I Peter 3:8-22 "Gentleness and Respect" Scott Hoezee

These days, it won't do to grade ourselves on the curve. As we have seen in the previous five sermons in this series, Peter is steadfastly interested in helping Christians make an impact on the world. Peter has over and again given advice on holy living. He has called upon Christians to be good citizens of the state. He has told slaves to be respectful of their masters, wives to be good examples of Jesus to their unbelieving husbands, and husbands to recognize their wives as equal partners in the gospel. And always the goal has been the same: Christians must demonstrate that they have been changed by Christ. In the public square and at home, Christians exude a whole different way of being.

Tonight we hear a call to public civility. Peter is concerned about the way we speak, the way we express ourselves. But when we apply this to our own lives, it won't do to grade ourselves on the curve. It will not be enough to be a little more civil, a little more well-spoken than the wider society. That can't cut it in the era of Jerry Springer. Being a little more considerate won't cut it in a day when the airwaves are filled with talk shows whose stock-in-trade is fostering all-out brawls as audience members become embroiled in such ugly shout fests that the censor's bleep of the foul language forms one long beep.

Even some of the more civilized cable talk shows encourage people to shout one another down, to talk overtop of one another, to cut each other off in midsentence. But we also live in the day of the bloggers. In case you don't know, "blog" comes from the term "web log." Some while back, various people began keeping a kind of online diary of their own opinions about politics or movies or whatever. Now lots of people keep such online blogs for all to see.

Recently one of the more famous political bloggers got her picture on the cover of a national magazine. She has also become a regular guest on MSNBC and was invited to the most lavish parties at both the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer. Yet she is a potty-mouthed person with a rather dirty mind who has become famous precisely because of her lurid language. But not only does this not put people off, 40,000 people per day read from her website, downloading 120,000 pages of her scribblings every single day.

When it comes to proper speech and good ways to express ourselves, it won't do to grade ourselves on the curve. We need a whole new grid by which to gauge ourselves. Helping us do that is Peter's aim in this latter part of chapter 3. So in the next little while, let's review what Peter has to say and then ponder its implications.

To begin, we should note that the verses we read tonight form a unity. Despite the fact that there is a lot going on here--and despite the fact that in the end this passage contains cryptic references to spirits in prison and the days of Noah--nevertheless, there is an overarching unity. We can see this best if we move step by step through these verses.

Beginning in verse 8, Peter says that no matter who you are and no matter where you are at any given moment, you need to be guided by love and humility. As has been clear from the outset in this letter, Peter clearly knows that there were any number of places in society in his day that would be openly hostile toward Christians. Peter expects up front that Christian people will encounter criticism and so he tailors his advice accordingly.

He begins by saying that within the Christian community itself, everyone needs to practice kindness and love and humility. If we can manage this among ourselves within the church, that will strengthen us to do the same when we get out into a sometimes-harsh world. Maybe we don't always think of it this way, but that is partly the function of the church. Our life together as believers becomes a kind of practice session for how we treat all other people, too. This month we know that the presidential candidates held lots of mock debates and practice sessions with their advisors in advance of the actual debates. The goal was to be ready to anticipate questions, set into place some potential rejoinders to the other person's remarks, and hone everything down to fit into those two-minute frames. It takes a lot of practice. You need a lot of rehearsal time for something like that.

It's no different for us. We should come here and practice loving each other, practice forgiving each other, practice devout and holy ways to talk to each other. We do all this not only so that we have peace within our fellowship of believers but also to get us ready to do the same things when we are out in the thick of it in society--out in a culture where, if anything, it will be much, much more difficult to do these same things. But that's all the more reason to be as rehearsed and practiced as we can be.

Whenever one of my kids needs to read something or recite something in public or here in a church service, I always tell them, "Practice reading this super, super slowly because if anything, when you actually stand in front of a crowd, nerves will make you speed up. So if you practice fast, you will end up reading way too fast when the time actually comes. But if you exaggerate things a bit in rehearsal by being extra slow, even if you speed up a little in the actual moment, you'll hit it just about right."

This is why church and worship and sermons should never be seen as a break from reality, a pause from "real life," a sheltered retreat where we can take a breather for a bit by not even thinking about Monday. But I fear that we've let the church get co-opted by the wider phenomenon of the weekend. The weekend is when we want to put work out of our heads. We leave the office at 5pm on Friday and say to ourselves, "Ahh, the weekend! I don't even want to think about this place again until Monday morning!"

We usually define a "good weekend" by how successfully we were able to forget about work. Church may have become part of that wider weekend effort to block out the rest of the week, but that's a mistake. Because this same phenomenon goes the other way, too: on the weekends we don't think about our workaday world, but when immersed in the workaday world, the weekend (including maybe church) seems very far away. But we need to keep worship and the work week connected. We practice civility here on Sunday so that we can act the same way in a Wednesday afternoon sales meeting. We need to practice compassionate and humble speech to each other here because it will only get harder in a rough-and-tumble world. Society can bring out the worst in us. That's why on Sunday we need to eliminate the worst in us and replace it with the best Christ has to offer.

So Peter tells us to fight the tendency to give as good as we've gotten. "Don't trade insults with people," Peter says. "Don't get into shouting matches but respond to harsh speech with a blessing." Peter asks us to pronounce a benediction on the people who curse us. Literally in the Greek, the word for "blessing" here is the same as the English word "eulogy." A eulogy is literally a "good word." So Peter says to give even foul-mouthed folks a good word in return. But then Peter says something interesting: "For to this you were called." Doling out eulogies of good speech is our calling, our holy vocation, our job.

Why is this our calling? The rest of the passage tells us. After a long quote from Psalm 34, Peter gets to the heart of it all in verse 15. Why are we called to talk a certain way? Because in our hearts we have set up Jesus as our Lord. Jesus is our speech coach and he is always with us. That's why we have hope. With Jesus in our hearts, we not only have hope, we have an on-site helper to enable us to formulate answers to the questions people may ask about why we believe what we do.

We need always be ready to apologize, Peter says. But the Greek word for "apology" that he uses in verse 15 doesn't mean saying you're sorry the way we often use that word now. Apologies, the art of apologetics, means giving a defense and an explanation for our faith. It doesn't have to be something highly sophisticated. As we said in our Mission Emphasis sermon last Sunday morning, witnessing begins with no more than sharing how you feel, saying what you think. But even so, being able to explain our faith doesn't mean we have all the answers. When Peter goes on to say that even our most ardent apologies need to be done with "gentleness and respect," he is implying that sometimes the only Christian thing to say to some questions is, "I don't know."

Because at times people try to corner us and trip us up with hard questions. "Oh yeah, well if there's a God, then why did the Holocaust happen? You know, I used to believe in God, too, but then my little girl got raped and murdered--so why don't you tell me why your 'loving' God let that happen. If your Jesus is so great, then how come he doesn't do something dramatic to make more people believe in him? What about all those billions of people in Asia who believe in other religions? Is your good God going to fry all of them in hell!?" These are hard questions. As often as not, they are also posed to us with an angry, cynical edge to them--with the kind of tone that puts you on the defensive and warms your blood. You feel pressure because if you can't give an answer, you just know that a derisive laugh is just waiting in this person's throat, ready to get hurled your way.

If ever there were a time to take a deep breath and trust the Lord Jesus in our hearts, that is the time. The "gentleness and respect" part of verse 15 tells us that we could better come off looking foolish in admitting there are some things we just don't know than come off looking arrogant by pretending we know more than we do. Gentleness and respect mean that we could better be deemed to have lost an argument than to keep on arguing in a conversation that will only descend to the sump levels of Jerry Springer-like hostile speech. When Peter goes on in verse 17 to say that it is better to suffer for doing good than to do evil, he may mean lots of things but at a minimum he means that when talking with other people, sometimes we have to live with the fact that there will always be those who deem us to be dumb because they cornered us with a question we couldn't fully answer.

I confess to having a hard time with this. Like some of you, I revel in the intelligent heritage of the Reformed faith. I loved my apologetics class at seminary and I don't want to be seen by others as a naive rube or a fundamentalist hick from the backwaters, a bumpkin who must finally be pretty stupid still to believe in miracles in the twenty-first century. I want to show my intelligence. I want to demonstrate that I have rational reasons by which to defend my belief in a Creator God or in the resurrection. But if we cling to these desires to look smart more fiercely than we cling to Peter's advice to be gentle and respectful, then we open ourselves up to feeling desperate. But it's desperation that can lead us verbally to lash out in ways that will, in the end, destroy our witness to Jesus.

We need modesty and humility. We acknowledge that we don't know everything. Of course, as Christians we do have central beliefs on which we must not compromise. We don't need to be modest about claiming Jesus is God's only Son. Being humble does not mean we wring our hands in uncertainty when we're talking about Easter. But in other matters we do sometimes need the modest humility that says we don't have all the answers. And there are limits to our being able to make people understand our faith. Some just don't, won't, or can't get it. That's frustrating, but we'll make matters worse if we turn that frustration into angry talk. Because then not only do they not believe the gospel, our behavior indicates we don't either or else we'd act like changed people!

But no matter what a discussion is about, we need to be gentle. That means we watch our language and not resort to name-calling. But we also never lose sight of the fact that we're talking to someone who is just like us: an imagebearer of God who has feelings that can be hurt the same as our feelings can be hurt. We need to pull back when we find we are raising our voices. And we need to find a way to demonstrate respect and love most especially toward those with whom we disagree.

But I said this passage forms a unity despite what looks to be an odd excursus near the end. Because Peter slides from reminding us that Jesus has redeemed us to talking about how Jesus preached to some spirits in prison who disobeyed God way back in the days of Noah. I wish I could tell you what this means, but there is virtually no scholarly consensus on this. It appears to be a reference to something that can be found in the pseudepigraphical and apocryphal book of I Enoch. But beyond tracking down this source, few commentators are sure who these imprisoned spirits are or what they have to do with Noah.

But even though we don't know precisely what these verses mean we do know why Peter said this. Whoever these spirits were, they were clearly wicked--they had something to do with bringing about the flood after all! But that didn't prevent Jesus from preaching to them in ways just as kind and gentle as the sermons Jesus delivered while he was on this earth. Jesus spoke the words of life even to imprisoned spirits.

This is our example to follow, Peter is saying. And now that he has alluded to Noah, it is a quick pivot to think about baptism. In baptism we were cleansed, set apart for God. As Peter puts it in verse 21, this was a pledge, a sign, of our now having a clear conscience before God. Since we have been cleaned up this way, we must not go around in society soiling ourselves all over again through intemperate and hostile speech. If we have set Jesus in our hearts as our Lord, this must always influence how we deal with other people.

Kindness, humility, compassion, and gentleness set the tone for how we treat one another. I'll close with a story I told some years ago. This story ties in as much with our treatment of fellow believers as with how we treat the world around us, but it may serve as a reminder that in all things, it is Christ as Lord that must set the tone.

It was shortly after World War II when the World Council of Churches dispatched Rev. John Mackie, president of the Church of Scotland, to go the Balkan peninsula to see how the churches were doing in remote areas following the war. Mackie was accompanied by two other pastors, both of whom were from a very sincere, albeit strict, denomination. One afternoon the three men visited an Orthodox priest in a lonely and small Greek village.

Unaccustomed ever to seeing visitors, much less fellow pastors, the priest was overjoyed and warmly invited them into his home. Soon after the men were situated in the priest's living room, the priest produced a box of fine Havanna cigars and offered them to his guests. Mackie gratefully took one, bit the end off, lit it, and began puffing happily, praising the quality of the stogie. The other two pastors sat wide-eyed and when the priest moved the cigar box their way, they drew back and sternly snapped, "We do not smoke!" The priest looked flustered and fretted he had offended his honored guests. So he disappeared into another room, returning a few minutes later with a flagon of his finest wine. Again, Mackie graciously accepted a glass, drank some, and thanked the priest of such an excellent vintage. By now the other two pastors were dumbstruck and again sounded peevish in telling the priest in no uncertain terms, "We do not drink!"

Eventually the visit ended and the three men returned to their jeep for the ride back to the hotel. Immediately the two pastors attacked Mackie with hostility rising in their incredulous voices. "Dr. Mackie!" they scolded, "here you are the president of the Church of Scotland and you smoke and you drink!?" Mackie looked at the two men and replied, "No, I don't. But somebody in there had to be a Christian!" Amen.