In our epistle reading this morning,
Peter writes:
“Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice,
and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk,
so that by it you may grow into salvation—
if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
For you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
In so many words, Peter is telling his readers that he hopes that they grow up – to grow up into their salvation.
And for Peter this means some very specific kinds of growing.
Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
And lest you are having a hard time taking this sentence in,
let me repeat it for a third time:
Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
Let me ask you:
How are you doing in these areas?
For many people this week, Christians included,
I’m afraid the answer is “Not very well.”
Pastor Dan Dick wrote about the power of malice a few days ago, saying:
I was listening to a young, self-proclaimed evangelical preacher talking about the Bin Laden situation on a Wisconsin radio station yesterday,
and the gist of his argument was this:
as Christians, we should have poured out into the streets singing and dancing Sunday evening when the news was announced,
and anyone who felt differently is both a questionable Christian and an unpatriotic American.
Real Christian-Americans hate what God hates and should rejoice at destroying any and all evil.
He further explained that Jesus taught us that it is not only okay to hate,
but that unless we hate we cannot be disciples (see Luke 14:25-35).
True holiness, the young reverend explained,
requires an all-out assault on all evil,
and he proceeded to list what constitutes evil and what God hates:
terrorism, liberals, gays, lesbians, democrats, the college-educated, scientists, women who think too highly of themselves, Lady Gaga (why her specifically, I am not sure — he didn’t say), the media, other faiths, foreigners who are jacking our gas prices up so high, and all who make fun of devout Christians.
There were more things in his rant,
but Pastor Dan says he couldn’t jot them all down.
But it became quickly apparent that anything and everything that went against this young preacher’s sense of values is evil,
and God wants him to hate these things —
not merely avoid them or judge them;
his instruction to his listening audience is that God put us here on earth to destroy these things.
We should do everything in our power to wipe these things out,
“so that the world might one day truly experience God’s love.”
Wow. Just wow.
If there is a more twisted logic out there, I am hard pressed to find it.
