1 Peter

Divided By Space, Connected By Mercy

The Pando in Utah. The trees are individuals above the surface, but they are connected by something down deep…

The Pando in Utah. The trees are individuals above the surface, but they are connected by something down deep…

Divided By Space, Connected By Mercy


Readings

  1. Old Testament: Exodus 15:22-16:10

  2. Psalm 13

  3. Gospel: John 15:1-11

  4. 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.

What sort of guest are you?

The holidays are upon us, which means food, travel, and family. Some of us are hosts, and some of us are guests. And there is nothing worse than a terrible houseguest: they smoke in your rooms, they threaten to spank your children, and they never leave.

The book of 1 Peter is written to encourage Christians to be a different sort of guest. To be the sort of people who are self-controlled, and seek the good of their hosts- even when the hosts are malicious gossips. The motivation for being this type of guest? That one day we are going home. Or to be more precise, home is coming to us. Sort of like this:

Becoming the People of God

The language 1 Peter uses to describe his readers is fraught with tension- sojourners and priests, exiles and royals, not a people and yet now a people. How do this radical transformation occur? How do we see ourselves as the home in which God lives, while we don’t have a home ourselves? How can we proclaim his excellencies as his priests when we long and wait for him? It is only as we see his love for us, the love of him who saw our need and saved us, that we can ever express our praise (1 Peter 2:10). Sorta like this epic story:

Become a Better You

To become the best version of yourself, go on an archaeological dig deep within yourself. Excavate your desires, and express them to the world. This last bit will be the hard part- the world will try to keep you down. Here’s a helpful guide on your way:

But what if this doesn’t work? What if “Excavate and Express” depends on a false set of assumptions? What if we aren’t stable, coherent, calm, individuals? What if we our desires are unstable and paradoxical? What if pretending like they aren’t makes us freaked out and anxious?

What if we need other people? What if pretending we are individuals instead makes us slaves?

If that’s the case, then becoming the best version of yourself is going to be an entirely different process. We will need our identity to be conferred- given to us- confirmed- by somebody who loves us- and conformed to- worked at.

What if worshipping Jesus is the only way to become the best version of yourself (1 Peter 1:13-21)?