Context, Context, Context

Context, Context, Context...

1 Peter 2:18-25
Sunday, April 13, 2008

Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are
kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of
God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for
doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it,
you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also
suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. “He
committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When he was abused, he did
not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the
one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free
from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For
you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and
guardian of your souls

In general I think it’s a good thing to have choices in life, but sometimes having a lot of
choices can make life difficult. I think the reason why parents are often told to limit the
choices their young children have is because too many choices can be overwhelming
for young and growing minds. Well, I don’t think it gets much better as you get older—
sometimes less is better, because what I have found for myself is that sometimes
having a lot of choices gets me in trouble. It was that way this week when I had the four
passages from the Lectionary before me, the passages that are recommended for our
study and preaching on this the fourth Sunday of Easter because I started gravitating
to the hardest one in the bunch, the one you just heard. It may not seem that way at
first glance, but I’ll share with you why this text really poses a problem for us, and for
others, and why we must tread in this Scriptural minefield lightly if we’re going to get out
alive, so to speak. Mid-week, I thought about just abandoning my original plans to
preach on this passage, but, no, me being a sucker for punishment I plowed ahead, as
if there was no going back. In truth, I had already invested hours of the week doing
research and trying to find a way to deal with these words, these good and challenging
words, and yet words loaded with shadow, with real difficulty as well.

Let me explain why I think that is the case. One of the things you don’t know from just
hearing this text this morning is that the folks who put together the lectionary
recommended that we preacher types not include verse 18 in prescribed text—in fact,
they start with verse 19 and delete the passage that might embarrass, or offend, or
startle many of us, the one that goes: Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with
all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.
Now, that’s a tough pill to swallow, if you’re a preacher, and you, like the rest of the
contemporary church, think that human slavery is immoral and wrong and sinful. No
wonder they didn’t want us to hear it…its not an easy passage to include, but if you
take it out, then you can hear verses 19-25 without noticing that the writer of First Peter
really is talking directly to the human slaves in that constellation of churches he is
writing to in the first century, and thus it that makes it easier for our 21st century ears to
hear.

Now, why in the world would the writer of First Peter want to tell slaves to take it on the
chin, even if it was for something they hadn’t done, that they were innocent of? Well,
there must have been a reason, and like a lot of things in the New Testament, you’ve
got remember that the writer is probably specifically responding to some news he had
heard, news about Christian slaves who had heard the Christian message, the Good
News, and had reacted in such a way that it caused them to stand up for themselves,
perhaps pushing back against their pagan or even Christian masters, causing a
concern among critics of Christianity that this new religion was causing slaves to rebel
against their masters, something that would most definitely have caught the unwanted
attention of the Roman Empire. Now, the early church didn’t want that reputation and
so in a small part of this letter, he tells the slaves to get through the difficulty of their
enslavement like Christ endured his own difficult crucifixion—by not responding to
cruelty with cruelty, pain with pain, hate with hate. Again, if you are reading the letters
of the New Testament, you’ve got to read smart, and if there is something like, say, a
moment when a male writer tells the women to be silent in church, well, there is a good
chance that there women in the early church who experienced Christianity as being so
liberating that they felt embolden enough to speak up for the first time in their lives.
You tell people not to do something when they are indeed doing that very thing!

But the horror of this text, especially verse 18, is that, of course, it was used to justify
and affirm human slavery—in fact, texts like this were used throughout the American
South to tell slaves to be good slaves, to follow the example of Christ, they would say,
and not try to run away, or fight back against the cruelty of their masters. At first,
Southern Christians—and I say this as a Southerner whose family once owned a
plantation that my hometown is now built on (Meridian, MS)—Southern Christians weren’
t sure whether or not they wanted to try to convert the slaves to the Christian faith,
because then their slaves might think they were equals to their masters, or they might
try to argue that Christians ought not to own other Christians. Eventually, most slave
owners gave in and shared the Gospel with their slaves. But it’s a funny thing, you
know, that if you share the stories of the Bible with people, they tend to gravitate to the
parts that most touch their experience, and so the African slaves loved the stories
about the Jewish slaves being liberated out of Egypt through the Red Sea. It shouldn’t
surprise us that they were less fond of texts like we have before us this morning. The
following is from the writings of a young Presbyterian minister in the South who was
preaching to the slaves from the New Testament of Philemon, in which Paul writes to a
Christian slave owner, asking him to take back and be kind to his runaway slave who
has been a help to Paul in his journeys—the Presbyterian minister writes:

Allow me to relate a fact which occurred in the Spring of this year, illustrating the
character and knowledge of the Negroes at this time. I was preaching to a large
congregation on the Epistle to Philemon; and when I insisted upon fidelity and
obedience as Christian virtues in servants, and upon the authority of Paul, condemned
the practice of running away, one-half of my audience deliberately walked off with
themselves, and those that remained looked anything but satisfied, either with the
preacher or his doctrine. After discussion, there was no small stir among them; some
solemnly declared “that there was no such epistle in the Bible,” others “that it was not
the gospel,” others “that I preached to please masters,” others “that they did not care if
they ever heard me preach again.” (Stony The Road We Trod, 216)

But of course, the book of Philemon was in the New Testament, sadly enough, though I
do not think that just because it is in the New Testament that God sees human slavery
as morally OK. It’s just one of those reminders that human beings, situated in a time
and place where human slavery was believed to be morally OK, and was one of the
backbone of the Roman Empire, simply reflected the values of their culture. It was also
something that those first century Christians were not going to challenge the Empire
since they were already the focus of so much persecution for just being followers of
Christ. And yet, knowing the context of these passages, it’s so sad that someone
forgot the context and thought that God did indeed think that human beings owning
other human beings was OK, because it said so, right there in the Bible, in black and
white. But interestingly enough, others challenged the idea that the words on the page
ended the conversation. Howard Thurman, an African-American minister and mystic,
tells the story of an encounter he had with his grandmother, who had been born a
slave, he writes:

Two or three times a week I read the Bible aloud to her. I was deeply impressed by the
fact that she was most particular about the choice of Scripture. For instance, I might
read many of the more devotional Psalms, some of Isaiah, the Gospels again, and
again; but the Pauline epistles, never—except, at long intervals, the thirteenth chapter
of First Corinthians…With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was
she would not let me read any of the Pauline letters. What she told me I shall never
forget. “During the days of slavery,” she said, “the master’s minister would occasionally
hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a
Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text
something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be
obedient to them that are your master….as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show
how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves,
God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom
ever came, I would never read that part of the Bible” (Stony the Road We Trod 61-62)

Thurman’s mother had come to realize that her experience of the God of the Bible, the
one who had quite literally freed her people after the Civil War, was not the same God
that seemed to say that her slavery was divinely sanctioned, that to be faithful as a
Christian was to accept her status as a slave forever, to never try to run away, as many
of her friends had done through the Underground Railroad that ran right through this
part of Southwest Michigan. And so, of course, it is a lesson for us to remember to put
things in context when we read the Holy Scriptures—sometimes the saints who wrote
our holy texts simply reflected their context, just as we reflect our contexts here, in the
21st century.

But I have to ask, is there something for us in this text as disciples of Jesus Christ, who
do believe that this Jesus does liberate us and frees to be whole and human and
blessed? Can we learn something from a text like this has been used to hurt so many
other fellow Christians, to hurt them by using this text as justification for their bondage
as slaves? I think we can, because, again, context is everything, and if we’re going to
honor the fact that this text and texts like it have hurt so many human beings because
we didn’t pay attention to their ancient contexts, we might also have to point out how
that same context might help us understand how radical this text really is, if we sit with it
for a bit.

The other context we mustn’t forget is this: the writer of this text does something
incredibly radical, radical in ways we can miss if we forget what he is really doing here.
In these words he is saying to those early Christians, to everyone hearing these words,
not only the slaves, but the free men and women, the poor and the rich, that to be a
disciple of Jesus is not be a powerful person, the master, the ruler, the victor, the
winner, the leader, the owner—no, instead he points to the lowest person on the totem
pole, the slave in the ancient Roman household, and says, this is what we should be
like if we wish to follow Jesus the Christ. The slave is not supposed to return an eye for
an eye, abuse for abuse, pain for pain, and he says that Christ did the same thing, he
become like a slave, like someone with no choice, like someone with no freedom,
because he refused to strike back with the same fists that were hurled at him, he chose
another way, a way that made clear that he would no perpetuate the world’s violence by
striking back with the violence that was used against him. And the writer of this
passage seems to have Jesus saying something like this: “to follow me is to be like this
helpless slave, who has no choice, and what I am asking you to do is to make a choice
to let me be your master, and to follow my way of peace, my way of gentleness, my way
of love.” A real slave has no choice, she or he cannot return hate for hate, abuse for
abuse, but as free people we do have a choice to stop the cycle of hate and hurt, just
as Christ did when he chose not to return the abuse that was being heaped upon him.

Now, don’t get me wrong—Jesus did resist, he did stand up against wrong, but he didn’t
do with his fists, or with the sword—he did it by telling the truth to the powers that
wanted to ignore the message from God he was bring them. Like those who followed
after him, those who stood up against wrong, but who did it with their lives and their
words, rather than their fists, people like Gandhi, people like Martin Luther King, Jesus
chose another way, and he looked at the people at lowest rung of the ladder and said,
“choose to be like those who have no choice, use your freedom to bind yourself to the
one you struggle to love, overcoming them by doing the right thing—the first shall be
last, and the last shall be first.” And for us, those of us who respect the successful,
those with the cash, those with the power, the ones above us—well, Jesus points us
downward to the nobodies of this world to say to us, “be like them, and you will be like
me.” Now, it doesn’t get more radical than that, because for his ancient listeners to
hear the writer of First Peter say that they should be like slaves, well, that is hard to
hear for them, much harder than it is for us hear nowadays.

In this passage, when we name the fact that it can be so hurtful to others, and has so
hurt so many throughout history, we can still see a glimpse of the Christ here, calling us
to be servants of one another, calling us to go another way, a way so few have chosen,
the way that doesn’t return the hate hurled at us with more hate, the way that says love
really can overcome all, even our enemies, and to walk the way that Jesus walked when
he was here among us in flesh and blood. Our sins, our choices to go the other way, in
the opposite direction, the direction of hate and rage, well, those kinds of choices are
literally inscribed into the flesh of Jesus’ body, as our Scripture says today, as he took
upon himself the world’s violence and its choices to go down the road of hate. And by
showing us the other way, the right way, Christ brought us home, and the truth of the
matter is that the only way we can bring others home to God, those others we struggle
to love, and the others we can’t help but love, the only we can shepherd them home is
to do what Jesus did, to love as he did by choosing the path so rarely taken in this
world, the one that leads back home to God, the source of all that is and was and will
be in this life. Amen