Text: 1 Pet 3:1-22
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
St. Peter’s chapter that is today’s reading could have been posted or tweeted five minutes ago. That’s how Scripture is: ancient, but always timely. For the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the inspiration of the human writers of the Sacred Scriptures. They are always relevant.
The apostle approaches the hot-button issue of gender roles. “Wives, be subject to your own husbands.” Wives have husbands, not wives. Wives are to be submissive, not dominant. And this is not to be doormats, but for the sake of order and Christian witness. Husbands likewise are to honor their wives – something that is equally unpopular in this day and age that pits the sexes against each other.
And Peter also teaches us about suffering “for righteousness’ sake.” And in our time and culture, the Church is under enormous pressure to abandon the Word of God and the order of creation. First, we are subject to social pressure. We don’t want to be considered as knuckle-dragging fundamentalists, unsophisticated rubes, sexists, and homophobes. The next step will be legal sanction: perhaps the loss of tax exemptions, and maybe the pressure of lawsuits. The next step will be confiscation, imprisonment, and even execution. Persecution reached this level in Peter’s day, as even St. Peter, the leader of the apostles and the bishop and pastor of Christians in the Imperial City, himself died on a cross.
Finally, Peter points us to Christ’s suffering “once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” And the Lord accomplishes this salvation of us by means of our Holy Baptism. St. Peter reminds us that “Baptism… now saves you,” and directly links us to “the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
As people baptized into Christ, as children of paradise, let us confess that which is true, that which has been revealed by creation and the very Word of God, let us carry out our vocations – including those of male and female and confessors of Christ. And if we suffer for the sake of our confession, let us always be “prepared to make a defense to anyone,” so that we may have a “good conscience” – by means of “Jesus’ cleansing sacrifice.”
“I am baptized into Christ. I’m a child of paradise!”
Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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