(1 Peter 2:11-12)

We’re a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; and we are, Peter continues, a nation of foreigners.  He uses two terms here, both connected to earlier in the letter.  One, for the second time, he calls us exiles.  The first time comes in the first verse of the letter, and you may remember we talked about this word in the first sermon of this series.  The Greek word referred to people who lived long-term in a place where they were not citizens, to which they remained foreigners.  They were outsiders who did not melt into the surrounding culture; they stayed identifiably different.  For their difference, they were often regarded with suspicion as possible threats to the social order, for their primary loyalty lay elsewhere.

To intensify his point, Peter also calls us “resident aliens.”  This is the only time he uses this noun, but he used the adjective form in 1:17.  The Greek word here is paroikos, so there’s a minor wordplay with oikos, the word for “house” which he used in 2:9; this word is oikos plus the prefix para, which means “by,” “alongside,” “near,” or “beyond”—thus for instance parallel lines are lines which run alongside each other but never touch.  Literally, paroikos would mean someone or something near the house.  It was first coined as a word meaning “neighbor,” but in Greek usage quickly came to denote someone who was a resident in a place for a long time but not a citizen there.  The only real difference between this word and the one translated “exiles” is that one had more of a negative sense, while this one was used of foreigners and outsiders who enjoyed the protection of the community.

Put these two words together, then, and there’s a balance between them.  We don’t belong here; we’re out of place.  We’re not supposed to be assimilated to the culture and society around us because we have a higher allegiance and bow to a higher authority than any in this world.  On this, both words agree.  To say we’re exiles is to highlight our nonconformity to our culture and emphasize the reality that if the goals and values and instructions of our society conflict with those of the kingdom of God, our call is to follow God in defiance of the world around us.  To call us resident aliens is to remind us we’re to be committed to the good of the community and the well-being of the society in which God has planted us, and to be committed in a way which actively displays that commitment to the world.  We’re to be neither isolated from the culture nor integrated with it, but interacting with it as something different from it.

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(1 Peter 2:9-10)

If you’re familiar with the King James Version, you probably see I took the title for this message from its translation of verse 9.  If you’re not, here’s the first part of this verse from the KJV:  “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.”  The ESV translates that “a people for his own possession,” which makes it typical of modern English translations; I don’t fault modern translators for that because the meaning of “peculiar” has shifted across four centuries.  It’s too bad, though; “for his own possession” lacks the connotations “peculiar” had.  I can say this is a shirt I possess, and while I obviously don’t own Sara, there’s a sense in which I possess her as my wife, but I can’t say that this shirt is peculiar to me—I’m not emotionally invested in it, and a lot of other people have one just like it.  As for Sara, I don’t make a habit of calling her peculiar, but in this sense, she’s peculiar to me alone.  Peculiar meant unique and remarkable and something only one person had.  There’s a sense of special and particular value here that we don’t want to lose.

That said, it’s not the whole reason I chose this title for the sermon.  Peter doesn’t explicitly say this, but we are indeed peculiar as contemporary Americans understand the word.  We are odd; we are atypical; we are outside our world’s idea of “normal.”  This is in part because we’re treasured by God.  You may  remember we talked about this while we were going through Ephesians 1, that we are God’s glorious inheritance and his treasured possession.  That means we don’t need to look to the world to find that affirmation.

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(1 Peter 2:1-8)

If you’re planning on coming to the inquirers’ class the next three weeks—or thinking of coming—this morning’s message will be a little bit of a preview of the second session.  That session will be focused on the church, and that’s what Peter’s talking about this morning.  I told you a couple weeks ago the apostle’s primary concern in this letter is with his hearers’ daily lives as believers in Christ loose in the world rather than with their life together as the church, and that’s true; but as I’ve said repeatedly, he’s addressing that concern by telling them who they are in Christ, and their identity in Christ (and thus ours as well) isn’t only individual, it’s also corporate.  Put another way, the church isn’t just a thing we go to, or even a thing we do with other people, that we can participate in or not as we prefer.  Rather, the church—being a part of the church, participating in its mission, and joining in its life—is integral to our identity in Christ.  If you’ve ever heard the line “Don’t just go to church, be the church,” that’s why:  on the one hand, just showing up on Sundays doesn’t mean much if that’s all it is for you, but on the other, if you’re not involved in an actual imperfect congregation of actual complicated, challenging, imperfect people, you’re making yourself less than you were meant to be.

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(1 Peter 1:22-2:3)

You have been redeemed from this world’s futility with the precious blood of Christ, who gave his life as the perfect, sinless sacrifice for sin.  God the Father raised him from the dead, and through him you believe in God and have been made children of God.  Therefore, your faith and hope are no longer in this world or the things of this world, they are in your Father in heaven.  This is Peter’s summary of the gospel in our passage from last week.  As he makes clear, it’s not enough for us simply to agree with this in our heads.  We need to agree with it in our hearts, our mouths, our hands, and our feet as well.  If we nod and smile and say, “Yes, that’s true,” then go on as if we’d never heard any of it, we’ve missed the point.

This is truth we need to obey.  That might sound like a strange way to put it, but it’s a normal part of life.  We obey the law of gravity:  we know if we hold something out and let go of it, it will fall, so we don’t intentionally do that unless that’s the result we want.  We know the law of gravity is true, and we act on that knowledge.  We make our plans and our decisions with the understanding that gravity is in effect.  I am married, I have four children, and I obey that truth—I don’t do things the same way I would if I were single.  (Partly because I don’t want to be single.)  These truths define and limit us.  They tell us this is how life is, this is what we can do and what we can’t, and this is what will happen if we defy them—not because God made rules to justify punishing us for breaking them, but because ignoring reality has consequences whether we want to believe it or not.  As with gravity, so with the gospel:  it’s not enough to believe it with our mouths, we need to believe it with our hands and feet and hearts.  We need to live the truth we say we believe.

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