“What Shall We Do?”[1]
2 Peter 3:12a
“Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God!”
When I began planning this service
earlier in the week, I had something else in mind. I had jokingly written
“Inescapable – Part 2” underneath “What Shall We Do?” the title for today’s
sermon. The joke was, of course, that I would continue from where I left off
last week. I had even planned to open my sermon with a short clip from The Matrix. However, life took a bit of
an interesting turn and there was no way that I could – in good conscious –
continue on the same route I had been planning to take. From my perspective, it
would have diminished the Good News of the Gospel to do so. And one of my
fundamental convictions about the Church in today’s world is that God is still
speaking to us, even if only in the soft tones of the hugs we share with people
who are nothing like us or the cries of distress and death from the victims of
the deadly car that sped into a group of counter-protestors who had gathered to
object to the Unite the Right Rally, which gathered right-wing paramilitary
groups, white nationalists, and the Alt-Right to protest the removal of a
statute of Robert E. Lee with chants for “Blood and Soil” and “Sieg heil”.
It was a display that propelled Senator
Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to state that, “My brother didn’t give his life fighting
Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” Similarly, Senator
Marco Rubio (R-Florida) stated, “Nothing patriotic about #Nazis, the #KKK or
#WhiteSupremacists It’s the direct opposite of what #America seeks to be.” Senator
Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called upon the Department of Justice “to immediately
investigate and prosecute this grotesque act of domestic terrorism”. Needless
to say, I was tempted to go on with the rest of the verse from 2 Peter (not
just the first clause) which states that the Day of God will see the heavens
“set ablaze, and dissolved” and the elements melted with fire.[2] There could be a bit of
God’s justice in a sermon like that, but that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m
not sure that it would be easy for me to find the Good News in the direction
that clause would lead me. And even if the reports of the attacks of clergymen
and women are true, Christianity has a long and proud tradition of speaking
truth and love into a world filled with violence and hate. We are all called to
do our best to speak and live God’s love into this world of ours, particularly
when it’s painful and it wrenches at your soul. We are called to die for love
if it comes to that. That’s what Bonhoeffer and scores of other Christians have
had to do over the millennia.
And so, I was left – last night –
wondering how I could take this weekend’s events and bring the Gospel to all of
us this morning in our need, in our brokenness, and in the fragility and
instability that we all bear in the weakness of our minds. Or, just as
importantly in my mind, how could I respond not just in front of all of you,
but in front of my Muslim roommate who told me yesterday that he’s glad that he
didn’t accept an offer from the University of North Carolina, because he
doesn’t want to go any further South and that he’s glad that he loves Philly so
much. So here am I, sitting with a terrible mixture of emotions – wondering
“what should I do? How can I be like Christ in this moment?” And this, dear
friends, is where I want to come back to the first clause of this verse from 2
Peter which can be read as – “Wait for and hasten to the Day of God!”
This is, admittedly, an incredibly strange
statement. The NIV translation tries to remove the inherent paradox intrinsic
to this statement by translating it as, “as you look forward to the day of God
and speed its coming.” It’s an understandable move given that the NIV always
tries to make sense of what’s being said in Greek, rather than translate it precisely. However, I think that there’s something lost in this
treatment. I think that there is an inherent tension here between the ‘waiting’
and the ‘hastening’ and that this tension was left there on purpose. The
theologian Karl Barth noted this weird phrase “wait for and hasten to” and he
jokingly referred to it as the “hurry up and wait” clause.[3] He had a love for
antithesis. And it was this love that can help us recognize the paradox of
the Gospel – that we are both “owned and loved by God even in our rebellion and
that the day of the Lord is both our mercy and our judgment at the same time.”[4] But the most important I
learned from Barth this week was that this verse – this clause that says “Wait
for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” – is actually an answer to a
question we all ask, namely “what does it mean to be a human being?” or more
practically “what are we supposed to do?” Later on, in today’s benediction,
you’re going to see a reference to “the existential question” and this is all
that really means – what does it mean for us to exist? What are we supposed to
do with our lives? Or in my case, what am I supposed to do with this weekend’s
events?
This question, “What shall we do?” is a
frequent one in the Bible. We encounter it in Luke 3:10, 12, 14; and Acts 2:37.
It’s the kind of question we encounter when we realize that things cannot go on
as usual. As Barth says,
“It is the question of the rich man when
the meaning of his wealth and situation of comfortable well-being becomes
questionable… It is the question of the young woman when she becomes aware that
nice clothes and marriage are not the total of what a young woman should think
about. It is the question of a pastor when his position and peculiar dignity in
the midst of worldly life strike him as odd. It is the question of superficial
persons when they become anxious about their soul…. It is the question of the
businessman when he is not fully satisfied with what he is doing, but is driven
now and again by a mysterious disquiet, so that he glances down with the
question, “Where have I come from, and where am I really going? ... All of them
ask, “What should we do?”[5]
It’s easy for us to get on
a track of the way we normally do things. We are all creatures of habit to some
extent. For some of us, that might mean that we view the world through our
experiences, our character, our faith, or the traditions we’ve inherited. And
yet, all of those things are imbued with our humanity both in it’s beauty and
it’s fragility – it’s instability. We all have that voice of protest inside of
us that tells us that there is something wrong with the world and it’s that
disquiet that wakes us up.
When the Bible answers our cry – “What should I do?” with
the phrase, “Wait
for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” it is suggesting that our
humanity comes from our relationship to God. It’s derived from the fact that we
all belong to God and, to continue from last week, that we can never escape the
love that God shows us, even when we try to run from it. The verse that I chose
for today gives us an antithesis of time – we’re called to hurry up and wait,
but this idea is intricately linked to another much larger idea of salvation.
When God looks upon our world, he extends a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ – an affirmation
of all that is good and a condemnation of all that is evil. God is both loving
and just and we live in the existential tension between those two realities.
When we ask, “What shall I do?” and we
hear “Wait for and hasten to the coming of the day of God” in response we are
being called to wait for Christ’s return, but we are also being called to make
it a reality in the present. That’s the beautiful thing about Christianity.
It’s not just a set of propositions or beliefs. It’s a way of life. It’s a
calling to follow Christ and live according to His Spirit. And this calling is
tough because it requires us to strive and grow in all of our struggles. And as
we learned a few weeks ago, Romans 5:3-5 tells us that,
“we know that suffering
produces perseverance; 4 perseverance,
character; and character, hope. 5 And
hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
So for now we struggle and
we pray. We look forward to the day of the Lord, when Christ will return,
trumpets will sound, and all of creation will be healed from it’s broken
darkness. But until that time comes, we hasten to the coming of that day. We
don’t just wait, we strive to make that’s day’s fulfillment a reality. We
strive to live into the example of Jesus and breathe love into this world. We
struggle with the most difficult of callings – to love our enemies.[6]
And some days I think that’s one of the hardest things Jesus asks us to do. I
doubt that I’m the only one who has to ask, “how do I love Nazis?” and yet
Christ tells us to pray “for those who persecute you” and to love
even those who seem most abhorrent because that’s what God does. He judges
certainly, but God also loves and he does so because he is perfect.[7]
And that is what
we are called to do as well. We live in the tension between what theologians
call the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We live in an imperfect and broken world
and in so doing have the opportunity to breathe love and hope into it. This is
the ‘already’ – the hastening to in today’s verse. And yet, we are also a
people of hopeful expectation. We know that Jesus will return like a thief in
the night and create a new heaven and a new earth – healed from all these evils
that we see. This is the ‘not yet’. And so, “we look forward to the day of God
and speed its coming.”[8] That is our
calling, even in troubled times such as these.
May we each pray
for strength both this morning and in those days that come. We all need the
strength and power of the Holy Spirit to shape us into better disciples of
Jesus – followers who try to exhibit the kind of love that God showed to us to
others, even those we struggle to understand. This is the way of the cross –
the cross that we are all called to bear. May we all find strength in the
examples before us. Christ, who gave himself for those who crucified him. The
martyrs, who died bringing the message of love to people’s intent on rejecting
it. Civil Rights leaders, who fought for equality. And the Confessing Church,
as it suffered and struggled against fascism and communism. May we grow into this
type of love.
[1] I’m working with a translation
that focuses on this clause exclusively in all of its paradoxical glory. It’s
also a translation that Karl Barth utilized. Original text: προσδοκῶντας καὶ σπεύδοντας τὴν παρουσίαν τῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμέρας;
the second clause follows as: δι’ ἣν οὐρανοὶ πυρούμενοι λυθήσονται καὶ στοιχεῖα
καυσούμενα τήκεται.
[2] 2 Peter 3:12
[3] Karl Barth, “2 Peter 3:12a”, April
29th, 1917 in The Early
Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary, ed. William H.
Willimon, trans. John E. Wilson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,
2009); and “We tarry and - hurry” in Karl Barth, Romans, pp. 30 and 33.
[4] Williams H. Willimon, “Commentary
on 2 Peter 3:12a” in The Early Preaching
of Karl Barth, p. 31.
[5] Karl Barth, “2 Peter 3:12a”, p.
25-26.
[6] Matthew 5:44.
[7] Matthew 5:48.
[8] 2 Peter 3:12a, NRSV translation.