The Buddhist faith in which I was raised as a child teaches rebirth. The Christian faith into which, by God’s grace, I was rescued, teaches that you must be born again. So, it could sound like these two faiths have something in common. But in fact, this is not so. 

The “rebirth” taught by the Buddhist faith says that, after death, you are born into another lifetime. It’s called rebirth because the life into which you are reborn depends on the life you have lived – what you sow in one life you reap in your next life.  

I recall an elderly relative suffering in hospital after being hit by a motorcycle, plaintively asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” He believed that his suffering was his “karma” – something sown in a past life – but he didn’t know what, and he didn’t know why. Tragically and poignantly, his was a “hopeless” rebirth. 

In contrast, the apostle Peter writes to God’s “elect strangers” – chosen by God but rejected by the world – and encourages them (in 1 Peter 1:3-4) that they have a “new birth into a living hope”. It is birth into a life now and into eternity that is the gift of God – not something we earn or deserve, but given by God. It is a living hope because it is founded in the mercy of God, guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus and focused on an imperishable inheritance kept safe for us in heaven.

It is a new birth by the mercy of God – not according to what we deserve, but according to his own kindness and love. Not according to justice, but according to mercy. Our new birth, unlike the rebirth of Eastern philosophy, does not depend on what we have sown in “previous lives”, but on what Jesus has “sown” in his death and resurrection. 

By his death, Jesus pays the penalty that is due for our sin, and his resurrection is a precursor to our own resurrection: 

[God] has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Peter 1:3). 

The new birth of the Christian is a birth into hope because our evil has been atoned for in the death and resurrection of Jesus. 

In our culture, “hope” can be a very weak word. To say that we hope for something is the same as to say “I wish”. But in the Bible, hope is a sure expectation, a confident anticipation. In the Bible, hope stands alongside faith and love as the indestructible and indispensable markers of the Christian person. Not things that we strive for – but the gifts that God gives us on the basis of the work that Jesus has completed.  

Just as an executed will gives rise to a sure expectation of an inheritance, so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead gives rise to our sure expectation of life with God, which begins now but only comes into its fullness in the future. An inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for us. 

The elect people of God are marked in the world as strangers because we are people who live for an imperishable inheritance in a culture that implicitly and explicitly treats what is passing, fading and perishing as most important. 

When there are so many goods and entertainments to be acquired and experienced, then the dynamic that increasingly drives the world is being able to generate enough money in a sufficiently compressed amount of time to be able to squeeze into the time that remains the stuff that money can buy. 

We spend now and pay back three times as much later; we have little time for relationships with people that don’t involve some benefit for us; relationships are commodified and made secondary to acquisition, consumption and the attainment of “life goals”. We’re pressed for time, we’re pressed for money and we’re desperate to have as much of the best of everything as soon and as often as we can.   

In so many ways, Sydney is a place of transient trinkets, hollow promises and glittering voids. But everywhere there is havoc, destroyed lives and despair; epidemics of gambling, loneliness, immorality, and exploitation. But by the mercy of God, there is new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead into an imperishable inheritance. 

Here is the shape of the salvation in which Peter wants to encourage his readers to stand fast (1 Peter 5:12). Here is the gospel of hope that we live to make known to our friends, family and community in Sydney and beyond.