I Peter 1:1-12 "Even Angels" Scott Hoezee

Probably there comes a point in everyone's life when you find yourself pining to experience again (and maybe to experience again as if for the first time) some thrilling moment from your past. Maybe it's the tingle you got the first time you kissed your spouse (who was then just your boyfriend or girlfriend). Years later you can still recall that combination of shyness, nervousness, romance, and excitement, but recalling it is quite different from really feeling it again. Or maybe it's the rush of emotion you felt when your first child was born--again, you have a sense for how you felt then, but you've never quite felt that way again. But you'd like to.

I can well recall how magical everything seemed to me the first time I went to Europe when I was a sophomore in college. Ever since, I have so often wished I could repeat the experience. Of course, I know that I could literally retrace the itinerary of that trip, but that could never reproduce the feelings of excitement and wonder I had as a 19-year-old. Some emotions are unrepeatable. You cannot manufacture them but especially when life appears to have become filled with "the same old, same old," you surely wish some of the past's zing could be recaptured. Because sometimes we all can feel, well, a little bored.

If you mention the word "sloth" to most people, you will conjure up images of laziness and torpor. "Sloth," people commonly think, is a lot like the animal for which this is named. Sloths are, after all, among the least mobile creatures in the world. Even when they move, they look as though they had been drugged and then filmed in slow motion! Algae grows on living sloths. And if a sloth dies in its sleep (and the likelihood is high seeing as they sleep 20 hours per day), they die gripping their sleeping branch so tightly that they cannot be pried loose!

So in the popular imagination, the slothful person is the lazy person--the quintessential couch potato, the channel-surfing, potato chip-eating, Pepsi-guzzling lump who, if he accidentally leaves the TV's remote control on top of the TV, wishes he had a remote to get that remote. In fact, that may be the only reason such a person has kids: "Hey, Billy, bring me that remote from over there, will ya!"

But as we have seen before, although that kind of laziness is a problem all its own, that is not the essence of sloth. Instead sloth ties in with what I just mentioned: sloth is boredom with life. Sloth is a kind of ennui that makes a person yawn over even vital pieces of beauty and truth. By this definition, therefore, sloth could be present even in the heart of a person who leads a very busy life. Even industrious, hard-working people can be slothful if, in the midst of all their furious striving, they find that they are no longer able to take joy in anything. Craig Barnes said recently that sometimes in mid-life people reach a point where they feel that all of life's choices are behind them and so all that remains are the consequences of those choices. We've set our course, married our spouse, had our kids, completed our education, chosen our career. The rest may as well go on auto-pilot.

By now you must be wondering how any of this ties in with I Peter 1. Perhaps in this way: most of us are familiar with I Peter 1:3-9. And as soon as you get to verse 13, you again encounter some pretty familiar lines. But sandwiched in between are verses 10-12, which are not so well-known and yet these verses are quite striking. Having presented a lyric summary of the gospel in verses 3-9, Peter takes what looks to be a bit of a detour in a brief discourse about how the prophets of old had predicted the advent of the Christ, proffering hope not so much for themselves in their own day but for people of a later time.

Peter's point seems to be that the whole world had been involved in getting things ready for the arrival of God's Christ. All of history, and so a very long line-up of the Bible's great figures, had been gearing up for the Son of God to fulfill what Jesus of Nazareth had now completed. So now there is a gospel that can be preached and proclaimed. Peter himself had just done exactly this kind of proclamation in verses 3-9. But then, at the end of verse 12, Peter writes a most arresting line: "Even angels long to look into these things."

Even angels. What does this mean? I think it means that we can never underestimate how spectacularly wonderful, bracing, and beautiful the gospel message is. Contained in the work of Jesus is a loveliness so profound that even the very angels find it irresistible. If they want, the angels can stare and stare at the beauty of God within the precincts of God's heavenly splendor. Angels are immersed all the time in the beauty of God. Yet these same angels spy in the gospel something so stunning that once they begin to ponder it, they find they are drawn ineluctably into a most moving apprehension of this most amazing of stories. This longing of even angels to investigate the heights and depths of the gospel tells us something about the gospel's lyric nature. It's beautiful!

As Laura Smit has taught me, theologians who deal with beauty as a theological category believe that beauty is closely connected to the biblical concept of glory. When the psalmist talks about worshiping God "in the beauty of holiness," you see that the completeness of God, the moral perfection of God, the abundance of God's love are beautiful precisely because they show us what this creation was always meant to be. A large part of the gospel's beauty comes from the fact that it is the gospel that has put that same creation back together again, back into the original shape God intended before sin and evil smashed it into a chaotic mess. The gospel is beautiful because God has worked so long and so hard and so diligently to achieve this lovely restoration.

But how often does it strike us that way? And now maybe you can begin to see how I am going to connect the idea of sloth, of spiritual boredom even in the face of great beauty, with I Peter 1. The people to whom Peter wrote this letter were Gentile Christians, people who had become the children of God just recently. They didn't have a lot of pre-history with God. They maybe now had begun to learn something about God's long, covenantal relationship with Israel but the fact of the matter was that as Gentiles, they had not been part of that millennia-long relationship, not until just recently anyway. But now they had become God's people, a royal priesthood, reborn into a living hope through Christ Jesus the Lord.

And yet they were now suffering, too. So throughout this letter Peter needs to bring the hope of Jesus into the context of people who were hurting. So the very same Christians who had just recently been adopted into the household of faith were also enduring trials and sufferings. Perhaps it was that combination that motivated Peter to write what he did. He needs to remind these people that the gospel in which they have only lately gotten caught up has a history, a glorious past, that extends back almost as far as the creation itself. God has been getting the cosmos ready for this for ever-so-long now. Salvation is always bigger than just us, than just this current generation, than just the present state of affairs.

What's more, Peter needs to remind these people, whose eyes have perhaps been clouded over by tears, that if they would but open their eyes again and see, as if for the first time, the depths of the gospel's loveliness, they might be able to spy once more the same beauty that even angels find to be utterly captivating. Peter wants to call these people back to their first love, to remember again the thrill of the gospel.

And for those people scattered throughout Asia Minor, perhaps this happened. Unlike many of us, these people at least had the advantage of being able to remember what it felt like to be introduced to Jesus and his gospel for the very first time. So when Peter said in verses 8-9 that Jesus fills them with an "inexpressible joy," maybe they were able to hark back to that and feel it deep in their hearts all over again.

It's never easy, of course. Peter himself made it clear in verses 3-9 that most of the realities we embrace by faith are for now invisible. Peter says we have a grand inheritance that will never depreciate, fade, or get spoiled. But, he also says, for now that inheritance is kept in heaven. Peter says that though we love Jesus, we cannot see him for now. And all throughout these verses Peter keeps talking about what will be revealed, what will be given to us on that grand and glorious day when Christ Jesus will appear. There is a whole lot of future tense verbs here. Peter reserves the present tense for something far less desirable: suffering. That is the present-day reality in whose throes we need to hold onto our living hope in Christ. As we do so, we need to remember, too, that this is all finally so incredible, holy, and beautiful, that even angels long to think about the old, old story every chance they get.

But as for the people to whom Peter wrote this letter, so for us: there are those dry white seasons when in our hearts we echo a line from the hymn "Oh, for a Closer Walk with God" where the oft-depressed poet William Cowper wrote, "Where is the blessedness I knew, when first I sought the Lord? Where is the soul-refreshing view of Jesus and his Word?" That's the cry of spiritual ennui, of a sloth that has vacuumed the joy out of us.

Maybe we never knew the jolt of having Jesus come to us in our darkness. Maybe we never had a moment of sudden joy where before there had been just pain. Some of us here tonight grew up into the Christian faith. We grew into the faith the same way we grew into our own skin: there was never a time we weren't aware of it. We breathed in spiritual talk and Bible stories the same way we breathed in oxygen every day, and we took both for granted as a result. We didn't ponder the gift of oxygen, and we didn't always appreciate the joy of learning about Abraham and Moses and David, either.

And even if we have a different story to give, a testimony of the "once I was blind but now I see" variety, perhaps even that memory grows faint at times. Across the centuries tonight, Peter wants to bring us back to our first love, reminding us that the old, old story is finally so wonderful, that even angels long to review it, retell it, and look into its details. We have a living hope! We have every right to have, deep in our hearts, an inexpressible joy! So how can we refresh our ardor and renew our zeal? How can we lift up sagging spirits and put a spring back in the step of flagging walks of discipleship?

Although what I am about to suggest does not stem directly from I Peter 1, allow me to close this evening with three ideas. A first suggestion is to find ways to learn more about the very Word of God that tells this wonderful story of God's long love affair with a wayward planet and a broken people. Bible study all by itself won't solve our every problem with spiritual sloth or boredom but by God's Spirit, who enlivens the Scriptures to make them a living Word, we might discover that our zeal for the things of God does increase the more we know about those same things of God. You cannot appreciate what you don't know to begin with!

There are rich treasures all through the Bible. Some are buried deep, like a treasure hidden in a field, others are right on the surface. But you can't know the joy of new spiritual insights, you can't experience the invigoration of having the Bible challenge some idea you have carried around with you for maybe years, unless you actually have a way to delve into Scripture. When Peter writes that even angels long to look into these things, the "things" he refers to are the words of the prophets and the testimonies of other biblical figures, too. In short, he's talking about Bible stories among other things. We need to study the Word.

A second idea is to look for goodness in life and, when we see it, to take joy over it as the gift of God it is. There is, any given day, more than enough bad news to go around. And, of course, as Christians who love God's world and God's people, we dare not ignore the bad news. We are right to discuss it, be aware of it, and pray about it. I'm sure some of us may have some unhappy prayer requests to share together here tonight in just a bit, and that is absolutely proper. Please don't think I am asking anyone to go through life with blinders on. But there is more than one kind of blinder you can wear. Because it's also possible to blind yourself to joys and to good things. I've met people (and you maybe know folks like this, too) who every time you see them will tell you right off the bat the names of all kinds of people (many of whom you may not even know) who were recently diagnosed with cancer or something. Worse, the conversation never leaves such grim topics, either.

Bill Cosby lampooned this kind of dour demeanor when regaling his audience with his grandfather's staple of conversation. Every time you went to see grandpa, Cosby said, it was always the same thing. "Say, do you remember old Floyd Cutler? Remember his old Massey-Ferguson tractor that always had that bad oil pump and he had that black dog that always came and dug up grandma's roses. But every year Floyd had the best tomatoes you ever ate. 'Member him, old Floyd?" "I think so," Cosby would reply, "what about him." "He's dead." It was the same every time: one very long set up for a death announcement!

Humor aside, we know that it is easy to get stuck on only all that is grim. Again, it's not that we ought pay not attention to these matters. Only a cold heart is not regularly broken by what goes on in this world. Nor is this to deny that clinical depression and the grief that comes from a loved one's death can also cloud our thoughts in ways that we cannot simply wish away. But even in the midst of all that is bad, we need to ask God to open our eyes to also beauty and goodness so that we can regale each other about also that. When describing what a world of shalom might look like, Neal Plantinga once had us picture people sitting on their front porches in the evening, reading the daily newspaper, and calling out to one another about happy news stories, celebrating goodness, and finding it just as possible to go on and on about joyful things as we currently find it possible to go on and on about bad news. We need to look for joyful things, and then talk about them.

Third and finally, there is that matter of prayer. Prayer can be a window onto the things of God. In prayer we open ourselves up and become vulnerable to be invaded all over again by the Spirit of God. In prayer we rehearse the things we believe, and we do this in actual conversation with our God, who secures our hope and is the source of our joy. Prayer changes us just by virtue of our assuming the posture of prayer in the first place, but then, within our prayers, we can of course pray for joy, pray for peace, pray for God to give us glimmers and shimmers that convey to us the certainty of having that marvelous inheritance in heaven--that gift of God that properly leads to a joy inexpressible.

Bible study, prayer, the search for good things worth celebrating: this is all pretty simple advice tonight. It's the ABCs of discipleship, the kind of thing we learn in the spiritual equivalent of Kindergarten. Perhaps it's difficult to believe that through these basics we may be able to recover the joy of our first love in Christ. But look again at I Peter 1: the things we learn about in the Bible, the truths re-enforced for us in prayer, and the glimmers of God's goodness to us that we may be able to spy in our daily lives if only we look for them: these are the very same items that Peter says even angels long to ponder. That ought to be enough for all of us, too. Amen.