Welcome to worship! Here’s our at-home online service for Sunday, May 24, 2020. This week, we have an update from Mary Beth & Bayo Oyebade, the missionaries our congregation supports, on how the COVID pandemic is affecting life in Nigeria.
This week’s sermon looks at the language of “fiery ordeal” and the persecution of the church, and the command for us to cast our anxieties on God who cares for us. Our Scripture readings for this 7th Sunday in Easter are 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 and John 17:1-11.
For more information on modern-day persecution, see this article from Christianity Today. I also found helpful Miguel A. De La Torre’s column in the relevant volume of Feasting on the Word, page 535. Here’s the sermon podcast audio and the online worship service.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
“Do not be surprised” our reading tells us “at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”
Being a Christian is not the easy task we sometimes think it is. Being a Christian, we read, involves some suffering. We shouldn’t be surprised that following a suffering savior can be challenging.
But when I read this passage about fiery ordeals and persecution, about our adversary the devil prowling around to devour us, I see two potential traps.
One trap we can fall into is treating everything as an attack on our faith. There are people and groups who make their money trying to convince you and me that as Christians, we are in the midst of a fiery ordeal right now, trying to push us into what I sometimes call an “American persecution complex.”
Believe it or not, it can feel good to think you’re being persecuted. It gives you a sense of purpose, an enemy, something to push back against.
It works like this: The Bible says persecution will come, and sometimes there are sports on Sunday mornings, so that must be the test of faith the Bible is talking about.
Yes, that’s a test of faith, but it’s not the government persecuting you. It’s a test of where your priorities are. The apathy of some Christians is not the same as persecution.
We’ve seen this kind of persecution complex popping up during the pandemic, with people arguing that the government—or at least the other party in the government—is trying to stop us from worshiping and therefore Christianity is about to be outlawed and we’ll all need to go underground to worship.
No, there’s a contagious virus active around us, and the demographics of who attends worship and the activities we usually do in worship like singing make us vulnerable, so we’re using our freedom to demonstrate we want to care for our neighbors, not get them sick.
The church has lost much of its power and prestige in society, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For centuries of Christendom, the church got caught up in playing politics and seeking power, and in turn, the church committed or tacitly condoned atrocities that drove people away from Jesus. The church is not meant to be the government.
To those of us who grew up in a time when the church had more obvious cultural influence, maybe the shifting of that power feels like persecution, but only because we have never known actual persecution, and God-willing, we never will. We are far from “being reviled for the name of Christ.”
When the writer of First Peter writes, “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal taking place among you to test you,” he’s not speaking figuratively. Scholars aren’t sure exactly when this letter was written, but it might well have been during the reign of Emperor Domitian, when followers of Jesus risked being arrested, banished fined, or even burned as martyrs, a literal fiery ordeal.
Even today, there are places in the world where persecution of Christians is quite real. In places like Eritrea and North Korea, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, Christians can be harassed, beaten, arrested, even killed.
The danger of treating little inconveniences and losses of privilege as persecution is it minimizes the actual suffering some of our siblings in Christ face every day.
So one trap is to put too much weight on our sufferings and to treat every inconvenience as an attack.
But the other trap is to minimize our suffering, to say that because we’re not in any danger of having our worship service invaded by secret police, the challenges and griefs in our lives aren’t worth God’s attention.
It’s true, you can always find someone who is worse off than we are. Often, comparing ourselves to someone else is a coping mechanism.
Sure, maybe I lost my job, but at least my house didn’t burn down. Or, sure, my house burned down, but at least my whole neighborhood wasn’t wiped out by a landslide. Sure, maybe I have cancer, but at least I found it early enough that it’s treatable. Maybe my dog got hit by a car, but at least it wasn’t my child. Someone is always worse off. Maybe that’s your coping mechanism, and if that’s what keeps you going through tragedy and grief, fine.
But it’s easy to go too far, and to say our sufferings and trials and challenges don’t matter. Just because things could be worse doesn’t mean they’re not bad! It’s ok to acknowledge when things aren’t going well. It’s ok to not be ok, even if you’re not persecuted for your faith.
It’s ok to get frustrated that you haven’t been able to get a haircut in two months. It’s ok to be disappointed your granddaughter missed her kindergarten graduation. It’s ok to recognize that the world is broken, that things are not right. It’s ok to not be ok.
Our lesson today calls us to cast all our anxiety onto God who cares for us. All our anxiety, all our concerns, all the worries that keep you up at night.
Maybe you’ve experienced the temptation to think, “Oh, my problem isn’t big enough to pray about. My issue is too small for God to care about. God’s too busy with all the real suffering and persecution to worry about my little thing.” Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.
Last week, I asked Mary Beth and Bayo for an update on their situation in Nigeria, and I’m going to pause my sermon for a few minutes to share with you the update they sent.
[Missionary Video]
One of the phrases that’s stuck out to me from the First Peter passage is in verse 9, “You know your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.”
In one sense, that’s very true right now. I’m tired of staying home, but so are billions of people around the world. We’re having a global experience right now with the pandemic unlike almost any other moment in history.
And yet, people around the world are experiencing the pandemic very differently. I might be inconvenienced by a conference I was going to attend being cancelled, and by the community swimming pool being closed. But other people are unable to be with their dying family members. Some people’s jobs are gone and not coming back. Some people don’t have enough food, as Mary Beth and Bayo talked about.
Nevertheless, God’s promise is still true. The point is not to compare our suffering, or to invalidate someone’s experience as not painful enough. The word for us in this passage is to cast your anxiety on God, because God cares for you.
The point is that suffering is not the end of the story. The end of the story is that “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.”
Our call as Christians is not to look for opportunities to suffer, or to compare ourselves to other people’s suffering. Our call and our job is to do something about it, to be God’s hands and feet working to alleviate suffering, working to show God’s love to the world and especially to the least of these, the ones who suffer the most. Cast your anxieties on the Lord, and ask the Lord to help you relieve other people’s anxieties.
Persecution was real for the early church, but not necessarily for what they believed. Most of the time, the empire didn’t care what you believed as long as you behaved the right way. But the Christians didn’t behave correctly.
Instead of accepting the world the way it was, the followers of Jesus actively worked for justice. Instead of going along with the empire’s priorities, they stood up for the orphans, the unwanted, the outcasts, treating them as children of God, as fellow bearers of God’s image. It was what they did because of what they believed that got them into trouble.
As Christians today, you and I are called to ask, why is it that the pandemic is affecting so many people so differently? We’re called to question what it says that some of us have freezers full of food—maybe not the same brands or same cuts of meat as usual, but still full freezers—when at the same time other people are desperate for a bag of grain to get through the week? Why should the zip code you’re born in determine your life expectancy?
And what would Jesus do about it? What are we as the body of Christ to do about it? We know what Jesus has done for this broken world: He loved it until it cost him his life.
We’re called as God’s people to discipline ourselves, to keep alert, to challenge injustice. Beloved of God, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeals that are taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.
Amen