"Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God." [1 Peter 1:22-23]
What do you do once you realize you don't have to keep looking over your shoulder?
What do you do when it occurs to you that you don't need to run and hide from divinely-thrown lightning bolts to smite you for some past secret sin?
What would you spend your energy on if you knew you didn't have to save it all for carrying the weight of every past failure on your back?
Or, to put it in the classic wording of the late Gerhard Forde's question, "What will you do, now that you don't have to do anything?"
We will love.
To hear First Peter tell it, it's just that obvious, and it's just that simple. We love--deeply and genuinely--because we no longer have to live under the constant worry of being condemned by God. And with that fear put away and left behind, we find we really are freed to love.
For the past several days, we've been taking a closer look at the passage many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. And in those days, First Peter has been abundantly clear that God has chosen not to hold our sins, our mess-ups, and our worst moments against us. We have been set free, First Peter said, like captives held for ransom and liberated. And even more amazingly, First Peter has told us, God made that choice not to hold our wrongs against us from before the foundation of the world, but rather set in motion the whole sweep of salvation history to rescue us. All of that is the starting point, the given, of the Christian story.
And now the question is, what next? What do people do who know that they are not being targeted from on high or condemned from some celestial throne room? Well, we are finally able to love others genuinely without trying to calculate whether we are being "good enough" to cancel out some of the red marks on our permanent records. In other words, the train of thought isn't complete until it arrives at love, like the plant hasn't arrived at maturity until the new shoots give way to blossoms and then in turn to fruit. Love is where the Christian life is headed, and forgiveness is what makes it possible for us to love others genuinely.
Understanding that is key, because we are otherwise likely to make one of two big theological mistakes in our lives. One is stopping short and reducing the whole of the Christian faith to simply, "You're already forgiven, so go ahead and be a selfish jerk--there's nothing more to following Jesus than just hearing the sentence that you're forgiven. See you in heaven." And the other is to get it all backwards and think that forgiveness of sins can be achieved by being loving enough, like getting paroled for good behavior.
First Peter help make it clear for us: the next step beyond hearing you are redeemed is to realize that you are now freed for something--for love. And it always goes in that direction: grace makes us capable of loving, because grace is what assures us we don't need to use our good deeds as bargaining chips to get time off of our sentence. There is no jail time. You are not condemned. You do not have to worry about someone finding you out and reporting you to the Heavenly Prison Warden, and you don't have to hope that you get bonus points for helping that senior citizen across the street or returning that five-dollar bill you found on the street corner. You don't have to worry about "points"--God has already decided not to keep score or count beans, so you are actually free to love people for their own sake, not as props in your merit-badge-earning.
When we treat loving others like it's a way to impress God, it turns out we aren't impressive and we're not actually loving others, either--we're just using them as means to an end. But when we start from the point of knowing we don't have to earn points, then love for others is at long last actually love--the conscious choice to seek the good of others for their own sake, not just for our own ulterior motives.
Today, then, knowing we are free from having to impress God or reduce our sentence, let's use this day well, wisely, and freely... for love.
Lord God, you have already freed us from sin's grip--enable us to see ourselves as freed for the embrace of love.
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