Sermon: Mattins - 20 July 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 20th July 2014

Service:

Mattins

Readings:

1 Peter 3.8-18

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 12.2M)

‘Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is within you.’  1 Peter 3.15b

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Caricatures, as we know, are just that: caricatures. Sometimes they’re malicious, sometimes they’re simply ill-informed, but even if they distort they are distorting something that is true. Indeed a caricature that is not based on truth is not a caricature. The art of great political cartoonists is to caricature to such an extent that the figure being caricatured is still recognisable even if thoroughly stretched and transformed.

All too often we Christians are content with the caricature; well we’re not really, we just moan that the media narrative or popular culture has a narrative that we don’t think is quite fair. We dwell in the caricature more than the truth from which it springs. And that is tilting at windmills. Our first reading though tells us, ‘Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is within you.’  That means we can’t moan about perceptions of being Christian, it means as it says, we defend ourselves by giving an account of the hope within us.

Christians are smiley, do-gooders. There is a caricature that stretches the features of Christians who are those who find deep joy in the gospel and seek to serve their neighbours. Christians are doormats, in other words, that we are people who set themselves up to be trampled all over: There is a caricature that morphs out of a deep Christian sense we are rooted in the gospel way of non-rivalry and, after the example of Christ, we seek to resist lashing out and create victims our of our victimhood.

So let’s tease out this second caricature a little in the light of that passage from the first letter of Peter. It may sound like the way of the doormat, but is actually a powerful articulation of just a way of living that refuses to mirror and imitate the deep patterns of rivalry and revenge in the world. Our refusal draws from Christ’s refusal to return malice with malice but to confront it with the integrity of being rooted in God.

Peter is almost certainly addressing the newly baptised, but he also reminds those of us longer in the tooth of the way of living that is the way of Jesus Christ. He appeals to the new Christian, as much as the established ones, to offer to the world the gift of the way of Jesus and that we do this out of hope not self-defensiveness.

What Peter sets out is the Christian way of living shaped on the example of Christ in the gospels and enabled by the Holy Spirit so that we grow into the image and likeness of the God who created us. So to be a Christian is not a one off act, or even a set of kind deeds that’s another caricature to be resisted even if one that might look good. Rather we are initiated at baptism into a living life-giving way in which we live and move and have our being in Christ.

Father, you hold us in your loving gaze:

may we desire to see each day as a day in your presence.

As we give account of the hope that is within us

keep our tongues from evil

and our lips from speaking deceit;

help turn away from evil and do good,

seeking peace and pursuing it,

for your ears are open to our prayer

in Jesus’ name in the power of the Spirit.

Amen.