Get your gloves on.

One of the greatest pains in a gardener's sensibilities is weeding.  Weeds are frustrating because they seem to sprout faster, grow bigger, and spread farther than most cultivated plants.  And they also manage to keep growing in spite of a lack of rain.  

Some people argue that weeds are contextual.  A weed is “a plant that is not valued where it is growing,” (Merriam-Webster) which implies that it might have value somewhere else.  And I can get behind that. That annoying clover in a strawberry patch is a desirable plant in a hay field.  I love walking through a field and seeing clover blossoms bobbing in the wind. Clover and alfalfa add a lot of nutrition to a hay field and the animals that feed from it.  But I pull clover out of my garden because the clover is getting in the way of my family’s nutrition.  We don’t eat hay.  We do eat strawberries.  

Morning Glory at work. 

 Moreover, if we look at the class of plants that we call weeds, I think we will discover that they are often the plants, like thistles, that have evolved to take over everything.   They reproduce inmore ways and more efficiently than the average garden plant without giving us much in return.  When we lived in Oregon, I had a love-hate relationship with wild blackberries.  They produce delicious fruit, but they can also take over whole plum trees in the space of a summer and grow thorns that are easily the size of my fingernail. Another in this class is morning glories, also known as bindweed, a beautiful flowering vine that will pull down absolutely anything in an effort to get to the sun. The only plant I’ve ever seen take over a wild blackberry patch is a morning glory vine (though kudzu might give it a run for its money). Lots of growth; not much in return.  

All of these, even thistles, have their place in the natural order (or so I am told), but all of them are also dangerous to the cultivated plants in a garden.  If I expect my tomatoes to produce fruit in August, I have to keep them free of morning glories in June and July.  If I want plums, I have to forgo the wild blackberries.  Or rather, I have to get rid of them.  No weed is ever content with a tiny corner.  Weeds are designed to spread, to take advantage of any open space, any drooping branch, any careless moment. 

So too for our own lives.   There are influences in our souls and in society that produce no godly fruit, and yet they spread like thistles or kudzu: the seed of an unchecked thought, the runner of an unforgiven sin, possibly even between generations, the rooting branch of an unholy desire.  These things may be immoral; they may be demanding; or they may just be distracting.  The problem is that they will spread, and they will tie up and pull down every righteous impulse to get the time and attention they need to survive and produce their own fruit.  Envy, jealousy, or prejudice muscle out charity.  Resentment and entitlement (which is a combination of pride and coveting) keep joy from ever really leafing or flowering.  That desire for approval or fear of conflict takes over a space where courage or justice should grow.  The soil is good.  The sun and water are plentiful.  But the garden rapidly becomes a tangled mess, and any fruit that grows to maturity is a miracle.   

Weeds in our lives is an immensely personal topic, and honestly, I’m reluctant to tackle it to the depth that it should be tackled because any conversation on this topic will feel personal.  The weeds that are easy to pull are not the weeds that need the attention.  The dangerous weeds are the ones closest to our hearts.   Jesus defines spiritual weeds as “the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things” (Mark 4:18-19).  What keeps you awake worrying at night?  What makes you angry with your neighbors, both near and far?  What desire makes you discontent with your current situation? OR what makes you sit back with a sigh of satisfaction at the end of the day and feel that all is well?  What wealth, be it physical, spiritual, or financial, are you trusting in or investing in?  That might be a weed too.  If it’s a weed, it needs to die.   The Cross is the great garden spade, and all of our weeds will die on it eventually.  If you are not willing to tack something to the Cross, it has taken over too much of your soul.  

Since this is such a personal topic, let me give you a personal example.  About 10 years ago, before my husband entered the ministry, we bought a house.  We had been looking for over a year, and finally we found almost exactly what we were looking for (in our price range too).  It was big enough for our family, it had good bones, it had gorgeous shade trees, established fruit trees and vines, and its own well in a wonderful neighborhood.  It was a mess when we bought it, and we put a lot of elbow grease into it, but we turned that house into our own personal paradise. We worked hard.  We learned new skills.  We developed a lifestyle.   It was a dream come true, and many an evening, we sat in the backyard with a glass of something cold and sighed in satisfaction, feeling that all was right in our tiny corner of the world.  

Then Seth got called into the ministry, and suddenly a move for graduate school became a necessity.  The thought of selling that house was hard.  We honestly thought about having Seth commute from Oregon to Michigan, three months at a time, and pay rent so that we wouldn’t lose the house, the neighborhood, and the school environment that we had achieved while we had been there.  It took some advice from wise friends to pry us free and get us back on the course that led us to where we are today. Selling that house was not easy, but it allowed us to live rent free in Michigan and taught us the wisdom of letting go of temporary things.  

The process of weeding our lives is a complicated one.  After all, at the base level, we are the dirt that the plants grow in.  We don’t know at any given moment what is a weed and what is a plant that will grow good fruit. We have some help with this.  Our gardening manual (the Bible) tells us explicitly to get rid of things that grow anger, malice, envy, slander, laziness, contention, and discontentment, just to name a few.  Any of these fruits in your life should tell you that you need to pull some weeds.  It also tells us to entrust our security and identity to God to the point where we can let go of absolutely anything else.  And the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, keeping company with fellow believers, confessing to trusted friends, and daily immersion in Scripture will act like a mulch to keep the soil soft so that it’s easier to pull those weeds.  

Thistles advancing on my compost bin.

But ultimately what patch of earth can weed itself? That’s a rhetorical question.  We don’t weed ourselves.  God, as a consummate gardener, is going to pull these weeds out of our lives.  We, as living soil, will have the opportunity to release them or to try to hold on.  And this is a constant process.  Even the tiniest sins scatter seeds in corners of our lives to sprout later.  Gossip, passive aggressiveness, and looking out for number one become habits remarkably quickly.  And anyone who has ever wrestled with a sin of identity like anger, alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual identity, or workaholism knows that you don’t become clean by yourself.   These things have to come under the Lordship of Christ and submit to being weeded, sometimes weeded out. Spiritual mulch (as described above) helps with this, but ultimately, only God can do it. 

 The fact is that a large percentage of our lives is uncultivated, not ready for the word of God to be scattered in it.  We are all full of weeds, cheerfully giving the soil of our heart, mind, and strength to whatever suits us personally, be it that new house, that pretty coworker, or that unsatisfied childhood longing.  Think of what Jesus lists as weeds of the soul:  the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and desire for other things. Is anything that fits into those categories ever satisfied?   Everything in this world wants to claim as much of you as it can get.  Jobs, political parties, ideologies, even commercial products like social media or tv shows want you to make them your identity, body and soul.  

But you are not your own.  You were bought with a price, which means that you will not be abandoned to the thistles of the soul.  Join God in this great work of growing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Open your heart to the Spirit’s prompting when you hear, “It’s time to get rid of that.  That right there is keeping you from being fruitful.” And take steps to let it go.    

The Question of Fruitfulness

Gardens are supposed to produce fruit.  Fruit for the summer, but also fruit for the rest of the year.  Homegrown tomatoes on a burger in August are amazing, but so is homemade spaghetti sauce in the middle of February.  Many of my neighbors, who have been gardening a lifetime longer than I have, store their own jams, applesauce, peaches, plums, pickles, salsa, onions, peppers, and potatoes. The cellar is still very much a thing in Southwest Minnesota.  The produce in your cellar could keep you alive through the winter, especially if a blizzard keeps you from getting to the grocery store.  

And gardens are also supposed to produce fruit so that there will be plants next year.  While you probably can’t grow a plant from the average grocery store tomato (I’ve tried.), seeds come from fruit.  No fruit, no seeds.  No seeds, no next generation of plants.  No next generation of plants, no food in the future.  

People who garden depend on the growth and production of their plants.  Either the garden produces,

Weeds ousting my peas.  

or you go to the grocery store and pay for that food a second time (since you paid for the garden already).  Any number of things can go wrong in a garden.  This year is an exceptionally dry year across much of the United States.  In the Midwest, where the fields and gardens depend on the rain for their water, many gardens are constantly on the verge of wilting at that key moment or producing bitter fruit because it couldn’t produce the necessary sugars.    

Weeds are also constantly attracted to the open, fertilized soil, and they always seem to spring up earlier and faster than the plants that you want to grow.  Without constant attention, dandelions will take the space you saved for spinach (I don’t care if dandelions are edible.  They taste awful.)  

And garden pests come in many forms.  In my history of growing plants, I have had to trap ground squirrels, salt slugs, spray grasshoppers and dispose of skunks.  I have seen deer jump over 6’ fences to get at a row of beans and had rodents burrow under my shed to get at my cucumber vines.  Gardeners have a wide array of expensive gadgets to keep their produce for themselves.  Our solution is a dog, and she is worth every penny.  

Popular opinion often regards God as some sort of magician.  After all, he speaks, and things happen. But God is no stranger to hard work.  The exquisite balance of the physical creation is evidence of his great attention to detail, but our spiritual states receive no less attention from him.  From the very beginning, God has worked hard to set up an environment where his people could grow and flourish and bear the kind of fruit that God is looking for (Genesis 1: 28), namely life.   The prophets and the gospels are full of references to God looking for wisdom, righteousness, peace and justice because with these things, new plants are planted and new fruit is made, and life flourishes in the world.  

But, just as in our little gardens a lot of hard work may not result in a bountiful harvest, so in God’s great garden of humanity, the harvest can be disappointing too.  Isaiah 5 sets the tone:

I will sing for the one I love,

A song about his vineyard.

My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.

He dug it up and cleared it of stones

And planted it with the choicest vines. 

Imagine the backbreaking work of pulling stones out of a hillside.  Around here, rock picking is an annual event.  Whole families will go out and run behind a tractor, picking up rocks and tossing them into a bin on the back before a field is ready to plant.     

He built a watchtower in it

And cut out a winepress as well.  

That’s a considerable expense, and it shows that this is an investment that will pay off over a lifetime. This vineyard owner expects to press some wine (and wine wasn't just for getting drunk. It was also used for medicines and daily consumption with meals).  

Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, 

But it yielded only bad fruit.   (Is. 5:1-2) 

Ouch.  Expectation denied.  Effort wasted.  Disappointment.  Plan B, anybody?  

In this poem, the vineyard is the nations of Judah and Israel.  God put them in a fruitful land, gave them (mostly) diligent leaders, and most importantly gave them his law.  In return, he was looking for justice and righteousness not only for the people in Israel but also as a model for the world and future generations.  What he saw was bloodshed and distress (Is. 5:7).

So, what went wrong?  Well, if you read the rest of Isaiah 5, it seems that God’s people had gotten rich and arrogant, creating huge estates by kicking poor off their hereditary land, throwing lavish all day entertainments and making an art of getting drunk while at the same time distorting justice, philosophy and religion to support their decadent lifestyles (a recurring human pattern).  God was so disappointed that he ripped up his garden for a couple of generations to let the soil rest so he could reset his plan A.  

Now, cheating other people or just taking more than is your due to maintain your own comfort is definitely one way to overrun your part of the garden and make it unfruitful.  But we can also just stop doing what’s good because it’s hard, which is like plants in poor soil or in a time of drought.  Or maybe we just want something outside the will of God, and we go get it like melons outside the fence.  Or maybe we just haven’t learned to recognize the hand of the gardener.  There are lots of ways to lose out on being fruitful.  All that said, there are some very stern warnings against being fruitless in Scripture.  The one I find most alarming is in John 15, when Jesus says that the Father prunes every branch that bears no fruit and throws them into the fire.  

The grace of this situation is that God keeps his garden, and God is the Master Gardener. He knows how to get fruit out of every plant and every soil. He is going to keep working his garden until we are fruitful, individually, collectively, and eternally.  He never abandons this patch of soil that is humanity, and he sees the good work forward until it is complete.  The resulting gardening is going to be painful, both for the gardener and the plants.  It may not seem fair in the moment when God prunes a personal tendency or removes a companion or uproots a people group.  But one, ten, or fifty generations in the future, God will bring about a great harvest through what he does today.  Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? 

 

I love working in my garden in the middle of summer.  The long waiting period after spring planting is over, and my little garden space is alive.  The beans are climbing.  The tomatoes are blooming.  And best of all, the strawberries are producing like crazy.  It’s all wonderfully alive.  But as I work among all the greenery every morning, I’ve been surprised by how much death goes into producing the life that I enjoy eating so much.  

Part of the death that I’m referring to comes from the mulch that I use to keep the weeds down.  Every autumn, I lay a thick layer of leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, and kitchen compost over the shells of my garden plants from the previous summer.  A lot of things were trimmed and uprooted to make that mulch.  But even in a living garden in the middle of July, I end up killing a lot of things to keep my garden going.  

See, nurturing a garden involves making a lot of decisions.  I have to decide which plants live and which plants die.  Plants like grass or clover, which can be very useful in other situations, take up space and nutrients in my garden patch that I would rather save for other plants.  On the other hand, thistles, which nobody loves as far as I know, spread like crazy and by every means a plant can. 
Volunteer tomatoes will overshadow my bean sprouts and attract dangerous pests if I let them.  And even the plants that I am actually cultivating send out runners or tendrils in the middle of their fellow plants in an effort to get as much soil, sun, and water as possible.  Then I, as the gardener, have to wade in with sheers, spade, and garden gloves and decide who gets what and also what stays and what goes.  

It’s a funny feeling, making those kinds of decisions.  With thistles, I feel no guilt at all.  Thistles are the enemy. I take great pleasure in pulling up a thistle all the way to the roots.  But clover is a pleasant little plant that makes pleasant little blossoms.   Pulling up clover makes me feel harsh and a little arbitrary, but I can’t harvest my spinach if it’s covered with clover.  The one that really gets me, however, is pulling up garden plants that are somehow out of place. What if that’s a really healthy tomato volunteer crowding in on my cantaloupe?  I don’t want to kill something good.  Still, I have to do it.  That’s my job as the gardener.  The point of a garden is to make enough fruit to supply my summer table and my winter pantry.  Weeds, thistles, and crowded plants all get in the way of the productivity of my garden.  

God is also a gardener.  From Genesis to Revelation, garden imagery dominates Scripture. The story begins in the Garden of Eden, and someday it will culminate in the Tree of Life.  Sometimes the garden is responsive, and sometimes it’s not, but still whenever God and his people are together in a place, we see a garden, a vineyard, a cultivated space arranged and tended to produce fruit.  And we, his people, being both his creation and his image, are both his garden and gardeners with him.  

We, like gardens, are intended to grow fruit, and God, as our gardener, cultivates us to grow it. The thought of having our lives pruned and weeded might be frightening, but as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “Because I belong to him, Christ by his Holy Spirit assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready to live for him” (Q&A 1).  Or to paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the one who started this good work in our lives will make sure it is completed (Phil. 1:6 NIV). But sometimes bringing the good work to completion involves more than we bargain for.  And in those times, it’s good to know in whose hands we rest.  So join me in these next few weeks as I ponder the idea of God as a gardener, and also the role that death plays in coming to life. 

Happy New Year

 Happy New Year, Everyone.  

It's the last weekend of Christmas break, and we've been busy taking down our Christmas tree.  Funny how empty the living room looks when the tree is gone the way of the compost heap.  The space we didn't think we could find in November looks awfully vacuous in January.  Still, I'm kind of glad that the tree is gone and the ornaments are back in their boxes.  Last year, I felt like I couldn't possibly get enough Christmas.  This year, I am ready to move on.  

And yet, as I was winding up the extension cord, I felt a moment of regret.  There's something encouraging about a house that keeps the light burning all winter long.  We need peace on earth and good will to all men in the middle of February as much as we do in December.  Where should we find that Christmas hope once all the decorations have come down?  

For the Christian, that's a silly question.  Our hope doesn't change once Jesus leaves the manger.  If anything, it gets more solid.  A baby with an angel introduction is a good beginning, but unless Jesus goes on to secure our hope with his perfect obedience, his divine consciousness, his willing death, and his resurrection, then there would be no point to Christmas.  On the other hand, if he'd never come to be with us, there would be no hope at all.  

In the meme mind of the western world, Christmas has a magical reputation.  Stretching back to the Middle Ages, the Christmas season has boasted stories of animals talking, of fortunes reversed, of dead plants blooming and feasts appearing in the wilderness.   On this one night, the power and grace of God move freely among desperate humanity again and remind them that they are loved.  Now, to mention Christmas in a story has become a synonym for evoking the name of Christ himself.  Christmas Past, Present, and Future restored humanity to Ebenezer Scrooge.  If movies are any indication, we believe that Christmas can bring peace in warring communities, reverse downward spirals, cure misers and alcoholics, and save marriages.  The  presence of Christ has left such a hallowed touch on this day that even the secular world can't shake the idea that there is power there. Real life stories like the Christmas Truce of 1914 keep us hoping that there is a divine power that can reach down in to our mess and keep us from destroying each other.  Brief flashes of Christmas light illumine our otherwise dark lives and make us hope for a brighter future, believe in the power of redemption, and remember that we love each other.  

As far as reminders go, Christmas is a good one, but it's only the starting place.  The presence of God didn't vanish when the angels went back into heaven.  Baby Jesus got a lot bigger, a lot more articulate, and to be honest, a lot more demanding.  What was whispered around a sleeping baby (we may assume) was preached from hill tops and proclaimed in council rooms and courts of justice.  Not only has God come, but He has no intention of leaving.  The Kingdom of God is near; the Spirit of God is with His people.  Immanuel is not just a word of Christmas joy.  It is also a challenge.  God is with us, and we are with God.  What are we going to do now?  

Maybe the difference is the weather (we have snow and sunshine, 32*F), or maybe I'm just eager to leave 2020 behind, but this year, something seems to say, "Move forward.  Don't rest here.  I have work for you out in the wider world."  So, one by one, the ornaments are getting packed up.  The greenery is being swept up.  The lights are being wound around old pieces of cardboard.   Christmas is over.  The wisemen are coming tomorrow.  Herod might be on his way thereafter.  We need to gird up our loins and have the donkey saddled.  God has work for us to do. 

Mary and Joseph weren't allowed to stop at Christmas.  They had the infallible promise of the Kingdom, as evidenced by the baby in their arms, but they also had their part to play in its coming.  They had to go to Egypt.  They had to raise the Christ and keep him safe.  They had to be both parent and worshipper.  

That can't have been an easy job.  In fact we see them fail at it more than once.  But their job is what we have to do too.  We have the Kingdom of God in our hands in our children, our spouses, our friends, our neighbors, our students, our coworkers, and our government officials.  The promise that we receive with that is infallible.  The Kingdom has already come, and there is nothing that can stop God from bringing it.  But we have some big work ahead of us.  Really, the work has never been other than big.  This is a cosmic Kingdom that we're talking about.  And it's not the power of Christmas that pushes us forward.  It's the power of Easter, God not only with us but God refusing to go away.  

2021 is not going to be an easy year.  Quite apart from the normal challenges of life, we have the fallout of 2020 to deal with.  Nothing is going to be the same going forward.  That's how life is.  Think about it: we have all had personal challenges that toss life over, flip the table so to speak.  After the death of a loved one, a battle with cancer, recognition of an addiction or countless other struggles, life is never the same again.  That individual example of humanity has to move forward in a new reality, and God gives them the grace to do it.    Now, with 2020 in the books, most of the world's population is moving forward into a new reality all at once, and God will give us the grace to do it too.  The promise is already given and sealed.  It has been sealed with nothing less precious than the blood of the Son of God and Man and the Spirit of God.  And the work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent.  

Lift up your heads, my friends.  The Light has dawned upon us, and the way ahead is cleared for us, even if it isn't very easy to see.  In the coming days, it may be necessary to lower our shoulder to our heavy load, but we should never lower our eyes from the Risen Christ.  The Spirit of God is with us in the trenches, but the Son of Man is at the right hand of the Father, and nothing can remove Him from that place.  This means that nothing can remove us from that place either because we are in the palm of His hand.  So whatever you are facing or fearing this coming year, new concerns or old, face them in the light of the Risen Jesus.

Waiting, Christmas, Corona, and Despair

Is anyone else tired of waiting?  

For instance, I just got finished waiting for spring.  Since I’m a west coaster, my physical calendar expects green leaves and flowers to happen earlier than they do in MInnesota.  For myself (and my daughter), the month between March 15 and April 20 was quite possibly the longest month of the year.  Not only were we full into social distancing mode, but the signs of spring just weren’t coming.  In spite of the fact that the birds were back, and the snows were melting soon after they fell, a normal spring involved warmth, sunshine, and plant growth, preferably in rapid succession.  We knew that spring had to come; it just hadn’t yet.  Now it’s here, and I’m thick in the middle of laying out my garden.  

Waiting for spring as a transplant is a lot like waiting for Christmas as a kid.  Everyone says that it is coming.  Your experience says that it has always come before.  But the wait just seems so long that doubt begins to creep in.  I, myself, have heard kids say, “What if Christmas doesn’t come this year?”  or “It feels like Christmas is never going to come.”  And yet it does.  Always.  

As adults, we tend to smile at these feelings.  We’ve got enough life experience stored up to know that feelings don’t alter the natural course of events. “Summer and winter, springtime and harvest shall never cease” (Genesis 8:22).  But the waiting periods of adult life aren’t so regular: finding that job, kicking that cancer, waiting out a political election, seeing our children out of some danger, or watching our spouses deploy.    The end result of these waiting experiences isn’t so predictable.  And so we as adults get to experience that same feeling of “I just can’t see the end of this” or “I don’t see how this is ever going to get better.”  It’s easy to lose hope. 

 As a Navy wife for seven years, I struggled through a lot of waiting.  In the middle of a deployment, it’s easy to forget what life with one’s spouse is like.  The time in between gets monotonous; it feels heavy and unreal.  One loses sight of the end and begins to think, “Even when they do come back, that can’t possibly make this better.  This is just too hard.”  

On the surface, that sounds a lot like, “Christmas is never going to get here,” but there’s a difference.  Christmas always comes, and while waiting for Christmas or for spring doesn’t leave any lasting scars.  But in adult experiences, waiting can tarnish hope.  And when hope gets tarnished, our expectations change. Our happiness gets tinged with cynicism or fear or despair.  We might become afraid to spend money, like people who lived through the Great Depression.  We might go through life expecting to be physically or emotionally assaulted, as many combat veterans or victims of abuse can testify.  Or we might become irrationally afraid that our spouse will depart for good, as I was for years after Seth got out of the Navy.  We aren’t able to enjoy what we’ve received.  Our capacity for hope has been depleted by overuse.  It’s worn out.  It’s broken.  

I think a lot of people are experiencing this now because of the CoronaVirus, but it’s hardly new to human experience.  It’s easy to be overwhelmed when your spirit has to do a lot of heavy lifting all at once.  We have a lot of fears to balance right now.  Will someone we love get sick?  Will there be medical treatment for my problem?  Will the economy recover in time to keep my business from going bankrupt?  Will I be able to feed my family and pay my rent this week?  Will we still have religious freedom when this is all over? Are my kids getting the education they need?  That’s a lot to lift, and it’s no wonder than people are getting tired of it.  

The Holy Spirit has been pushing me toward the book of 1 Peter during this crisis.  Peter was writing to a bunch of Christians in an uncertain place.  They were being persecuted, but in a way that still allowed some of normal life to go on.  Historical sources tell us that when Christians weren’t being fed to the lions, they were still facing things like being turned out by their masters, losing their jobs or their homes (if they were renting), being turned away from certain services, and being the last to receive aid in times of crisis.  This slow-burn persecution still happens today, and it creates a lot of uncertainty.  Maintaining a strong front in the face of an immediate enemy is one thing, but how do you resist unspecified enemies that could come at any moment or slow deprivation stretched out over a long period of time? 

Suffering, uncertainty, and helplessness tend to assault our sense of self-worth.  When we feel like we can’t do anything about a situation, we begin to question how effective we are in the world in general.  Suffering induces shame, whether we deserve shame or not. Isolation leads us to question ourselves, our friends,and our government.  Exile is hard.  Man is born to trouble, just like sparks have to fly upward.

In the midst of this, Peter reminds his beloved friends to take an eternal perspective on their situation.  Not all suffering is connected to shame, and their self worth does not lie in their social efficacy.  They are not made of perishable things but imperishable.  And these struggles have come so that the imperishable cord that runs through their lives, the faith in Jesus Christ that God has sown into each one of them, can be refined, strengthened, and matured.  They were chosen before the creation of the world, they have been purified by faith and obedience, they are united with Christ Jesus in their suffering, and they will be shielded by God until they receive the inheritance that is in heaven.  

Three things struck me about this letter as I read it

1. How many times Peter refers to the divine seed of the people he is writing to.  He speaks of their salvation as a concrete fact, one that should be built around and planned on.   The immortality of his readers, by the grace of God, is the central fact of this letter, and it shapes everything else.  
2. That immortality makes them different from the people around them.  They are a “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession that [they] may  declare the praises of him who called [them] out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (2:9)
3. That difference is manifested in hope that other people don’t understand.  “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect” (3:15).  Peter is assuming that their hope will be obvious.  People are going to see it and say, “How can you have hope like that right now?”  And they’ll have to explain.  

Hope is a strange thing. It is an enjoyment of a possibility that isn’t proven yet.   Hope can only really exist in uncertainty, but it literally breeds miracles.  Hope for a better life inspires immigrants to leave family, property, and community and move to another country to start all over again.   People who continue to hope in the face of impossible circumstances have regained nations.  Hope allows people to resist tyrants and die knowing that they  will leave a better world behind them.  Hope of the Resurrection changed the world.  Great things happen when people can hope for great things.  

Faith is the certainty of what you hope for.  Peter and his readers were hoping for their own holiness (purification) and the glory of God.  And they were so certain of it that they were able to do great things like love when they had nothing, submit to unfair rulers, and suffer cheerfully in full view of an incredulous world.  

So in this time of uncertainty, what are you hoping for?  

That’s a big question, isn’t it?  There are a lot of great struggles being waged right now.  Human wisdom and scientific innovation are wrestling with death.  The human spirit is wrestling with isolation, fear, frustration, and a general feeling of invalidity.  The economy is wrestling with government restrictions, supply chain disruptions, and consumer panic.  Justice and freedom are wrestling with the concentration of emergency powers.  That’s a lot of uncertainty.  It’s a breeding ground for despair, but it’s also the perfect soil for hope.  So what are we hoping for? 

If we are hoping for a vaccine or a quick and effective treatment for the CoronaVirus, we may or may not be disappointed.  If we are hoping for a new embracing of the Constitution as it was originally written, I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.  If we are hoping that the economy will bounce back like a rubber band, and six months from now neither our children nor our bank accounts will remember this economic shutdown, I think we’re being unrealistic.  Things will get better for most people;  they always do.  But they will never be the same.  If our hope is that things will go back to the way they were, our hope will fail.  We can hope for better, but if that hope depends on human function, whatever comes is going to be a mixed blessing.  

However, if our hope is in God, then we already have one certainty.  We know that difficulty, shame, and death are in the long run irrelevant.  “Death, where is thy sting,” is just a fancy way of saying, “Is that all you’ve got?”  Is watching your family struggle hard?  Is postponing medical treatment risky?  Are our fears legitimate? Yes because they are painful, and it is natural to recoil from pain.  But at the same time, no.  And this is something that we need to wrap our heads around:  Suffering the way Jesus suffered is an honor. It is a direct connection to Jesus Christ, and it is the fastest way to get sin out of our lives. We may not  be able to take up a literal cross, but we can take an eternal view on the frustrations and dangers that the current crisis is pushing on us.  We can pour our frustrations out  to God instead of hurling them on Facebook.  And when people notice our silence, they will ask us why we can bear this with equanimity, and then we say, “Because death doesn’t scare me, and I know that God can make good things out of this.“ 

Why is this happening to us?  “These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith -- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though it has been refined by fire -- may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed”  (1:7)

Remember what Christ has done for you, rremember what He deserves from you, and also remember that the work of our hands is not the only way God makes his kingdom come.  Sometimes it’s not what we do but how we handle what happens to us that brings God the most glory. Somehow, somewhere, the Kingdom of God is advancing because of the CoronaVirus.  Can we be glad about that?  

Can you see it in your own life?  Maybe you’ve had to give up something that was coming between you and your Heavenly Father.  If so, don’t look back.  Maybe you’ve become more humble, more conscious of your neighbor, more sensitive to your spouse, more involved with your kids.  If so, thank God and pursue that.  Maybe this will make us all more patient and less selfish and more aware of how the economy works.  Maybe our lives will become simpler so we can give more to those who need it.  You know your life better than I do.  But in the midst of all this, remember to keep an eternal perspective.    You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.  Your inheritance in heaven is secured by Jesus Christ, and your soul  is shielded by God himself for the duration of this trial, however long it may last.  Your loved ones are in his hands, and his hands never let anyone fall.  Let that be the anchor that you hang all your worries on.  It can support them.  And if your divine identity makes you feel less afraid for the future, don’t be afraid to say as much.  People should have a reason for asking you why you have hope.