4 May 2014 - futile conductors

4 May 2014 - futile conductors

conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning,
realizing that you were ransomed from your futile conduct,
handed on by your ancestors,

What is futile conduct?  Honestly, any strivings or aspirations apart from Christ are futile.  Yet we seek them as if we can find eternal life in them.  We seek them as if they aren't ending.  We pursue them as if they can give us more than they actually can.  Our relationship with the world is marked by idolatry in this way.  We seek in things that are not God that which only God can give.  No amount of silver and gold can get us what we need.  Yet most of us, if we are honest, give more priority to worries about silver and gold than to worries about pleasing God.

not with perishable things like silver or gold
but with the precious blood of Christ
as of a spotless unblemished lamb.

This does not take God by surprise.  He chooses to allows us to see the world as the consequences of our sins make it.  He lets us come to know that our conduct is "futile conduct".  He allows us to know the hopelessness of the path on which we insist to the degree that we insist on it.  But he does not leave us on our own to face this hopelessness.

This man, delivered up by the set plan and foreknowledge of God,
you killed, using lawless men to crucify him.

From before the first moment of creation God knows the hopelessness and despair his creatures will both cause and experience.  He sees sin and death at work.  But as he allows these it is never without the ultimate solution also in mind.  Jesus experiences on his cross the summation of all of the futility of this sin scarred world.  We look on him whom we have pierced and see the true cost of pursuing this futility.

But that futility, the futility of human weakness and idolatry, meets an even greater futility.  It meets the futility of trying to hold God down.  It meets the futility of trying to stop his love.

But God raised him up, releasing him from the throes of death,
because it was impossible for him to be held by it.

This is the plan God has from the beginning.  But it is vital that we realize it if we want to turn from our futile ways.  Without this hope in our hearts we are like sheep who go astray.  There is no voice of hope to guide us and no goal toward which we move.

He was known before the foundation of the world
but revealed in the final time for you,

It is the final time right now.  How is Jesus revealed to us?  The privileged place of his revelation is the same as it is on the road to Emmaus:

he was made known to them in the breaking of bread.

Clopas and his companion know Jesus.  But until Emmaus they only know the story marked by futility.  They only see one more good man, a teacher, maybe a prophet who eventually succumbs to this futility.  But Jesus does not abandon them or us even as the Father does not abandon him.  He reveals his resurrection to them and to us in the breaking of the bread.  Here he invites us all to share in this new abundant life which the Father pours out through the Spirit.  He invites us to trade in our futile conduct for the paths of life.

because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld,
nor will you suffer your holy one to see corruption.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.

Let our hearts be glad, let our souls rejoice, and let our bodies abide in confidence.  We are not abandoned.  The world is not left to futility.  The resurrection is literally the most important fact in history and Jesus reveals it to us in the breaking of the bread.  It is Sunday.  He stands ready to reveal it to us once more.