God is Not Neutral
God is Not Neutral: On the Christianity That Has Never Suffered
There is a Christianity that has never suffered a day in its life.
You know the kind. Stained glass and padded pews. Parking lots that fill on Sunday and empty by noon. Sermons about prosperity and purpose and the particular ways that God wants you to feel good about yourself. A faith that costs nothing…demands nothing…offends no one. A faith that has made its peace with every empire it has ever encountered and called that peace a blessing.
That Christianity has nothing to say to this text.
Peter is writing to people who are bleeding. He is writing to communities scattered across Asia Minor…strangers and aliens in lands that do not want them…people who have been insulted, excluded, accused and made to carry a name like a brand on their skin. He is not writing to the comfortable. He is writing to the condemned. And what he tells them is not what a reasonable person would say. What he tells them shatters the logic of every empire that has ever tried to break a people.
He tells them to rejoice.
The Offense Before the Liberation
We have to sit with how offensive that is before we can hear how liberating it is.
Rejoice in suffering. Rejoice when you are insulted. Rejoice when the name you carry gets you excluded from the table…gets you reported to the authorities…gets you killed. To a world that measures blessing by safety and comfort and the absence of pain, this sounds like the theology of the broken. Like Stockholm syndrome dressed up in liturgy. Like a faith that teaches people to love their chains.
But that is not what Peter is saying.
Peter is not telling them to enjoy suffering. He is not telling them that suffering is good. He is not baptizing their oppression and calling it divine. He is doing something far more dangerous than that.
He is telling them that their suffering is not the end of the story.
He is telling them that when they suffer for the name of Christ…when they are made to bleed because of whose side they are on…they are participating in something ancient and unstoppable. They are sharing in the sufferings of Christ himself. And the one who suffered on that Roman cross…the one the empire thought it had silenced forever…that one was revealed in glory. The suffering was real. The death was real. And the resurrection was also real.
This is not comfort. This is cosmology. Peter is telling them how the universe actually works.
God Is Not Neutral
Liberation theology has always understood something that comfortable Christianity refuses to believe.
God is not neutral.
God does not stand equidistant between the oppressor and the oppressed and ask both sides to be reasonable. The God of the Exodus took sides. The God of the prophets took sides. The God who became flesh in the body of a poor Jewish peasant under Roman occupation…that God took sides. And the side God took was not the side of the empire. It was never the side of the empire.
When Peter says that the Spirit of glory rests on those who are insulted for the name of Christ…he is making a political claim as much as a theological one. He is saying that the people the empire calls worthless are the ones carrying the weight of the holy. He is saying that the ones who have been pushed to the margins are standing at the center of what God is doing in the world. He is inverting every hierarchy that power has ever constructed.
This is the word that has sustained every liberation movement that dared to name God.
It sustained Harriet Tubman moving through the dark with a pistol and a prayer. It sustained the women of the civil rights movement who marched when marching meant being beaten. It sustained Oscar Romero standing in that cathedral in El Salvador telling the truth until the truth got him killed. It sustained every person who has ever been made to suffer not because they did wrong but because they did right…not because they were criminals but because they were Christians in the truest sense…people who stood on the side of the poor…the condemned…the discarded…refusing to move.
The Spirit of glory rests on you.
Not on the empire. Not on the comfortable. Not on the ones who made their peace with the system and called it wisdom. On you…the ones who were willing to be insulted for the name.
God is Not Neutral: The Line
But Peter does something here that we cannot afford to skip past.
He draws a line.
He says: do not suffer as a murderer. Do not suffer as a thief. Do not suffer as an evildoer or as one who meddles in what does not belong to you. There is a distinction between suffering that shares in the wounds of Christ and suffering that is simply the consequence of harm you have done to others.
This is not cruelty toward people who have fallen. This is clarity about what the movement is.
Liberation is not simply rebellion. It is not simply the inversion of power for its own sake. It is not about becoming the oppressor once you have survived the oppressor. The tradition that Peter is writing from…the tradition that runs from Sinai to the Sermon on the Mount to every base community that has ever gathered in a dangerous place to read scripture together…that tradition insists that the means and the end cannot be separated. You cannot build the Kingdom of God through the tools of every kingdom that has opposed it.
This is the hard word for every movement that starts in justice and drifts into something else. The hard word for every revolution that liberates one group by crushing another. The hard word for institutions that began as prophetic witness and became the thing they were prophesying against.
Suffer as a Christian. Not as someone who has simply chosen a different set of victims.
Suffering as Christians Right Now
There are people in this country right now suffering as Christians.
Not the people who claim that word in order to hold power over others. Not the ones who use the name of Christ to justify cages…deportations and the slow machinery of state violence against the bodies of the poor. Those people are not suffering for the name of Christ. They are suffering…if they suffer at all…for the name of empire. And empire has its own rewards and its own judgment.
I am talking about the ones who have been called troublemakers for standing outside execution chambers. The ones who have been arrested for feeding people in public parks. The ones who have been called naive or dangerous for insisting that every human being…no matter what they have done…bears the image of God and cannot be thrown away. The ones who have lost jobs…churches…friendships and reputations because they refused to stop saying the names of the condemned out loud.
To those people Peter is writing.
To those people Peter says: you are not alone. What you are carrying is not a curse. The Spirit of glory rests on you. And when the glory of Christ is finally…fully…irreversibly revealed…you will rejoice with a joy that the comfortable have never even imagined. Because you will recognize it. You will have already been living inside it. Suffering was the door. Glory is what is on the other side.
God is Not Neutral: Do Not Be Ashamed of Suffering
Do not be ashamed. That is the word I want to leave with you. Do not be ashamed of the name. Do not be ashamed of the suffering that comes with it. Do not be ashamed of the theology that insists God is present in the wounds of the world and not primarily in its triumphs. Do not be ashamed of the movement that looks weak by every measure the empire uses to count strength.
The cross looked like failure. Every instrument of death looks like the final word until the one who was dead walks out of the tomb and the soldiers fall on their faces and the empire’s best weapon turns out to be the beginning of something the empire had no category for. That is the shape of this faith. That is what we have been handed. Suffering that does not destroy. Insult that does not silence. A name that every power in every age has tried to extinguish and that keeps lighting fires in the dark.
Glorify God because of the name. Rejoice. Not because the pain is not real. But because the resurrection is also real…the one who walked out of that tomb is still walking…still present…still resting as Spirit and glory on every broken body that refuses to stop bearing witness. The wound is not the end. The glory is coming. And you will be ready for it.
Amen.
Amen.
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