II Peter 1:3-15 "For Goodness Sake" Scott Hoezee

We are a funny society. On the one hand people from all walks of life have embraced some form or another of moral relativism. If you read philosophers and sociologists, you will find a lot of talk about how religion and morality are little more than social constructs. "Truth" is culture-specific. Hence, to compare one culture's morality with that of another makes no sense. It should be no more surprising to discover religious differences than to discover culinary differences. Americans like meat and potatoes whereas Indonesians like red curry paste and jasmine rice. Big deal. So also some people like Jesus and take seriously his words whereas other people prefer Shiva and disagree sharply with Jesus. Big deal. Different strokes for different folks.

On the other hand we love excellence and celebrate it to lavish degrees. We cannot find enough excuses to reward and fete our children. "My Child Was Student of the Month at Eastside Middle School" proclaim a plethora of bumper stickers. (Of course, I also saw a bumper sticker which stated, "My Child Beat Up the Student of the Month at Such-and-Such School!") Grade inflation is rampant at all levels of education because we want to celebrate excellence and, by the way, we'd like everyone to feel excellent.

And where there are truly stellar examples of excellence, our culture all but falls and trips over itself in its adulation. Blessed are you, Michael Jordan. Blessed are you, Tiger Woods. Blessed are you, Meg Ryan. Blessed are the spectacularly excellent for theirs is the kingdom of capitalism.

But this adulation of excellence is curious in a culture which simultaneously doubts the universality of standards by which to judge such things. If, as many people now believe, we cannot know what truth is (or if the only universal truth we can know is that there is, as a matter of fact, no universal truth), then how do you even know a good thing when you see it? What prevents someone from claiming that, relatively speaking, the duffer who hacks and divots his way through the links is really every bit as virtuous a golfer as Tiger Woods?

The simple fact is that for all our moral hesitation and stuttering, many people know goodness and excellence when they see it and they are overwhelmed by the magnetism of goodness. Goodness attracts. Goodness is proclaimed so that the circle of adulation can widen. So we have film critics who laud good movies. We've got restaurant critics to highlight the places where you will receive a truly good meal. And when an athlete shows excellence, sports fans find it irresistible. Excellence is magnetic and very powerful.

We like good things. Perhaps that is why in the long sad history of this planet there have been very few people who have scratched their heads over the presence of goodness. "Why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen?" These questions are asked routinely. But when was the last time you heard someone crying out, "How can you explain the presence of excellence? Why do good things happen to people?" Theologians and philosophers have wrestled from time immemorial with the so-called "problem of evil," but the "problem of goodness" does not exist.

We like good things and have a deep-seated hunch that what's good represents the way life is supposed to be. We like happy endings in which the good guys win. Indeed, Hollywood directors routinely shoot two or more possible endings for their movies. They then hold test screenings with sample audiences to see which ending "plays" better. Invariably it is the happy ending in which goodness triumphs over evil which is selected.

Of all the fruit of the Spirit we've been considering in this series, the fruit of "goodness" seems, at least in some senses, to be the most difficult to get a handle on. We know what gentleness or compassion looks like and can easily pick out in a traffic jam the patient people over against the impatient. But what does it mean to have the fruit of goodness? What would be the opposite of this fruit?

Well, in one sense the opposite of goodness would be evil and yet few of us would want to claim that the only way to avoid being genuinely evil is to be a Christian. Plenty of non-Christians are good, decent folks. True, there are many bad, even evil, people in the world but even though many of us live in neighborhoods populated by many non-church-going folks we would hardly characterize most of them as thoroughly bad people.

So what does it mean to say that as Christians we have the spiritual fruit of goodness in ways that non-Christians do not? If, as I just said, even moral relativists cannot resist the magnetic pull of genuinely good things, what extra boost of goodness do Christians have? There are several things to be said in answer to these questions, the main answers coming quite helpfully from our passage from 2 Peter.

The ancient Greeks did a tremendous amount of thinking about what constitutes "the good." If you recall your ancient philosophy courses, then you may remember that one question with which people like Socrates and Plato wrestled had to do with the source of the good and how we may come to know it. Is "the good" something declared by the gods or is "the good" so universal that the gods are themselves subject to it?

In addition to these philosophical ponderings was the entire Greek celebration of excellence. One of their favorites words was the Greek term areté. Whatever was deemed morally good or supremely excellent in life was called areté. As we get ready for another round of the modern-day summer Olympics, we are reminded that these athletic contests began in ancient Athens as extended celebrations of physical prowess, with the highly prized laurel wreath going to the truly excellent champions of the games.

What is good and how can you know it? Where does our sense for moral excellence or physical excellence come from? The secular thinkers of old Athens had conflicting opinions on these questions. The biblical writers did not. Indeed, 2 Peter 1 is one of the few places in the New Testament in which a writer makes significant use of that Greek term areté. In verse 3 Peter claims that Jesus has called us to himself and that he has done so by his "glory and goodness." But the word rendered "goodness" in the NIV is areté in Greek. That same word pops up in verse 5 when Peter says that once faith has been established in your heart the very next thing which that faith furnishes for you is "goodness."

So Peter is taking the Greeks' most prized virtue of excellence and is locating it singularly in Christ Jesus the Lord. What is goodness? It is not a concept, Peter says, it is a person. How do we know what goodness is? It is not through idle speculations by philosophers but by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit which Jesus, who is goodness incarnate, can send into your hearts. God is goodness.

Well, OK, but what does even that mean? Perhaps a partial hint is found in verse 3 when Peter links goodness with glory. "Glory" in Greek is doxa, from which we get "doxology." It is the standard term to refer to the shining holiness and grandeur of God. "Glory" refers to the punch of God's presence. God has so much power, just is so very holy, and exudes so strongly all that is right and true that you cannot miss his presence. In fact, the glory of God is almost too much for ordinary (and sinful) mortals like us.

Even in the human sphere there are some people who have what we term "great personal presence." There are some people who, partly because of what you know of their reputation, partly because of their position in society, and partly because of some ineffable, hard-to-define personal magnetism simply bowl you over when you are in the same room with them. If you've ever been in attendance when a president has spoken, perhaps you sensed this. My friend Philip Yancey once said that the first time he met President Clinton, he was astonished at the power of his personal presence. A few months ago I was sitting near the stage when Maya Angelou spoke in Calvin's Fieldhouse and though I cannot quite put my finger on why, I felt physically and emotionally jolted by the sheer power of her presence. There was a sense of gravitas, a palpable weight to her very presence.

Interestingly, the Old Testament Hebrew word for "glory" is kabod which is a cognate of the verb kabed meaning "to be heavy" or "to have weight." God's glory is the sheer punch of his holy presence, the sense of gravity and seriousness and weightiness you receive when God is near. Peter links this glory of God with areté. This may provide a clue that there is a connection between the moral and holy grandeur of God and the content of God's goodness. Excellence in Christ means living in such a way as to line up with God and with his excellent designs for how life in this creation is supposed to work.

Perhaps that is why when Peter puts together is own "fruit of the Spirit"-like list here, he puts goodness immediately after faith. Faith is the first gift we receive from God. Through faith we believe not just that a god exists but that the true God of the cosmos has visited this planet in the man called Jesus. Faith assures you that all those gospel truths about Jesus, the nature of his life, ministry, sacrifice, and resurrection are all true. But faith does not end with just knowledge and assurance. Instead it immediately goes on to furnish you with goodness--with a spark of the same moral excellence which God, in all his splendid glory, possesses to the utmost degree.

But we still need to ask the practical questions of how we can further nurture this fruit in our hearts as well as how it will show itself in our daily living. I suspect that a considerable hint is provided by Peter when he talks in this same passage about knowledge, the promises of God, the truths of the gospel, and the need for constant "reminders" of these basics. The fruit of goodness, both in terms of its content and its expression, depends on knowing God's glory as it is seen in the lovely way God set up this universe.

Goodness means recognizing what works in life and what doesn't and then going with the flow. Being good means respecting the built-in limits God has woven into the fabric of creation. It means being interested enough to investigate what's right and wrong and then doing your level best to live within those moral boundaries.

But that may well mean that the presence of goodness in your heart will make you naturally want to be a student of God's Word as well as a curious observer of how things work in God's world. Goodness authorizes being students of God even as it in many ways depends on our ability to deepen our understandings of God and his ways. That may sound merely trite or simplistic but given the foggy state of our minds this ongoing education in God's ways is going to be difficult many times. We live in a very complex world and, despite what we sometimes hear from fundamentalist preachers on TV, you cannot always find some biblical proof text which will provide instant and crystal clear guidance for every conceivable situation you may encounter.

Instead we need abiding curiosity, abiding reminders of the gospel. We need, as Peter writes in verse 13, to have our memory refreshed often through preaching, teaching, Bible studies, and stimulating conversations with fellow believers. We need to struggle and grapple with knotty issues. Goodness insists on such struggles. Not everything is complicated, of course, but some things are. It is merely lazy to declare that everything is pretty cut and dried such that it's always easy both to know and to do the good. It is morally slothful simply to refuse to discuss things that we admit are complex.

The fruit of goodness means that we have a major spiritual boost in terms of knowing and being able to do what is good in God's sight. This fruit means we have a big advantage over those who try to concoct definitions of the good on their own. Paradoxically, however, this fruit also tells us that we are none of us ever finished with learning more, being reminded of the truth, and seeking an ever-sharper awareness of it.

So in a day of relativism, a day in which the zenith of moral education in many schools advances no further than so-called "values clarification" whereby students are encouraged not so much to find the truth as to articulate whatever it is they happen to believe already anyway--in an era like this one the fruit of goodness is very often going to make us the odd ones out. As Charles Taylor noted in his stunning book Sources of the Self, the most many people manage today is wondering what the good thing might be to do but very few seem willing to ponder how we can simply be good at the core of our lives, with our actions then flowing like a rushing stream out of the moral headwater in our hearts.

As people bearing the fruit of goodness within us we surely want to do what is good and excellent in life but more than that we want to be good, to have the weight of God's glory in our hearts so that we can proceed outward into life from that bright center of our existences. We celebrate the good, we revel in it, and we find great joy in doing what we can to live it out, difficult though it sometimes is.

Indeed, we just in general celebrate goodness and all of the fruit of the Spirit. We have but one sermon left in this series when we will think about love. But having looked at joy, compassion, gentleness, patience, faithfulness, and now goodness, it's well to ask how much we really value these things, how much we really want to celebrate them and nurture them in ourselves and in those around us.

I read a wonderful quote the other day by a woman who says she is one of those people who just loves getting Christmas cards which contain one of those annual "Christmas letters" which people compose so as to bring friends up to speed on the latest family news. This woman enjoys such generic yuletide missives and yet is distressed by them, too. As she notes, even the letters from Christian friends rarely show much sensitivity toward or interest in the fruit of the Spirit. "Just once," she writes, "I'd like to open a Christmas letter which said something like, 'Good news! Our child is consistently gentle and kind at home, church, and school!' Or, 'We're so pleased to say that little Christie shows real compassion toward the hurting in her class and young son Joey is about as joyful a child as you could hope to meet.'"

The fruit of the Spirit are not hanging around waiting to be plucked, we need to cultivate them and celebrate them in also our children. What would happen, this writer wonders aloud, if parents were willing to get as enthused about the presence of spiritual fruit in their children (and were as willing to brag about such things in Christmas letters) as they are about sports trophies, good report cards, and acceptance letters to this or that university?

In a society which spends 99% of its energy judging people based on their looks, income, or performances, we need to have a different focus. We need to tell our children and each other that what matters most is that we are good people for God. No, we are not trying to be good to earn our way into heaven. We try to be good because our place in heaven was long ago secured by grace alone. We live our every moment as temples of the Holy Spirit and as with the ancient Temple in old Jerusalem, so now with our hearts: we have the weight of glory inside us. Given who we are in Christ, two words which we should never say tritely but two words which we should nevertheless always say are, "Be good! For God's sake, be good!" Amen.