(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

I invite you to stand for the reading of Scripture, and after the reading of Scripture, as we're being seated, the kids can head to the back where they'll be met and taken downstairs for their teaching during this time as well. 1 Peter chapter 2, 18 through 25, this is the Word of the Lord. Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the unjust. 

For this is a gracious thing when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it, you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you've been called, because Christ has suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps. 

He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. 

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you've been healed, for you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. This is the word of the Lord. 

You may be seated. Servants, be subject to your masters. You'd be hard-pressed to find that one on a coffee mug, I think, right? Nah, it's not a lot of NFL players have their under-eye blackout with, you know, 1 Peter 2 18 written in little white letters under there. 

It's not, it's not a top-selling wall art. I don't find many many t-shirts with this one on it. Matter of fact, I think I would pay to see that if somebody had servants be subject to your masters on a t-shirt and then you walk into like a sit-down restaurant. 

If you eat anything that comes out of that kitchen, you are a braver man than I. We don't talk like this. Think about that for a second. Nobody has the title servant. 

At the restaurant, what do we call them? We call them servers, not servants, and presupposed in that subtle word change is like the agency of the worker, right? I mean, try it. Servant, can I get a refill? Might give a whole new definition to a dirty soda, okay? Why, why don't we like that word? It wraps up our identity with our work. So there's this agency of like maybe they chose the job to be a waiter, but they're not owned by the restaurant. 

None of you sitting in this room commonly think of yourself as a servant. We don't talk about the the word that Peter uses here in this opening line, be subject. We don't talk in those ways.

We fought a war so we wouldn't have to talk in those ways. And a lot has changed since Peter wrote this letter. So much so, I mean, our cultural context is very, very different and it would be easy, it seems logical to sort of set a passage like this aside because it just, it's hard to apply in the way that we live in our society today. 

If we did that, we would have two luxuries. One, we could set aside some of the very difficult and uncomfortable things that we're gonna read and what Peter says. And the second one is that we could just turn this into a self-congratulatory session about all of the advances that we've made in the West through Christendom to advance freedom and independence. 

I don't think that's what Peter has for us at all. Freedom, independence, self-governance, these are ideas that's baked into the core of what we think it means to be an American. And for a lot of us, it's baked into the core of what we think it means to be a Christian. 

And for those reasons, this text gets really, really hard for us. What we're gonna be reading today and studying is uncomfortable. It's difficult. 

It goes against the pattern that you've been trained to think, the pattern you've been trained to think in. See, we have heroes of our freedom, and we pattern our lives after them. We memorize what they had done, and we mimic them.

Patrick Henry, give me liberty or give me... Yeah, so you've memorized a speech from 250 years ago. Good work. In fact, let's have a little civics lesson. 

I wanna see how far I can take this. So let's see how far we can go. We hold these truths to be... Good. 

That all... By the way, first hour, I did way better than you guys. That all men are created... See, equal. There are no servants and masters in this room equal, right? By the way, for those of you who are maybe lost, it's okay. 

What we're doing is we're quoting one of America's founding documents. It's called the Declaration of Independence. It marks out some of the ideals of this American experiment. 

And if you grew up in this culture, then a lot of us actually have it committed to memory. Created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable... Yeah, that's the one we like, rights. We got our rights, and among them, there's three. 

They are... Good work. Now, we'll stop there because that's about as far as I have memorized. I'm sure some of you could do the whole thing. 

There's not gonna be a test, don't worry. There's no quiz coming. But we can do... Why can we do that? What's going on there? We have this memorized because it's been laid out for us like an ideal, like the model. 

And we are expected as Americans to then pattern our lives after those ideals, to trace out that pattern. And you can't mimic what you haven't memorized, so we as Americans were expected to mimic the freedom, the self-determination of our heroes. It's our unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

After all, who would not have rebelled? I mean, taxation without representation is unjust. It's unjust. It gets more uncomfortable as we read on. 

Servants, be subject to your masters, with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the unjust. All right, not here to criticize this country. As a matter of fact, I really like our nation. 

I'm very pleased with what has gone on in history. And it is the job of good government to protect the freedoms of its citizenry. But when this gets difficult is when we start to take and apply that perfect model, that we trace that out for us, each of us alone individually. 

And when we do that, a text like what we have today gets real hard to apply. And the two don't fit together. What we're gonna be unpacking, even though the cultural setting is vastly different, we're gonna find some really uncomfortable things written in here. 

What Peter is saying to his audience is kind of foreign to us. And we're gonna find just how uncomfortably close that they land to where we actually are. So with that introduction, you know, the first sermon that I actually preached here was a little over two years ago. 

And in it, I know you've all probably forgotten it by now, thankfully, right? But to refresh your memory, in that sermon, I offered a new way to translate the Hebrew word rah, which is often translated evil or wicked. It's the antonym of tzedak. It's the antonym or the opposite of righteousness and justice. 

Wicked and evil, opposites of righteousness and justice. And I suggested that we should translate it as wonky. And I know what you're thinking. 

If you're newer here in the last couple of years, you're like, dude, you told me that was sermon number one and you were already retranslating Hebrew? Yeah, as one does, right? I suppose I've traced out that American ideal of individualism quite well. But hear me out. I want to bring this back up again today for a couple of reasons. 

I want you to have this picture in your mind of righteousness as trying to order society, well-ordered, upright, just society as a stack of rocks. If you have just this simple metaphor of a pile of rocks, what we think of as a righteous rock, one that fits well into society and fits well with others is a nice, nice flat surfaces, square edges, that seems like righteousness. And then if you just picture in this pile that you're trying to make, the misshapen, wobbly, warped rock with, you know, knurls and bumps and it just doesn't fit well, and that's a wonky rock. 

That kind of person fitting into a society, they're chaotic, wicked, evil, they're wonky. And I bring this back up today for two reasons. One, just building my argument. 

So if you look in verse 18, this word that's translated unjust in your Bibles, look at verse 18, be subject not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. That's the Greek word skolio. That's where we get skoliosis. 

It means crooked, wobbly, out of line, wonky. The second reason I bring this up is because talking about this in the metaphor of wonkiness the reason has always been this. It's righteous, that is it is just, to absorb wonkiness.

Righteousness, maintaining righteousness, requires the righteous to chisel out space in themselves. Not just that they are perfectly neat and straight, but to chisel out the space for the wonky rocks to actually remain in society. So if you think about those Old Testament laws of justice like grace and creating Sabbath rest one out of every seven days to allow servants to rest, forgiving and releasing debts, just calling them good and releasing debts, releasing prisoners, releasing slaves, giving back property that had been sold by people who could not maintain it anymore, just giving it back to them. 

All of these things are the righteous people absorbing wonkiness on behalf of the others, people who carved out space in themselves in order to maintain order. Today's text, though, puts an even sharper edge on this idea. Because offering grace, creating Sabbath rest, forgiving debt, even enacting a year of Jubilee, those are all ways that people who have resources carve out space, absorb the wonkiness for those who don't, right? This is the strong protecting the weak, it's the landowner treating the sojourner with justice, see what I mean? But you guys know the difference here then. 

The servants be subject to your masters, including the wonky ones that don't fit well, they're hard to fit in with, that is taking righteousness to a whole new level. It's Peter is asking the weak to remain subjected to the strong and absorb their wonkiness. Peter's asking the servant to absorb on behalf of his master, and that feels wrong, especially given our American ideals. 

And what your logical mind is begging for next is the redeeming quality, right? For Peter to ask us to do something this radical, surely he has in mind a happy ending, a turning point. Something like maybe what we read from last week's sermon text, where that they will see your good deeds and glorify God, that somehow by enduring that there ends up a redeeming quality in the end. What we're looking for, what we're hoping for is something like the Bob Cratchit and Scrooge story, right? Where there's a turn in the end and it winds up happy. 

And that might happen, it'd be great if it did, but it's actually not Peter's focus in this text. If you look, according to Peter, the primary motivation for enduring unjust suffering is this. He says it is a gracious thing in the sight of God, a gracious thing. 

That's what Peter says twice, in fact, in verse 19, then he repeats it again in verse 20. So he's not holding out the hope that by doing this you're going to change things and fix everything and set it right to order. He says it'll buy you extra credit with God. 

And when you hear that, just that, do you catch yourself thinking like, is that worth it? Is that all? Just pleasing God? And then when I say it out loud like that, surely you're thinking to yourself, no, no, no, no, I don't think that way. Like enduring unjust suffering, being subject to an unjust master, a bad boss, a hurtful leader, an unfair ruler, sitting under that quietly and without any rebellion or retaliation, and all just for the hope that God is pleased with you. Does it sound worth it? I used the phrase a minute ago, extra credit.

This term, gracious thing, that you see in your Bible, it's hard to put into words. I don't mean it's hard to translate. It's even not a complex word. 

It's just caress, grace. It's just hard to put into words because it's so simple of an idea that we all know what it is and we never usually define it. You know, those kinds of things. 

We all know what it is, but we rarely put it into words. It's like if you worked on pure salary, okay? If you worked on salary and you get an unplanned, unearned bonus, like your boss just wanted to show some extra appreciation. It wasn't scheduled, it wasn't Christmas time. 

This is just, it's a gracious thing, or the King James actually translated, if you're working off an old King James, he called it a thank-worthy thing, a thank-worthy thing. I like that translation, but it's actually, it's not exactly like working on salary and getting a bonus, is it? I want you to spend a minute really trying to imagine the full weight of the picture that Peter is painting here. It's not like working on salary and getting a bonus. 

It's like being owned. It's like working, not for any salary, but just for maybe room and board. It's working for the privilege of your master just not casting you out on the streets where you'd have no other choice but to beg. 

And as you do that, as you work, because your life is completely not your own and your full service is fully expected by your master, as you live that out and work that out, it's like doing something that they actually notice. They don't have to, but they do. They take notice of you and maybe they even actually verbalize and say, thank you. 

And even though there's nothing you could do that the master would actually have to repay you, nonetheless, they see you and appreciate you. When you suffer unjustly, what Peter's saying here is when you submit yourself to unjust masters, bosses, managers, leaders, overseers, Peter says the Creator God of the universe sees you. All your good deeds, obedience, living a holy life, that's just what life in the household of God entails. 

You are not your own. You were bought at a price. But when he sees you suffering unjustly and enduring, I want you to hear this. 

The Heavenly Father, Creator God of the universe, takes notice of what you're enduring. He sees you. As you are enduring, know you have caught the kind gaze of God your Father.

And He sees you, and He knows, and He appreciates, and He's grateful you are His. That's what Peter has in mind. Now, to the masters in the room, Peter completely ignores you.

Peter ignores you. I suspect, I can't prove this, but I'm pretty sure Peter knew he would be writing this letter to an audience where there would be, as it was read aloud in the church, there would be masters as well as their servants. And he speaks right past the masters, and he speaks directly to the subordinate. 

So, I want to be true to the text. My sermon today is primarily focused on what it's like to be that servant. This is not a lesson in leadership, but I have a few comments for those of you who might be masters, might be leaders, bosses, supervisors. 

First, it is actually very notable, we should point out, that Peter speaks directly past the masters. So, there was a kind of a well-established pattern of teaching in Greek society. They were called household codes. 

These were the wise teachings you might pick up from a philosopher or a teacher, and they were designed to teach leaders how to maintain good order in their household, how to keep their children in line, maybe, how to keep their wives in line, and how to keep their servants in line. These were called household codes, and Peter says not one word to the master, and that silence itself would have spoken volumes to his original hearers. So, take note, leaders, this is not a call to subject, right, to maintain dominance and to maintain rule. 

In fact, if there had been one master in the room, as this is read out loud, and he has a servant who's also become a Christian, who is following the Messiah Jesus, and he's in the room as well, and this is being read aloud while they're both in there, I picture that master probably shrinking down in his pew. I mean, they didn't have pews, but work with me. He's feeling kind of small, right, because as he hears this, this is what he figures out, that the meekness and the respect that his servant showed him is not for him. 

It's not out of fear and respect for him. It's to honor God. It's for the honor of God, and that is pretty much all I have to say to masters, because like I said, this text wasn't written for them. 

It's written for servants, and I know that still some of us are having a hard time identifying ourselves as servants, so I'm going to read on. Peter goes on in verse 21. For this, or sorry, to this, you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, called. 

In other words, enduring wonky masters, it's not coincidental. It's not like this might happen, and so in the contingency, if and when it does, Peter says, don't fret, to this you have been called. First of all, if you've been called to this, if this is what the Christian is actually called to, and if you're running an inventory in your mind of the relationships that you have, and you can't think of a single situation where you are a servant to someone else who has authority over you and you are subjected to them, that might be something to reflect on. 

But for most of us, I think we can. We can see Christians are called to submit, and yes, to submit to God. That is ultimately what we're called to submit to, but we can't learn what it's like to submit and to be subject if we don't also practice that in our everyday relationships, and when we're doing that, practicing subject, being subject as a servant in a world full of wonky people, wonky leaders and wonky laws and wonky governments, it is inevitable reality that you will eventually find yourself under a master that is scolio, right, crooked or wonky, and it is to this you have been called, called to be subject, and that call doesn't get voided because the master is unjust. 

Do you see that? It doesn't void the call because he's unjust, because Christ also suffered for you, Peter goes on, leaving an example, an example. It's the word hypogrammon, and it just literally means writing underneath or a drawing underneath. Have you ever traced a drawing, you know, like when you were in second grade and all you were doing was stick figures, but you could put a piece of paper over a good drawing and you could trace it perfectly and then you'd be like, look, mom, what I did, and she was fooled, right? We trace things to get it right.

There's a pattern that you can model your life after, that's the exact metaphor, this, by saying hypogrammon, that's what Peter is trying, this is a picture he's trying to get you to see, tracing, following someone else's pattern, just exactly mimicking them, and remember, you can't mimic what you haven't memorized, and as we proved a few minutes ago, many of us have memorized an ideal, a pattern that we are tracing our lives on top of, that gives us certain unalienable rights, but what we're going to see in this next section of Peter's letter is that Jesus had memorized a very, very different pattern, okay, and his life traced it to a T, so what I want to do is I want you to have your Bibles open in front of you to the sermon text for today, all right? It's 1 Peter chapter 2, if you didn't already turn there, and if you have the little black Bibles in the pews in front of you, it's on page 1204, so if you have in front of you 1 Peter chapter 2, kind of focusing in, starting in verse 22, and if you just train your eyes at first 22 and look there to the end of the chapter, what I want you to do is have that text open in front of you, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the pattern that Jesus was following from Isaiah 53. So you're going to be looking at 1 Peter 2, and I'm going to be reading aloud Isaiah chapter 53. Ready for this? He had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth. 

He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that was led to the slaughter, like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. He bore the sin of many. 

He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, and with his wounds we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 

That comes from Isaiah chapter 53, and for the people of God in Jesus's day, that served like a sort of formational document. It really did. It served to form their idea of what it meant to be God's righteous people in an unrighteous world. 

This formed a pattern for them. Is there any freedom in there? Yeah, didn't you read it? We have turned each one of us to our own ways. There's your freedom, and it's called sinful, and it's prideful, and disordered, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

But even though the Jewish people understood this Isaiah 53 section to be sort of a pattern for them, they knew that they identified themselves in that kind of role, that it was a model for them, until Jesus. This was thought of to be kind of a poetic ideal set out there afar. It was a song. 

So, yes, it was what a righteous sufferer might look like, but in the sort of way that Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan are what an American ought to look like. Do you guys understand what I mean? Like this ideal. Nobody expected any single person to actually live it all out, the whole picture, to trace it perfectly. 

I mean, how could somebody? Did you see and hear how deeply sorrowful this life would have been? No, no, no, no. One person could be the suffering servant ideally and perfectly themselves. No, this is just an artistic, hyperbolic rendering of what it's like to be a suffering servant, or so they thought, until Jesus perfectly traced the pattern.

And Peter watched him do it every step of the way. And now he tells us that it is to this that we have been called. He lived his life as a pattern for us to mimic. 

He made it a template for you to trace. And listen, tracing that template, living a life patterned after Jesus' own life, which means being subject to unjust masters, it's going to feel unfair. Actually, that's an understatement.

It won't feel unfair. It's going to be unfair. It is unfair. 

And this, you've got to understand, is what we call the scandal of grace. You don't want fair. Look at verse 24 with me very closely.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. He bore your sin. He committed no sin.

You did. He didn't. You did. 

He died. My friends, that is not fair. Full stop.

By his wounds, you are healed. That's not fair. It's not fair, but it is just. 

It's not fair, but it is just. And if you think I'm just playing word games here, how can something be just if it isn't fair? Hear me out. Fairness is when everyone gets exactly what they deserve, and justice is when everyone gets exactly what needs for restoration. 

You hear the difference? Fairness is when everyone gets what they deserve. Justice is when everything gets restored for the good, even if they don't deserve it, especially if they don't deserve it. And I know that that is really hard for us to wrap our minds around, but I want to remind you again of those Old Testament justice laws, right? When people were setting aside one day a week as a Sabbath rest for their servants, when they were completely canceling and forgiving debts, when they were giving back property to those who hadn't been able to maintain it themselves, when they were releasing prisoners, they weren't doing it because the people deserved it, and to do it definitely cost others. 

It wasn't fair, but it was just. And then Peter takes that idea in this text, and he makes it so deep and so hard for us to stomach in our modern context. Be subject to your masters, even the unjust. 

Do not retaliate. Do not perpetuate evil. When reviled, do not revile in return. 

When threatened, do not threaten in return. He's saying absorb their wonkiness. You let it end in your flesh. 

You let it land on you, and then you don't return it, and that is not fair. But look at the part that I skipped in verse 24. He did this. 

Jesus did this. He bore our sins and healed us by His own wounds so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, justice. To righteousness, to justice, not to fairness. 

As sinners, we cannot, we dare not demand fairness, but to justice. Separated from a life of sin, distanced from our sinful past, we can now live to righteousness in the direction of justice. And then this is the rub. 

When you are living that way, to absorb what needs to be absorbed, to restore justice, and you're doing it under a master who is not, you will get wounded. It'll hurt to this you have been called. Now, I need to interject here with a couple of caveats. 

Not a lot, but two caveats. First, Peter wrote this in a culture where servants had very little, if any, legitimate recourse. They had three options, basically. 

They could mount a rebellion, some did in Greek culture. They could run away, that is technically theft. Or they could be subject to their masters. 

Those were their three choices, and giving those three choices, Peter said, be subject to your masters. Now, thankfully, today we have a wider gamut of options, and I'm not suggesting that all of them are sinful. Changing jobs, staging a demonstration, speaking out, or writing in opposition to bad leadership, we live in a nation of laws, we do have rights. 

Nobody owns you, you're allowed to change jobs. You may even be in a job where your handbook, your employee handbook, specifies that you have the right to go talk to HR if you're being treated unjustly. You're allowed to peaceably assemble, you're allowed to speak out. 

Peter's which leads to the second caveat, perhaps more important caveat, you are allowed in our modern social contract to report and to prosecute the crime of abuse. Do not, I don't want to be misheard, do not confuse anything that I've said here this morning to mean that if you just subjected further and subjected more, that then they would stop hurting you. That is precisely the lie that abusers like to exploit. 

Be subject here is not Peter's strategy for managing a genuine threat. When someone above you is using their position to harm, be subject does not mean hiding their offense, it does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their sin, removing yourself from danger,

(This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at https://turboscribe.ai/ to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.)