“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you.”

“For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night. 8 But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath”, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, (1 Peter 1:3-4 ; Thessalonians 5:7-9 New American Standard Bible)

 

“Put on the Helmet of Hope”

A Lesson From Peter’s Experience and Paul’s Pedagogy

Pandemic Easter, April 12, 2020

Preface

The events the entire world is now going through are unique to everyone living at this time.  There may be a slight exception to the totality of this statement.  Very few people are alive who, as very young children, experienced the Spanish Flu pandemic that began in 1918 and raged for very close to two years.   But now a new unwieldy plague has broken out, and thus far, we have no read antidote.  Spreading with little hindrance from one to another in leaps and bounds, it is infecting millions (to date at the posting of this missive 2.2 million) and killing over 146,000 young, middle age, and older people.  Daily we are updated on the havoc and ruin it brings to families and cities, robbing the hopes and dreams of many.  Beyond all the small steps we can take to shelter ourselves from this plague, there is another spiritual lesson that needs to be brought into sharper focus.  We need not only hopes and dreams for fulfilling our lives here and now and tomorrow, as fragile and fleeting as these often are, but greater enduring hopes that go beyond this worldly horizon.  Easter speaks to this latter hope and our response to it.

In this Easter lesson, I link two passages from the New Testament, one from Peter and the other from Paul. In the first passage, we listen to Peter’s words taking care to notice that they infer the disciples’ loss of their hopes and dreams before a new birth of hope. The Easter hope emerged. The second passage by Paul uses a vivid metaphor to convey to us how vulnerable we are to spiritual harm if we had not attended to and taken up the Easter hope that the Apostles experienced before they made it the centerpiece of their gospel. Peter states this pivotal piece of the unique apostolic experience when he writes, “he caused us to be born again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” This meditation looks behind ‘again’ and asks why ‘again’? ‘Again’ implies a second go at hope. Paul tells us hope is a helmet that protects us. To help us grasp how it does this, we look at Peter’s experience and then our own.* (Note as regards hope as it is used in this article think not of hoping a verb, but of hope a noun, in the framework under consideration the noun empowers the verb.)

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