If you’re a big fan of films and TV shows, and you talk about your favorite series or movies with friends, you may have heard or used the term “spoiler.” A spoiler is an important piece of information about a plotline that, those who haven’t yet seen the show would rather not want to know. For example—and I hope I’m not ruining anything here—it turns out that, in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense, the psychologist, played by Bruce Willis, is one of the dead people that the kid can see. He was dead all along! You can imagine that knowing that beforehand would change the way you’d experience the movie. It has thus become etiquette for those who are going to discuss spoiler material to announce a “spoiler alert” before speaking. The premise of a spoiler alert is that, if you know what the end of the story is going to be, it could change your entire understanding of the narrative as you’re watching.
The author of the letter we consider this afternoon—let’s slip out of our text-critical hats for a few minutes and say, for the sake of simplicity, that it’s Peter—he knows how spoilers work. The difference is that Peter is committed to making sure his audience knows the ending of this world’s story, because he knows it will change the way they understand the world and the way they act in it. In the few verses before the text we’ll read today, Peter gives away the ending. He says that we have an imperishable inheritance that is kept for us in heaven, and that the glory and honor of Jesus Christ will be revealed, that our belief in Jesus will turn into sight when we receive the gracious salvation that has been prophesied. That’s the spoiler. That’s where our text begins.
13 Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. 14 Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. 15 Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; 16 for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
17 If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. 18 You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. 20 He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. 21 Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.
22 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. 23 You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. 24 For
“All flesh is like grass / and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, / and the flower falls, 25 but the word of the Lord endures forever.”That word is the good news that was announced to you.
1 Peter 1:13-25
Friends, we know the ending of the story we are living in. We know that we have, as Peter writes, hope in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. We celebrated Christ’s resurrection two weeks ago, and we celebrate it every Sunday on the Lord’s Day. We proclaim it every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper, as Jesus commanded us. We know the spoiler, don’t we?
This afternoon, Peter wants to tell us that if we do know that ending, it should change our understanding of our entire lives. That’s why he begins our text for today with the word therefore. You know Christmas is coming, and therefore, you run around to get gifts and prepare for a big meal and visiting family members. You know you’re going to be moving in a couple of months, and therefore you start selling the furniture you don’t think you want to take across the country. What we anticipate changes how we conduct ourselves.
So, Peter starts off in this text with the word therefore and offers with a laundry list of important things for us to do. He tells us to roll up our sleeves and get ready to dig in to Christian action, he says we should discipline ourselves, and not be conformed to our worldly inclinations. He sums up this list with a reference to Leviticus 11, 19, and 20, where God tells his people to “be holy as I am holy.” In each of those imperatives in the Levitical Holiness Codes, God includes a “therefore” kind of logic, as expressed with the Hebrew כִּי. “I am your God, therefore, be holy” (Lev. 11:44). “I brought you out of Egypt, therefore, be holy” (Lev. 11:45). “I am holy, therefore, be holy” (Lev. 19:2). “I have made you my own, therefore be holy” (Lev. 20:26). We have been made God’s own, and we have been promised a life with God in the hereafter. Therefore, we should be holy. We have been loved and shown grace and know the ending of the story, and we should conduct ourselves accordingly. Therefore, we should be holy.
Honestly, though, we live in a time in which it is difficult to focus on being holy. Among other reasons, the word “holy” doesn’t jive so well with us twenty-first century American citizens, does it? When we are implored to be holy, the word clangs around in our heads, conjuring images of holy rollers and those who are “holier than thou.” Few of us aspire to such holiness, and I think that’s a good thing. And the reality is, that’s not the kind of holiness that Peter implores us to adopt. He’s not concerned with how our individual “holiness accounts” are accruing. For Peter, holiness is not about my holiness or your holiness. It’s about our corporate holiness, the shared holiness of God’s people.
We can see this in the grammar of the Greek in which this letter was written. It’s fairly difficult to render, because unlike many languages, in English, we don’t have a different pronoun for the second person in the singular and in the plural. They’re both just “you.” (Unless, of course, you borrow the “y’all” from our brothers and sisters in the South.) Unfortunately, that means that, when we read in verse thirteen, “set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed,” we might imagine Peter speaking to each of us individually. But Peter implores us with the second person plural—y’all—and beseeches us together to focus on our communal hope, our communal faith in Jesus. He makes this clear later in chapter two, when Peter emphasizes that God’s people have been called to be a holy nation, a chosen community, a royal priesthood.
This is an important distinction that the clichéd holy rollers miss. In verse 15, Peter tells us to be holy in our behavior: not our individual behaviors, but our communal behavior. Peter is less concerned with the aggregate holiness of the church—that is, the sum of its members’ individual holinesses—than the church’s communal holiness. We are holy, for Peter, when we are holy together. We are sanctified when we are sanctified together.
So, our holiness is a therefore holiness—it is premised on the work God has done to redeem us and the work God has promised to do for us in the future. We know the ending, and that’s what motivates us to be holy. And because we have been redeemed together and will be saved together, we are to be holy together. Verses thirteen to twenty-one could be summed up like this: therefore, y’all, be holy.
But then, we can’t help but wonder: Just how should we do that? Peter writes that we should roll up our sleeves and get ready for action, that we should discipline ourselves and be holy in all our communal behavior. But he doesn’t give us many specific instructions until halfway through the whole epistle. He doesn’t leave us hanging here, though. Peter puts some meat on the bones of the word “holiness” in verse twenty-two. There, he tells us: “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth, so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply, from the heart.” The word here for purify—ἁγνίζω—is a cognate of the adjective holy—ἅγιος. Our souls are made holy by our sharing of genuine mutual love.
Holiness, our communal holiness, is achieved in love.
It’s achieved in love that is genuine. The Greek here is the word ἀνυπόκριτος, which could be stiffly translated as “unhypocritical love,” the kind of love that is honest with itself, love that is not pretentious. Holiness, also, is achieved in love that is mutual. Holy love isn’t unrequited. It’s love that grows in its reciprocity.
But more than anything—at least, according to Peter—is that holy love is fervent. It’s strenuous. He finishes this sentence with the word ἐκτενῶς, which comes from the Greek word for “to stretch.” It means to be stretched taut, to stretch almost beyond one’s capacity. If you’re a runner, it’s that feeling that you get when you feel like you can’t finish the mile, but by strength of will you force your legs to forge ahead. That’s ἐκτενῶς. It’s ardor. We’re Presbyterians, and so we get things done decently and in order, but Peter also teaches us that ardor is even more important than order when it comes to Christian love.
One commentator on this letter points out that the word Peter uses to describe holy love is the same word that Luke uses to describe Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. In that prayer, Jesus stretched himself almost to the point of breaking: his sweat turned into blood. This is holy love: genuine, mutual, strenuous love.
Let us be clear: This kind of holy love is often not so enjoyable or gratifying. It’s based less on emotion than will. It is painful, it is awkward, it is unintuitive. It’s the kind of love that is easy to speak of in the abstract and near impossible to enact in the concrete.
So let’s get concrete. This variety of holy, strenuous love is the love that compels an entire national denomination to rework its standards for marriage, in order to embrace all of those who were called to be citizens of God’s holy community. And it’s the same kind of love that prompts understanding and compassion for those who are unsettled by that adjustment. It’s the kind of love that is troubled by the chauvinism, xenophobia, and incitement to violence that is being broadcast on network TV in this election cycle—and the same love that makes us care for those Donald Trump supporters we worship and work with by choosing our words in our conversations and our sermons carefully. This genuine, holy, strenuous love spurs us to consider removing the names that adorn our buildings in our schools and our seminaries, and to contemplate reasons for not doing so. This holy love is almost impossible, and yet it is to this holy love that we, those who have been redeemed by God, are called.
We are called to this arduous love—almost to the point of breaking. But we are both enabled and impelled to offer this strenuous love only because of the God who has loved us strenuously. As Peter points out in today’s passage, God paid a price for us, not on the trading floors of Wall Street, but in the life of his dear son. For our sake, Peter tells us. Not just mine, not just yours, but for the sake of those all whom he calls to be his holy community. We are to embody a therefore kind of holiness—one that is premised on our hope in God—and a y’all kind of holiness—one that is enacted only in community. And we embody that holiness when we show love to one another with every single ounce of our might, even when it feels near impossible. Let’s roll up our sleeves—and get holy. Amen.