First, Peter is encouraging the early and scattered church to prepare their minds for action. Literally, he is saying stand “on the balls of your feet” and be ready to move. Don’t be flat-footed in the faith. It’s not enough to know more if we have lost the ability to do something with what we know. It’s not enough to be reflective if we have become exclusively reflective and thoughtful and full of interesting questions that we have lost the desire to accomplish something.
We need prepared minds. I have been with well-intentioned people with large hearts to visit countries where the poverty is overwhelming. Their hearts are large but their minds are unprepared for the experience. So, they end up doing more harm than good in their impulsive response to the need. There are times when helping hurts.
I have been with people whose hands have been so anxious to do something that they end up doing more harm than good. They want to fix everything at once. They want to “make a difference” in ways they can see because their minds are less prepared than their hands.
Peter wants us to have prepared minds that are flexible and ready to act – but not impulsive.
Second, impulsive is but another word for being intoxicated. We are easily intoxicated and swept up in novelties, new ideas and trendy fads. Instead, we are to be sober. That doesn’t mean somber but it does mean that we are to have the capacity to be self-regulating and accountable. We are not to be controlled by old habits and patterns that we had when we lived in ignorance and empty lives.
We are not to be controlled by circumstances or what cards we have been dealt. I’ve mentioned it before but when my father was a very young boy he fell on a glass jar and slashed his wrist. The surgeon was drunk and mistakenly cut the nerve to the hand. It turned Dad’s right hand into something almost useless. But, Dad always said this was not a handicap but a fact of life. He never used it as an excuse. He was not bitter about it. In fact, it became a challenge for him to figure out creative ways to get around his “fact of life.” Dad was not going to be controlled by what had happened. Victor Frankl, the death camp survivor and author of “Man’s Search For Meaning” wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”
Third, Peter challenges the church to look forward in hope. The phrase “living in hope” is used 61 times in the New Testament. Obviously, hope is a fundamental of the faith. It was especially true for the early church when the future looked bleak indeed. But hope and living in hope is not the same as positive thinking or optimism. We saw that last week. We do not like the far away or the unseen – but that is our reference point. We live in hope but we don’t live in denial of the present.
In his book, “Good To Great”, Jim Collins relates the story of Admiral James Stockdale and what Collins has come to call the Stockdale Paradox:
“The Stockdale Paradox is named after admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was tortured more than twenty times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to see his wife again. And yet, as Stockdale told Collins, he never lost faith during his ordeal:
“I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Then comes the paradox.
While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prisonmates who failed to make it out of there alive.
“They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn’t handle it.
Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset. He accepted the reality of his situation. He knew he was in hell, but, rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to lift the morale and prolong the lives of his fellow prisoners. He created a tapping code so they could communicate with each other. He developed a milestone system that helped them deal with torture. And he sent intelligence information to his wife, hidden in the seemingly innocent letters he wrote.
Collins and his team observed a similar mindset in the good-to-great companies. They labeled it the Stockdale Paradox and described it like so:
You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time…
You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Our hope is not dependent on things getting better but on our becoming people who can retain the faith and confront the facts.
My friend and mentor Curtis Meadows is such a man. I wrote this about him a couple of years ago:
“Last August, Curtis felt a tingling in his arms that turned quickly to numbness, and within 20 minutes he was paralyzed from the neck down. Rushed to the hospital he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, an inflammation across both sides of his spinal cord that blocks the nerve impulses. Since then, he has been confined to a bed and wheelchair.
This week another longtime friend, Jeff Buford, and I went to see Curtis. While there was some discussion about how Curtis was doing and our catching up about how his life and the lives of his family have changed, the visit reminded me of our very first 30 years ago. Curtis began telling stories – not this time about grant recipients but about the people who were helping him.
He knew about the struggles and challenges of the nurses, aides and therapists who were with him daily. He told us about their families and the effects of living close to the edge where one missed paycheck or brief illness put them at risk. He told about what a major health problem or setback has done to completely unravel the lives of those he has come to know. But he also told us about their courage, perseverance and determination to live without bitterness or anger.”
Victor Frankl put it this way: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Fourth, Peter instructs them to mold themselves to the eternal, not things that come and go. We live in a world of mind-numbing change. The co-author of “Future Shock”, Alvin Toffler, died last week. Do you remember what the definition of future shock is? “Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Does that sound familiar? Has anyone felt that way in the last several years with whole industries being made obsolete by one discovery and innovation after another? That is the world in which we live now and it is not going to slow down. It is only going to accelerate.
People respond in different ways. Some jump on the train and try to keep up or even ahead of the curve. Others, try to make use of the advantages and conveniences without being overwhelmed with every new development. Some, have joined growing communities like the Amish to escape the pace. It’s hard to believe but one of the fastest growing religious communities in the world is the Amish. People are tired of being constantly disrupted and the stress that comes with it.
How do we find what endures and is not fleeting? How do we attach ourselves to what abides? There is a movement of people toward what is called the Benedict Option. St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it. Were it not for him and his network of monks and monasteries, much of classical culture – both skills and art – would have been lost forever. Some think we may be entering a new Dark Ages and losing the fundamental values and practices of the Church. Let me quote historian Robert Louis Wilken:
“Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.”
What does abide no matter the circumstances? What endures? It is not our buildings or institutions. It is not those things we can see and touch. Ironically, it is the very things that are most immaterial and yet essential. How does Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13? “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Finally, the goal of this is “deep love, abiding love, love from the heart.” This is not romance or infatuation of a fearful and awesome love.
This week we are unusually aware of people responding to the tragedies around the country by saying we need to love each other. That sounds good…but it is false. What we need is to obey God and from that will come the love of God that is supernatural. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” That is the inevitable result of our trying to “just love each other.” It ends in destruction instead of peace. We cannot love on our own.
This is a snapshot of a conversation in “The Great Divorce” between one of the “solid ones” and a recent arrival to heaven – Pam. She lost her son and is distraught because she loved him so much. So much that she never got over it. She spent the rest of her life living in the past and what she had lost. In the exchange, Lewis writes of the difference between natural affection/human love and the love that comes from our loving God first.
“You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God…No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods…There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly…And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil…And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.”
The theologian Karl Barth wisely said, “God is love but love is not God.” The deep love from the heart that Peter describes is not to be found outside the love of God. It is converted love and that begins with obedience to God. Love derived from obedience is the only love that is incorruptible and true. Everything else leads to destruction.
Let me close with this from Rod Dreher:
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult…but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as a man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”
It may be that the letters of Peter written so long ago may be perfectly relevant to us today.