Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For, “Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech. They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed.“Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. (1 Peter 3:8-16)
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“ Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” There's a story told about something that happened on a plane in the midst of a long trip. The captain's voice suddenly came over the intercom system: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I have to advise you that one of our engines has stopped working, but I want to assure you that there's no reason for alarm. The plane can fly perfectly well on three engines, but we will be arriving at our destination 15 minutes late.” A little while later, the captain's voice was heard again. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I have to advise you that another of our engines has stopped working, but I want to assure you that there's still no reason for alarm. The plane can fly perfectly well on two engines, but we will now be arriving at our destination 30 minutes late.” After another while, the captain's voice was heard yet again: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking again. I have to advise you that a third engine has now stopped working, but I want to assure you again that there's no reason to be alarmed. This plane can fly perfectly well on just one engine, but we're now going to be arriving at our destination about an hour later than scheduled.” This was finally too much for one man on board. He looked at a flight attendant and in an impatient voice said “this plane better not lose its last engine because if it does we'll be up here forever!” I wonder what that man would have said if one of his fellow passengers had asked him to give the reason for the hope that he had? To me, at least, whatever answer he offered wouldn't have been very convincing.
“ Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” That's an interesting verse of Scripture, because it tells us to be prepared for something that hardly ever happens. Let me just ask flat out: how many of us have ever actually been asked by anyone at any time what the reason is for the hope that we have? To be perfectly honest with you, I've never been confronted with that question! I suspect that most of you haven't either. And I wonder why? It's not that I don't have hope, and I'm sure that you have hope. So why don't people ask the question? Maybe it's better to put it another way: why would they? People ask about things that make them curious. People ask about things that startle them or amaze them. People ask about things that look or seem or act different. I wonder if the basic problem isn't that for the most part many Christians just blend in to the crowd these days, when it seems to me that the point of the gospel and the example of the life of Jesus was that we're supposed to stand out in the crowd, and be noticed – not to gain credit for ourselves, but so that people would want to know what it is that we have that makes us hopeful. That would give us an opportunity to talk about faith, to talk about God, to talk about Jesus, to talk about the impact that all this has on our lives. But too often there's a disconnect between what we believe and how we show it. Rebecca Manley Pippert, in a book called Out Of The Saltshaker, wrote that “I remember once encountering a zealous Christian. His brow was furrowed, he seemed anxious and impatient, and he sounded angry.” Too often we either buy into society's notion that faith is a private thing not to be spoken of in public, or we simply don't display our faith well enough to make people want to ask us about it. And if we often can't show that any of this makes a difference to us – then no one asks.
Now, that may not be a bad thing, because I suspect that a lot of people might have difficulty asking the question if it did get asked. That's not a criticism. It's a symptom of a larger problem. It's a sign of how comfortable we've become with our faith – a faith that, really, is supposed to challenge us at least as much as it comforts us. In 1965, Pierre Berton wrote a book called “The Comfortable Pew.” He had been an active Anglican, but left the church because of his disillusionment with what he called “churchianity” at the expense of “Christianity.” Basically, he felt that the church had become comfortable with itself and comfortable with society. It had stopped being a counter-cultural movement that could offer hope to the downcast and disillusioned and had instead become simply a part of the culture, with nothing new or exciting or dramatic to offer, upholding the status quo, making people comfortable with what is rather than challenging them to hope for what might be. And – becoming fixated on the church itself (on ourselves) rather than focusing on preaching good news to the poor, on proclaiming freedom to the prisoners, offering sight to the blind, releasing the oppressed and proclaiming the Lord's favour. This was the ministry Jesus called His ministry according to Luke 4. This should be the church's ministry. But when we settle for what is rather than hoping for what might be, we too easily lose sight of what we're supposed to be about, and that makes it hard for us to even imagine what we might say to someone who asked us the reason for our hope. It's why we often don't have an answer to a question that we rarely get asked.
This all, of course, leads up to a single point – if we know what the question is (what's the reason for your hope?) then we need to figure out what the answer is and we need to determine how to live in a way that literally begs the question to be asked. And it's really not that complicated, but I think too many Christians have it wrong – even if they are reluctant to share it.
For most people, the idea of the Christian hope is oriented toward eternity. I certainly don't want to deny how important it is for us to believe in eternity. In one way or another it's the thing that's on everyone's mind, if only because everyone's going to die, and living with that knowledge gives us the desire to have hope that somehow we're going to continue on beyond death – if only because we love life. Paul doesn't refer to “death” as our “last enemy” for no reason. It is an enemy. It's perhaps our greatest enemy. And Christian faith does give us hope that we'll continue on; that there's more to life than just this life. That's what the resurrection of Jesus is all about – it reminds us that God is a God of life, and that in the end life always triumphs over death But the Christian hope is more than that. If we satisfy ourselves with the hope of eternity then we run the risk – to use an old saying – of becoming too heavenly minded to be of an earthly use.
To be of earthly use, the Christian hope we share has to be more than a hope for eternity. It has to be a hope for today – or at least a glimmer of hope for tomorrow. And the Christian hope for today and tomorrow is that ministry of Jesus – the ministry the church is called to continue; the ministry that threatens to turn the world and our society upside down; the ministry that promises to liberate the oppressed and feed the hungry and provide for the poor and welcome the outcast and love the stranger and heal the sick. And this is the ministry that calls us not just to talk about such things – not just to make them an answer to a question – but to actually try to bring such things about in whatever way we can, or at least to create within our own church community a glimpse of that ministry (which is the Kingdom of God) being lived out.
“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” We may not get asked the question very often, and unfortunately we might struggle with the answer sometimes. But we shouldn't – because we should be living the answer out each and every day. We should be making a difference in lives right now. I don't know what the man on the plane in the story I opened with would say was the reason for his hope. But the reason for my hope (and, dare I say, the reason for OUR hope) should be that we know about Jesus' life, and Jesus' death and Jesus' resurrection, and all these things push us forward to create a better world now even while we wait for eternity.
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