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The Letter of 1 Peter #1 Together We Endure: The Letter of 1 Peter #1 “Not an Immigrant, Not a Tourist” // 1 Peter 1:1–12 There’s a few words I think some of us are tired of hearing: Coronavirus. Pandemic. Unprecedented. Lockdown. Put a little thumbs up in the comments if you would like to go a week without hearing those words. I’ve had a few of you straight-up tell me, “I’m tired of talking about COVID-19.” And I get it. We took a few weeks to think through how a follower of Jesus should respond in a moment like this, and, of course, that will stay in the back of our minds as we move forward, but we are going to shift now to a study through the book of 1 Peter. One of my favorites! Now, you ask, “Why 1 Peter at this time?” Peter wrote this letter to a church whose world had been turned upside down like ours has. In the opening greeting of the book, he says, I am writing this “To those chosen, living as exiles dispersed abroad in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…” This was a group of believers who had been scattered all over the world through political and religious persecution. Everything in their lives was uncertain; their communities had been shattered; their worlds were totally rocked! ● We haven’t necessarily gone through persecution like that, but many of us feel like we are living through a period of isolation and uncertainty unlike anything we’ve experienced before. We may not literally be exiles, but on some level we can relate. ● How do we endure, even thrive during such a time? That’s the question of 1 Peter. First, let me just give a quick word about the author, Peter. Most people, when they start to read the Bible, develop a real affection for Peter, because there is just something about him we feel like we can relate to. He had a big mouth and said some stupid things. And he was not real churchy, either, which sometimes I find refreshing. The Apostle Paul is sometimes way up here; Peter is almost always down here. Paul was like, “I was a Pharisee of the Pharisees; graduated with honor from the most prestigious school in the land;” Peter was like, “Yeah, but I can tell you the difference between a carp and a bass.” Paul strikes me as the kind of guy who translated documents from ancient Syriac in his spare time ; Peter the kind of guy who watched Tiger King twice. (BTW, I just learned they are turning Tiger King into a movie, and who did they get to play Joe Exotic? Only the finest thespian of our generation! NICOLAS CAGE. That’s a match made… well, it’s made somewhere. Paul was the kind of guy who wore his shirts buttoned all the way to the top; Peter was not afraid to wear Crocs in public and if he got a stain on his robe just flipped it inside out. You catching my drift? The point is, Peter was just really down to earth. And you’ll find his book that way, too. Gritty. Earthy. 1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ: To those chosen, living as exiles, 2 key words in there. Chosen, and exiles. Chosen means we belong to God. He’s our true home now. Exiles. That speaks to our current relationship with the world we live in. Peter, of course, was writing to a group of people who literally had been exiled from their country, and Peter uses that as a metaphor for all Christians everywhere. All Christians are essentially exiles in this world; temporarily isolated from their true country and taking up residence from another. When you’re living in a country that you’re not from, you can be one of three things to it: ● You can be an immigrant. An immigrant is someone who seeks to make this new country their permanent home. They are not from there, they want this new country to be their new home. And that is what a lot of Christians do with this world. They might know up here that they are citizens of heaven, but they treat this world as if this is where they really want to live. So they leverage most of their resources to make a comfortable life here; they obsess about their reputation here; they stress about what they do and don’t have here (Am I ever going to get married; is my ship ever going to come in; why is life here so hard; there’s so much to life I may never experience!). ● Option 2 is a tourist: A tourist is the opposite of an immigrant. They don’t want to live in this new country, they’re just visiting. They don’t form any real connections to the place, but they stay huddled in their groups; while you’re there you speak your own language; you eat your kind of food; you stay in Western hotels and complain when you can’t find a Starbucks. If there’s political or social problems going on in that society it doesn’t concern you--you have no connection to that place. This is the attitude some Christians have toward our world. They stay separated; never get involved; feel no connection to the community around them or its problems. They’re like, “Me and Kirk Cameron are waiting to get raptured off of this trailer park of a planet.” This is wrong, too. ● The third option is what Peter talks about here: Exile. An exile is someone whose home is somewhere else, but for an undefined amount of time they have to make their home in a new place. So they invest in this new community, form relationships, learn the culture, but they don’t want to get too attached and all the while they are looking for the day when they can go back home. Christians who live as exiles are not focused on owning a lot, because their real home is elsewhere. They are satisfied with just enough to get by, because their real treasure is somewhere else. It’s like when you are in an airport, you usually have little shops that will sell you necessities at ridiculously high prices. That’s so when you have a layover you can be comfortable. But you know what you never see in these shops? Shopping carts. Because nobody goes there to load up. You buy enough just to get by. It’s a temporary stop en route to your real home Peter wants you to change your mentality toward the world around you. This world is not your true home, so don’t be obsessed with your experiences here, what you do or don’t have. And don’t let it bother you that everyone else around you is different. That’s what you should expect if you’re an exile--you belong to a different kingdom, with a different set of values. You follow a different authority. Christians are supposed to seem strange to the world around them. How could you not? You’re living with a whole different set of values; you answer to a different authority. In every way, you’re marching to the beat of a different drummer. Imagine you’re watching a huge drum corps out at halftime when we used to be able to go to football games. Everyone in the whole corp has their eyes focused on the guy on the platform. But you notice one guy in the middle is paying no attention to the guy. You notice he’s got his headphones on and he’s not watching the conductor call out the beats of the march, he’s listening to the latest song by Chance the Rapper on Foxy 107. He’s playing along with that beat. He’s going to look odd--not because he is out of sync, but because he’s tuned into something entirely different from everyone else. When you are really tuned into God, you’re going to look odd. Extremely odd. In fact, if you’re not odd, it’s because your life is more in rhythm with the world than it is with God’s word. Now, in saying that, some of you are just odd period I don’t want to excuse that. There’s no excuse for that. You’re just supposed to be so out of sync with everyone around you that you seem weird. Peter says, “Embrace your identity as an exile.” He continues, vs. 2. We are chosen 2 according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient and to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ. Now here, in this opening section, Peter shows us that the whole Trinity is involved in our salvation. If we’ve got to be outcasts from everyone around us, he wants us to know the glorious majesty of the One we belong to. He starts with God the Father: 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead Highlight that word Mercy: The Father’s mercy conceived salvation’s plan. Sometimes people think of God the Father as the God of judgment, ready to pour out his wrath, and Jesus is the nicer, understanding Son who jumped in the Father’s way and was like, ‘no, no’ let’s extend grace.
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