Thomas J Parlette
“Divine Reverse Psychology”
1st Peter 1: 17-23
4/23/23
On a clear spring day, near an airport north of Madison, Wisconsin, Alan Klapmeier almost met his maker.
He was taking an advanced flying lesson, with an instructor sitting right next to him, when his plane suddenly collided with another one. Klapmeier’s wing sliced through the strut that supported the other plan’s wing, and that aircraft quickly spun into the ground, killing the pilot.
Alan Klapmeier had to ram the control yoke hard to the left to keep his plane – now missing part of its right wing – on course back toward the runway. As he neared a landing, he realized that he had pushed the yoke as far as it would go. In moments. He was going to begin rolling over to the right. Then his disabled wing would strike the ground, sending the plane into a cart-wheeling crash.
But death took a holiday. With a second to spare, Klapmeier felt the wheels touch the runway. He was born anew.
Now you might think that Alan Klapmeier would walk away from such a harrowing experience determined to never fly again. But you’d be wrong. Realizing that existing small planes were too risky, he committed himself to making them safer.
He decided to start building planes with parachutes. He and his brother Dale developed the Cirrus SRT20 – a four – person aircraft that contains, as standard equipment, a parachute for the whole plane.
This is one solution to the long-standing question of how best to protect pilots and passengers. Fired out by a rocket, this strong Kevlar parachute enables a plane to drift safely down to Earth, saving the lives of everyone on board. It’s speed at impact is still violent – rough enough to jar the passengers and total the plane – but the landing is controlled enough to prevent massive injury and destruction. (1)
Like the Klapmeiers, we too can think of ourselves as parachute people. The apostle Peter reminds us that we “were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ…”
Peter isn’t talking about a Kevlar parachute, of course, but the blood shed by Christ on the cross as a sacrifice on our behalf. Ransomed, restored and spared, we have been saved by the “precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish.” The blood of Christ, shed on the cross, is our parachute of salvation. With it, our feet touch down on solid ground, and we are “born anew.”
The important thing about parachutes is that you have to trust them. You can’t always see them, packed and strapped to your back. You can’t fuss over them or fiddle with them when they’re lodged deep within a Cirrus SR20. You can’t test them in the safety of your home. You can’t control them as they deploy in a mighty rush of wind. You simply have to trust them, rely on them and have complete faith in them, as they blossom above you in the sky and save your life.
Charles Plum, a U.S. Naval academy graduate, was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plum ejected and parachuted into enemy territory. He was captured and spent 6 years in a prison cell. He survived that ordeal and now lectures about lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”
It sure did,” said Plumb. “If that chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Says Plumb, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a navy uniform. I wondered how many times I might have seen him and not even said “Good morning, how are you,” or anything because I was a fighter pilot and he was a sailor.”
Plumb thought of the many hours that sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t even know.
Now, when he gives a speech, he asks his audience, “Who is packing your parachute? Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day.” (2)
Peter’s point is clear – God has packed our parachute, but it requires an element of trust. God destined Jesus to save us “before the foundation of the world.” God’s divine research and development plan put Jesus in place long before we began to spin out of control and plummet headfirst toward destruction. Just before impact, Jesus “was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake,” announces Peter; he popped suddenly into view and slowed – if not stopped altogether – our descent into a life of meaninglessness, “quiet desperation,” sin, rebellion and disobedience.
Because of this, “you have come to trust in God,” concludes the apostle, “who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.” The point of Christ’s sacrifice is not to give us a pleasant little parachute ride, but rather to save us so that we will live a new and more abundant life; a life in which we trust in God and set our faith and hope in the Lord.
In other words, the point of Christ’s parachute is to send us soaring again – like parasailing behind a speed boat. It’s to get us in the air and flying right – maybe for the first time.
What does such a life look like? According to Peter, it involves the purification of our souls by obedience to the truth. Simply put, it’s about a deep, heartfelt connection to the one person who was sent by God to show us the way to live and save us from death and despair. When we are obedient to Jesus, we are tied tightly to the parachute that can hold us when we begin to plummet and deliver us to safety.
Peter wraps it up by saying that the purpose of all this is so that we might have “genuine, mutual love.” And as if that were not clear enough he adds: “Love one another deeply from the heart.” Benjamin Franklin put it another way to John Hancock: “We must indeed all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of her nephew Will’s first birthday party. The little boy was the center of everyone’s attention, and so he happily did a little dance – until a jealous 7-year-old named Jason charged over, put both his hands on Will’s chest and shoved. Will fell hard, right on his butt, and then his head smacked the ground.
He looked utterly surprised at first. No one had ever hurt him before, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Then he opened up his mouth and howled - but not for long. His mother hugged him and helped him to his feet, and the first thing Will did was to totter over to Jason. He knew that Jason was at the bottom of this thing, but since such meanness was new to him he didn’t know what to do. So he did what he had always done. He put his arms around Jason and laid his head against his chest.
“What Will did to Jason put an end to the meanness in that room,” observes Taylor. “That is what love is… not a warm feeling between like-minded friends, but plain old imitation of Christ, who took all the meanness of the world and ran it through the filter of his own body, repaying evil with good, blame with pardon, death with life. Call it divine reverse psychology. It worked once, and it can work again – whenever God can find someone else willing to give it a try.”(3)
That’s what we are called to do – practice a little divine reverse psychology, by showing genuine mutual affection, loving one another deeply from the heart. We are called to set our faith and hope on God, who raised Jesus from the dead and gave him glory – even when the world shoved him to the ground.
Divine reverse psychology, loving one another – that’s how we will be born anew. That’s how we will be saved from destruction and sail smoothly on the wind of God’s Holy Spirit.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline, retrieved 4/3/23.
2. Ibid…
3. Ibid…
