I have to confess, I’m a bit of a fantasy-nerd.  That is to say that I enjoy books like the Wheel of Time, Dune and the Lord of the Rings.  There’s a scene in one of the movie adaptations of that trilogy that has a moment that is truly breathtaking.  It’s in the “Two Towers” movie and it comes when the good guys are surrounded in a castle.  They’ve fought valiantly but the opposing side is just too great a force.  They’re beaten, they know it.  A group of them decide to just ride out into the massive swarms of enemies, taking out who they can as they die.  IT’s a real, take a last stand kind of moment.  But, as they say, it’s always darkest before dawn – just as that grim decision is made and the final ride about to occur – reinforcements arrive behind the enemy’s lines.  The battle changes direction and, ta da, the good guys win.  But what is so spectacular to see is the moment when Gandalf, the good wizard, arrives on his white horse, Shadowfax.  It is a moment replete with hope.  The tide is turning, the good guys will win in the end.

  Man, do I wish we could get a moment like that in real life.  Wouldn’t it be great when the stresses of this world have us pushed to the edges, when some diagnosis or family crisis sees us depleted and beaten to see some wizard appear on the horizon with a friendly army to help you out of whatever situation you find yourself in?  Wouldn’t that be great?

  Well, this passage from First Peter can be like that moment for any of us once we properly understand what is being said to us.  This passage affords us an amazing hope that somehow, someway, we’ll make it through difficult times and do so all because we’re joined by a good and merciful God who loves us.  Because that’s what the people of God needed most at the time.  As Peter sits down to write this letter, things have gotten dicey for the Christian communities at the time.

  In order to understand this, we’ve got to understand a bit of what was going on at the time.  Sometimes we forget that Christianity grew in the real world in real time and space, so to speak, when things were happening.

  For the Christians, Rome proved to be quite an enemy to the faith, early on.  Beginning with the Emperor Nero, Christians began to be persecuted on occasion for being atheists.  Now, their understanding of what an atheist is differs from ours.  To the Romans, an atheist was anyone who wouldn’t worship the Roman gods.  We know from Paul’s writings that Christians regularly abstained from participating in feasts for the Roman gods.  This allowed them to be singled out for persecution.  But then, Nero dies and Rome sees the year of three emperors as nobody could quite nail down the job and everyone kept getting killed.  Finally, a man named Vespasian takes over leadership of Rome and one of his first acts is to send his eldest son to Jerusalem to sack it.  So, Titus comes and does again to Jerusalem what the Babylonians did generations before – Titus razes the Temple and burns the remainder of the city to the ground.  I don’t think we can rightly imagine the devastation.  Thankfully, we here in America haven’t seen invading armies.  We don’t know the terribly tragedy of being displaced from our homes, not knowing where to go or what to do.  This is precisely what would’ve faced many of the “exiles” that Paul addresses at the beginning of his letter.  These were people who were faced with extreme upheaval, chaos in their lives the likes of which I hope none of us in this sanctuary are ever faced with.  

  Now, thankfully at present, we don’t have that kind of upheaval in our lives.  But that’s not to say that life here in 21st century America is all that wonderful at present.  By the Grace of God, we’re emerging from a pandemic but the scars of the thing are already beginning to show.  We’ve got kids struggling in classrooms to make up from nearly 2 years of quarantine-type learning.  We’ve got rampant inflation, gas well up over $4 now.  On top of that, we’ve got a war in Europe raging and, if history is any indicator, that doesn’t necessarily bode well for world peace as European conflicts often become larger in scope.  And those are just the “meta” issues facing us today.  What’s going on in your life?  Now, hopefully everything is well in your life and this sermon, while nice, won’t hit home.  But, as your pastor, I know that’s not the case in all of our lives.  There are difficult diagnoses, cancers, family situations, you name it, all of which work against us.  More than anything, we need to see Gandalf on that hill in that amazing white horse ready to save us from the devouring hordes.