Household Codes - 1 Peter 3:13-22

I can’t help but notice that today’s lesson from the first letter of Peter reads a lot like a sermon - and not the good kind. The kind where you come away feeling guilty and chastised and a little worse for wear. The letter was written to a community experiencing persecution, so I can appreciate that the stakes are high. But the author repeatedly implores us to keep a good conscience at all costs, and to act right no matter how much we suffer for it. It’s intimidating, and perhaps not as encouraging as the author hoped.

Now you might think, if we zoom out a little, and get some more context for this passage, as Hannah is often wont to do, that will help us understand and engage with it. But you would be wrong. The portion of the letter we read today comes in the midst of what we call household codes. There are several instances of such codes in the New Testament, but First Peter’s are particularly gnarly. They have a lot to say about wives submitting to their husbands and slaves obeying their masters through any amount of cruelty.

According to First Peter, a first century, Christ-following household should look a lot like a miniature Roman Empire, which should immediately rouse our suspicion, because Christ had a lot to say about the differences between the kingdom of God and earthly powers. I’ve always been tempted to ignore this epistle altogether, but more recently I’ve discovered a trick to help me stay patient and open minded.

I pretend that Peter - as depicted in this letter - is social media influencer. You know who I mean, the people who make their living on the internet, telling the rest of us that we should buy this product for flawless skin, or use this tip when painting cabinets, in order to really live our best lives now. Can’t you just hear Peter saying, “You guys, I’ve tried every lifestyle option available and this is best out there. Just follow these laws, and you’ll see heavenly results in as little as 3-6 weeks.”

The problem, of course, is that social media campaigns like this are curated to convince. They show tiny snapshots of a life with all the mess and nuance edited out. The life that many influencers try to convey isn’t even realistic for them, much less for the rest of us. And while I find the occasional time-saving life hack handy, I am wary when someone claims to have the singular answer to all my problems.

I suspect that most people who offer such claims are like the author of our epistle today, just trying their best to manage all the various pressures of their day. I trust that this letter is a faithful attempt to make sense of the urgency of Roman assimilation set against the message of Jesus Christ, in which they find meaning and spiritual community.

Even so, the passage got me wondering. Does my household look like an example of the Kingdom of God? Does my community? What about my own heart? Or do they instead look like an imitation of someone else’s clean and curated Instagram feed, or maybe even a miniature version of the kind of empire Jesus warned us against. Perhaps I have more in common with our letter writer than I thought.

It can be very beneficial to look at the world around us and do what our leaders want us to do. This can keep us from getting arrested. It can keep us employed. It can open up doors to social circles and education. It can win us the approval of our peers. These are all very desirable outcomes and just as necessary for success in our modern world as during first century Roman occupation.

Sometimes it’s not even community leaders that we conform to, but whichever voices are loudest and strongest in our midst. Remember when you were young and forbidden to do something that everyone else seemed to be doing. An adult would inevitably ask, “if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?” The answer was meant to seem obvious, but it isn’t. I remember thinking as a young person: well, I don’t want to be the only person left standing at the cliff’s edge!

My grown up example goes something like this: I’m having a wonderful day, perhaps I’ve just taken communion to someone’s home and I’m feeling just a little closer to God than usual. But then a well-meaning social activist on the internet or the radio says something like, “if you’re not enraged about the state of the world, you’re not paying attention!” And just like that my reverie is broken. I feel guilty for having a good day when there is so much pain in the world. I worry that I should be doing whatever that social activist says instead of what I had planned for the week. Maybe some of you are familiar with these feelings.

Thankfully, no one person or group is the final authority on what the Kingdom or God looks like. Like the author of First Peter, we are called to hear the Gospel message, then look at the world around us and try to hold those two visions in tension with each other faithfully. But unlike our author, we can trust that that faithfulness will look different for each and every beloved child of God. With Christ as our guide, we get to make our own household codes for our own lives. This may seem self-evident, but this is holy agency that we too often give away when we are distracted by worldly cares begging for our attention.

It’s not that we should never listen to other people or take advice from the internet. God comes to us in many and varied forms. But nurturing our relationship with God, particularly when it comes to how we order the household of our inner lives, is important. It’s what grounds us so that our joy and hope are not snatched away by headlines or trends or other tools that empires may use.

In our Gospel passage today, Jesus tells us what love looks like. He says it looks like listening to and walking with God, and basing our household codes on God’s instructions, not anyone else’s. This is our task. Sometimes we’ll be tempted by life’s metaphorical cliffs and find ourselves frustrated that our household doesn’t look like that of our neighbor. But other times, we’ll get it just right, and our lives will reveal a glimpse of the Kingdom of God to the world. A world that is hungry not just for influence or assimilation, but for the love of a God who can’t be contained in a social media post, but abides within and among us forever. Amen.