I Peter 4:1-11 "Diversified Grace" Scott Hoezee

In his latest book, Rumors of Another World, Philip Yancey makes keen observations on popular culture, revealing much as to what some people aim at in life. Some while back Yancey stumbled onto a website on which people can anonymously post confessions of sin. One person confessed, "If I could smack every coworker and take their salaries, I would do it." Another person wrote, "I wish I was rich. I want to buy things I don't need with money I can afford to waste." Yet another admitted, "I want one laptop, one cool flip phone, one Mercedes, two beers everyday for the rest of my life, and one million bucks in my bank account, that's all I want." Apparently that is all a lot of people want. And the mass media are highly adept at fostering just such desires in us.

As Yancey says, you can see this in the checkout lanes of almost every grocery store. Just take a look at the magazine covers filling the racks on either side of the checkout aisle. For one thing there has been a curious narrowing of focus over time. Years ago we had Life magazine. Then along came People followed by Us and now we have Self! Aside from this increasingly individualistic focus, notice how just about every single cover features incredibly skinny women in bikinis, sculpted men with rippling muscles and winning smiles, celebrities with perpetual tans and dazzlingly white teeth. But then glance from the magazines lining the checkout lane to the people in the lane. Do most of the women and men buying these magazines look like the folks on the covers? Maybe they do where you shop, but not so at the stores I frequent (and not when I am in the lane!).

Yet those magazine covers, like so much else in the media, tell us that we should look like that because if we did, we could also afford to live the way those folks do, replete with the shiny sports cars and the home theater entertainment system with surround sound. This is what we aim at and we seem willing to kill ourselves to get there.

Some years ago the late Dr. Paul Brand was at a medical conference at which in one seminar the presenter listed the leading causes of death in the Third World: typhoid, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, leprosy, and polio. Those are all communicable diseases stemming from natural causes like germs, bug bites, and dirty water. Then Dr. Brand attended another seminar that listed the leading causes of death in this country: heart disease caused by stress-induced hypertension, cancers caused by chemicals, sexually transmitted diseases stemming from promiscuity, lung diseases linked to smoking, fetal alcohol syndrome, diet-related disorders, murders committed with handguns, and drunk drivers causing car accidents.

No doubt you sense the observation made by Dr. Brand and Yancey: in most of the world people die because they became victims of their environment. In this country people die because of what they do to themselves: the stress involved in trying to climb to the top and by overconsuming the products associated with "the good life."

This is the cultural air we breathe. I mention all of this as a lead-in to today's topic of stewardship because there is no sense in addressing this topic without admitting up front the strong cultural crosscurrents that fight against stewardship. But it should also be noted at the outset that this sermon will even so not assert that being a good steward of wealth will ultimately mean having no possessions at all. The very notion of being a steward implies that you have something that needs prudent managing to begin with.

Some years back in a Thanksgiving Day sermon I tried to make the balanced, nuanced point that God has richly blessed us with many good things and that he gives them to us for our enjoyment. Even so, however, God expects us to use such gifts thoughtfully. That's what I said but after that service I heard one person dismiss my sermon by claiming, "Oh, so now Rev. Hoezee says we're not allowed to own anything! Well I don't believe that!" That's not what I said then and it's not what I will say this morning, either. But stewardship does force us to face the question of how we own what we do and what we do with it. I Peter 4 provides us with a rich theological framework for those very questions.

In general I Peter 4 is one of those "before-and-after" passages that you often find in the New Testament. Peter is telling his readers that whereas before they came to faith in Jesus they lived a certain lifestyle, now after meeting Jesus they live in a different manner. That much is hardly surprising. We have all heard "before-and-after" conversion stories and they are the type of testimony we expect converts to give.

What is interesting about I Peter 4, however, is the fact that Peter claims that it is the suffering of Jesus in his own body that contributes to our changed lives. Jesus' own human body was sacrificed for us. The earthly part of Jesus was bruised, beat up, whipped, and finally killed. But as we know from the gospels, all that ugliness was not something Jesus resisted. He didn't raise his hands to ward off the blows of other men's fists. When he was arrested, the authorities did not have to engage in some high speed chase before finally trapping Jesus in a blind alley from which there was no escape. And as the Romans did their bloody worst to him, Jesus was not begging for mercy every chance he got.

The spirit of Jesus, his soul, the spiritual core of who he was allowed his earthly body to go through all of that in order to open up for all of us a very different way of life. The abundant resurrection life Jesus came to this earth to give came when he allowed his body to suffer and die. But please notice something: this does not mean that Jesus regarded his physical body as unimportant and so what difference did it make what they did to his flesh?

Jesus did not take the ancient Greek attitude that the body is the gross, disgusting prison of the soul and so the sooner the body died, the better it would be for the soul that could at long last fly free. In the Christian framework, it is precisely because this earthly life, and our earthly bodies, are so precious to God that the sacrifice of Jesus' body was at once so tragic and so powerful. Further, Peter goes on to say that we now may suffer in imitation of Jesus as we too deny ourselves certain physical pleasures out of respect for the higher, better, more noble way of life Jesus' sufferings have opened up for us.

But we are not trying to escape being embodied people on earth but rather to transform life on this earth. We do not pretend we have no bodies, no bodily needs, no earthly possessions but instead we treat those physical realities in new ways because of who we have become in Christ. In Christ we have not become less physical but more physical precisely because we are engaging creation the way God intended when he made this world in the first place. And so for now, as Peter details it in verses 3-5, we must turn away from the self-indulgent, frenzied life of the wider society. But notice why we shun such a life.

In one way or another the activities Peter lists when talking about orgies and parties represent what even today some people might well associate with the good life. Getting invited to the glitziest parties in New York or Hollywood where the liquor and money flow and where the flirtatious atmosphere of casual sexuality pervades--that looks like the top of the mark to some people. That is what it means to live life to the fullest. But Peter cleverly claims just the opposite: what some people think is a fulfilled and filled-up life is actually a life that is empty. This kind of life drains us of all vibrancy.

Perhaps you noticed the oxymoron in verse 4 when Peter talks about "a flood of dissipation." That is a pretty good translation of the two Greek words that Peter yokes together in that verse. First he used the word asotias that means to dissipate in the sense of being wasteful, of overindulging in something until it is used up and so it vanishes. Usually when we say that the rain is dissipating, we mean it is ending, disappearing, is drying up. But then Peter yokes that word for dissipation with the word anachusin, which means a floodtide. So Peter is saying that when you live for only your own pleasure, when your definition of a rich, full life is consumption for consumption's sake and wasting your money because you have enough of it to waste to begin with, then what looks like a tidal wave of fullness is really one huge draining away of life's goodness. It's not a tempest in a teacup but a tempest in a toilet bowl--you are flushing away life, not enhancing it.

Some of you will remember the very novel image from C.S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce in which hell is depicted not as some great big vast region full of the condemned but intead hell is this incredibly tiny, almost microscopic place. If one day the entire universe will be the new creation or what we commonly refer to as "heaven," then within all that vastness the region of hell could fit inside a little crack in the sidewalk. It was Lewis's way of saying that hell, and those who populate it, are finally almost nothing because the substance and vibrancy of life will long since have been drained away.

Jesus Christ the Lord, Peter says, is the source of all life and so has restored vibrancy and substance to us. Jesus makes it possible for us to have rightly directed appetites, helping us to make a fitting use of the treasures and talents we have. And so as people who know this Jesus as Lord, we are called above all to love each other. We offer hospitality to each other, which is essentially what we do when we take the abundance we have and share it with others so as to make also their lives thicker and more substantial as a result.

You take a look at the gifts you have been given and then wonder not how they might help you to get ahead in life but instead how you can enrich others through what you are able to do. "Serve others" Peter writes in verse 10. But then he invokes a very curious turn of phrase: he says that in living this way, we will administer God's "diversified grace." Peter says that the Big Grace that saved us in the first place is supposed to result in lots of little "graces" throughout the course of our lives. This is a form of "trickle-down" economics in a spiritual sphere. We cannot sing about "Amazing Grace that saved a wretch like me" unless we also are interested in all the gracelets that should fill up our lives after that.

The time, talents, and treasures we have been given in our lives are all evidences of God's grace to us. If you are a good teacher, that is a grace. If you are skilled at working with children in the Cadet program, that is a grace. If you are good at writing and sending out cards to encourage the sick or the homebound, that is a grace. The nice home you have where you can be hospitable to others is a grace. The dollar figure in Box 1 of your W-2 form is a grace. The voice with which you can sing in a church choir is a grace. Every talent you have, every dollar you earn, every nice thing you own is a grace of God.

To see it in any other way is, I think Peter would agree, a pagan way of looking at this earthly life. The sufferings Jesus endured in his own body, and the ways we suffer for Jesus by denying ourselves or giving up certain potential pleasures, all remind us that although this earthly life and all its goodies are precious and valuable, they are not the highest good. They are all graces to be employed graciously. We need to take what we have and make of it a source of life. But the more we hoard what we have, the more it becomes like a tidal wave of dissipation. When fullness becomes an end in itself, we sooner or later discover it has become an emptiness after all. We thought we were storing it for a rainy day when really we had been all along pulling the stopper out of the drain that will eventually lead to a hollowness of spirit that is finally devastating.

Stewardship means seeing time, talent, treasure as graces of God. Stewardship means seeing all of our stuff as being God's stuff first of all, and then seeking creative ways by which to make of our lives fonts of liveliness for others. And as Rev. Koornneef said also last Sunday morning, if we find that we cannot or simply are not finding it possible to serve others in this church or the wider community, then that properly gives us pause to ponder whether we are genuinely filling up our lives with the true stuff of life or emptying our lives, dissipating our lives, by living for our own interests alone.

In recent years here at Calvin Church we have tried to stress that stewardship is about much more than money alone. Our passage this morning helps us to see this, too. God's grace takes many diverse forms and results in lots of different talents, interests, and abilities. Any way that we can plug into the ministry of this church gives us an opportunity, as Peter writes in verse 11, to give Jesus praise. But as the ministries of Calvin Church continue, by God's great blessing, to expand, we cannot over-emphasize the need for all of us prayerfully to ponder our financial commitments to this congregation, too. In terms of our Ministry Fund, the math is very simple. Every December we all say "Yes" in re-approving the 6% giving guideline to support this congregation's staff, programs, upkeep, and contributions to the wider denomination. As we today begin the final quarter of this year, it is as good a time as any to take a look at our annual income, multiply it by 6%, take a look at that number, compare it to what we have offered to God in the collection plate so far this year, and see what we have yet to do before December 31 rolls around.

Of course, some of us have outstanding circumstances and unexpected expenses that complicate matters beyond the simple set of steps I just outlined. Being committed to Christian Education hits a lot of us hard, even with the church's help. Some of us frankly don't make that much to begin with and our health insurance is either non-existent or inadequate, leaving us with piles of bills. Still others of us are unemployed--we'd love nothing more than to write a big check to the church but for now just can't do it, and it breaks our hearts. Life is topsy-turvy enough that across-the-board formulas for determining financial support will not work 100% of the time for 100% of Calvin Church's membership.

But even with a proper acknowledgment of all that, still we are called to look over our lives to determine whether or not we see accurately the diversified grace of God. Most of us have been given much. Peter's question today is whether or not we are taking that abundance and turning it into a life-giving source of service to others or allowing it to become a dissipating floodtide of indulgence that drains us of life's vibrancy and joy.

Jesus Christ the Lord suffered in his body so that the rest of us who share in his sufferings can now take a better approach to our own bodily lives on this earth. More than anyone, Jesus revealed the value of life and the great gifts God gives us for our good, for our pleasure, for our delight. Jesus did not trivialize our lives on this earth and the possessions we have, he deepened it all, infused it with so much more meaning than we could have imagined. But precisely because he did that by giving up his own self, we now see that the secret to our own lives is likewise in giving of ourselves for the sake of others, for the sake of the congregation, for the sake of the wider kingdom of which we are by grace members.

The society in which we live bombards us with images and ideas designed not only to whet our appetites but to form them. We are told every day not just that we should desire something more for ourselves, we are also told what we should desire. Many people are working themselves to death to get all that for themselves. But we Christians follow a man who worked himself to death not so as to make a life for himself but so as to open up life for everyone else. As the Son of God, Jesus held in his hands all the power and riches of the cosmos. But just look at how he spent it. May we now lead life-giving, generous lives of service that will give to Jesus praise and glory and honor every day. Amen.