow the word “we” to be used. And when we even allow ourselves to use the word “we” for our identification with a congregation, we discover that “we” can hurt us more than “they” can. Social processes of getting to know or allowing to be known can become difficult, because the only skills we possess are the skills given to us from the world with whom we don’t share the same allegiances. It is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God’s will, than for doing wrong. Do not return evil for evil, or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you have been called. Love life, see good days, keep you tongue from evil and your lips for speaking deceitfully. Turn away from evil and do right. Seek peace and pursue it. And this will mean taking the suffering of a congregation within oneself, not in dishonesty, but in love, and openness, and blessing for those that God has called together into Christ’s body. It means seeking the best for the other, not being consumed by patterns of negativity, but keeping your conscience clear. It means learning how to forgive, not to act like someone is right when they aren’t, but to live in love for the good of all. As a minority under siege, it’s easy to feel the pressure and divide, to withdraw, to dismiss and complain. But the hope for survival, let alone witness, of sojourners and aliens, means learning how to let the suffering into our bodies without having the suffering so break our passions, our emotions, into patterns of intense agony so that our bodies become broken before their time by the stress of living for Christ in the world. If we are going to suffer, we have to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts to allow this suffering to form us into a people who love God in all things, and therefore, our neighbors as ourselves, even when our neighbors are members of our own families and our own congregation.

Sanctify Christ in your heart as Lord; because in living for what is just in this world, the kingdom of God, suffering will come.

You see why Christ said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me, and I will abide in you.” Abide in Christ’s love. Come in faith to the Supper of the Lord this morning. Come to let Christ, in the bread and the cup, abide in you, that you might abide in him, and thus, abide in God. Allow God prune you to bring forth fruit, that together, we might witness the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.