Divided By Space, Connected By Mercy
Readings
Old Testament: Exodus 15:22-16:10
Psalm 13
Gospel: John 15:1-11
Epistle: 1 Pet. 2:1-10
Devotional
You probably know what it’s like to move to a new city. Along with the excitement of new places and experiences, there’s the impending dread and fear of not having “your people” anymore. Perhaps it was your childhood friends, or maybe it was friends at work or at church that you had to leave for a new setting of loneliness. It can be really difficult to move to a place where you hardly know anyone. Hopefully, you’ve also experienced the inverse of this. In your new environment, someone reaches out to you to do the thing that you wouldn’t have been able to do yourself: they include you in something. And by this inclusion, you begin to meet others. You form new shared experiences. It’s not just the fact that you are around people that makes it feel special. It’s being part of something bigger than just you.
Peter is writing to a group of people who are dispersed. Though the nature of ours is different than the first century church, the idea of dispersion is familiar to us in 2020. We’ve been dispersed of our routines, our comforts, and so much of what we love. Yet the promise he iterates to them is that being reconciled to God also means being reconciled and inseparably connected to others. “You were not a people, but now you are God’s people.” There’s a collective nature to the church. It isn’t just a group of individuals. It’s a body. You’ve been welcomed into “your people.”
The interesting thing about the context into which Peter is writing is that in this encouragement of unity, their experience has been anything but. Yet amidst displacement, they find solace in the comfort of one another. And the central theme of this unity, says Peter, is mercy. “You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” In other words, the primary link for all Christians is not geographic. Rather, it is the transformative reality that in the sin that was killing us, God showed us mercy by uniting us to His Son in salvation. This is good news in a quarantine, isn’t it? Even though we are separated by location, we are still united in the Savior and mercy that gives us structure. We can mourn the distance of the physical church that we all miss at the moment, but we can still rest in the unwavering hope of being united by mercy. And mercy can’t be stopped by a virus.
Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord
Prayer
Pray Psalm 12 aloud.