I talk a lot about the idolatry of identity in our society, and it’s necessary to do so. Along with desire, it’s one of the two chief idols of Western culture, and I think it’s probably the single greatest point of attack for the Enemy against the church. There are many who would say homosexuality is, or transgenderism, but those are means to an end; if he can get the church to accept identity idolatry in the course of opposing the world on sexual issues, the Enemy is just as happy. It still turns our minds and hearts away from God, and it does so in a way which makes us more vulnerable to other things he has in motion.
As Christians, we have a new identity in Christ. We are no longer who the world says we are. We don’t construct our own identities, by its rules or in any other way; we don’t choose our own identities, on its terms or any other. Simply put, “identify as” is idolatry and anti-gospel: Jesus Christ gives us our identity. He tells us who we are.
Unfortunately, we have difficulty getting there. We may get so far as to affirm we are a new creation in Jesus; trouble is, as the Christian music group Jars of Clay put it years ago, we don’t know who we are instead. Our vision of ourselves hasn’t really changed, and reflexively, we still run on the assumption that life works the way the world says it works. To borrow a line from comedian and former late-night host Craig Ferguson, we have a thinking problem. We need our minds renewed.
1 Peter is aimed squarely at this issue; it’s why we’re turning to spend some time in it at this point, and it’s why I took the line from Jars of Clay for the series title. It’s full of explicit identity language, and also of implicit identity language. Its chief purpose is to remake our thinking by teaching us who we are in Christ—who we are instead of who the world thinks we are. Interestingly, it’s quite closely connected to the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon—we’ll talk about this down the line—is an extended message on the way of the disciple, on what the life of a disciple of Jesus is and means and looks like. Jesus was preaching to his disciples and letting the crowds listen in as he painted a picture of living the life of the kingdom of God among the kingdoms of this world. In this epistle, Peter takes that picture and turns it into our spiritual identity documents. And as someone who spent four years taking people’s driver’s-license photos, I can affirm he does a much better job than I was ever able to do.
Peter tells us where he’s writing from and to whom, but for his own reasons, he does so in metaphorical fashion. He’s writing from Rome, which he names as Babylon; and though he addresses his audience as Jews, it’s a safe bet he’s actually writing mostly to Gentile Christians. I suspect the New Testament scholar Karen Jobes is right, though it can’t be proven, when she notes Rome expelled all Christians from the capital several times during the first century and suggests Peter’s primary audience may have been these deportees. Disoriented and highly aware of their status as exiles, they would have been particularly able to understand and appreciate Peter’s language in this letter.
Whether Jobes’ proposal is correct or not, Peter starts off describing his hearers in three specific ways. One, they are exiles. Some translations soften this, but the ESV doesn’t, which I appreciate. 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.
Now, the connection here to our current political reality is blindingly obvious. Some of you met my son-in-law when he and my eldest daughter visited for the weekend on their way back to North Carolina. He’s Ugandan. I initially thought to put their picture up, and then I had to wonder if that could somehow put him at risk. Last Monday, he went in to the USCIS—United States Customs and Immigration Service—office in Raleigh to get fingerprinted as part of the process toward a new permanent status; he went in, had his fingerprints taken, and went home, and that was cause for thanksgiving. There have been so many stories of people who were doing everything by the book but got seized by ICE and held for deportation anyway, any appointment could be a trap. Understand, when Peter calls his hearers—from the first century down to us—exiles, that’s exactly how loaded this language is.
The connection to our current cultural reality is less obvious but at least as significant. The American church had two centuries to grow accustomed to being seen as native to the culture. We have now been expelled from the cultural capital to the hinterlands, cast down from the ranks of approved voices, consigned to join the hicks, the rednecks, and everyone else our contemporary elite culture finds intolerable. This has left large swaths of the American church disoriented. Some have looked up, listened to Peter, and recognized the truth that our previous favored status was illusory. Most, sadly, have been furiously fighting to get back to Rome.
- Craig Barnes, a Presbyterian pastor and theologian, has said, “Exiles are people who know where home is—they just don’t live there.” Deuteronomy 26:5 taught Israel to say, “My father was a wandering Aramean”; we could just as well declare, “My Lord was a wandering Nazarene.” If we are to faithfully follow that Lord, we need to begin by remembering where home actually is. We need to look around at the world and recognize the truth that we aren’t, and can’t be, truly at home here: we don’t belong here, we don’t fit in, and we can’t try to change that and still be faithful to Jesus. If we are following him in mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God, we will be conspicuous for things this world does not like and will not accept.
Two, Peter calls his audience exiles of the Dispersion; the ESV translates this word, but many translations just take it straight as Diaspora. You might recognize that as the standard term for Jews living outside of Israel; it already was, which is why Peter uses it. In the Roman context, some Jews assimilated, but most refused to conform to any great degree. They remained unyieldingly Jewish; they maintained their identity and allegiances as a separate people, alien to their society. They were thus conspicuous by their difference, and disliked by many Gentiles as a consequence. They did not seek approval or affirmation from the culture but accepted its disapproval as the price of being who they were. In this, they served—and serve—as a model for the church.
Three, Peter addresses his hearers as elect or chosen exiles of the Diaspora. This is the reason for their difference, and ours. He unpacks this word in verse 2 in a trinitarian formula. First, we were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. Two aspects to look at here. One is foreknowledge. Our salvation is not simply left up to us; God doesn’t wait for us to choose him, then give us a confirmation number. He chose us in advance before the creation of the world. That’s not because he foreknew we would choose him; again, God didn’t just sign off on our decision. We did not cause God to choose us. At the same time, his choice was according to his foreknowledge—it wasn’t capricous or random. We don’t know the content of his foreknowledge, and we don’t know why he chose whom he chose; but we have the assurance that he had reason, he just isn’t going to tell us what. As, indeed, there’s no reason we should expect him to. New Testament scholar M. Eugene Boring sums up the matter this way: “The essential point is that Christians are in the church not merely by their own decision, but by the initiative of God who has called them.” Karen Jobes adds, “God’s divine initiative has operated in their lives even before they were aware of it.”
The other thing to note is this is the foreknowledge of God the Father. His fatherhood is related to his foreknowledge. This isn’t a generic title for anyone and everyone to use. He is God the Father because he is the Father of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ; therefore, as we have been born anew in Jesus, he is God our Father. As Jobes puts it, “The God who took the initiative in their lives has drawn them into an intimate, loving, and redemptive relationship with him . . . in which God claims supreme authority over their lives.” None of this is earned; all is only by his great mercy.
Second, we were chosen in the sanctification of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit applies the Father’s choice to us, connecting us to God’s saving work. The Spirit of God brings us into the circle of who God are and what they is doing. The Spirit plugs us into the power of God, bringing God’s redeeming and transforming power into our lives; thus the Holy Spirit is at work in us transforming us into what God has already made us to be.
Third, we were chosen for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling with his blood. By the blood of Jesus we’ve been brought into a covenant relationship with God as his beloved children. The sprinkling, as we see in Exodus 24, symbolized the application of the sacrifice to the people of God, the price paid being applied to their sin. In the same way, by the Spirit of God, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross has been applied to us, paying the price justice demands for our sin. The fruit of that application, and of the Spirit’s work in us as a whole, is obedience to Jesus’s commands.
As you might have noticed, Peter only addresses his audience as individuals; unlike Paul, he does not name them as the church in these regions. This is carefully balanced. He wants them to understand that as disciples of Jesus, we’re all exiles and resident aliens, but addressing them collectively as the church would focus their attention on what they do when they’re gathered together, separated out from the world around them. Peter doesn’t want to do that. The easiest way to deal with a society in which you’re a misfit is to withdraw from it, to find other misfits and create your own little misfit bubble. It would be easy for the church to become just that sort of bubble, a little pocket culture for the benefit of those who already fit in there. That’s not what the church is supposed to be, and it’s not how Christians are supposed to live.
Peter addresses this letter to individual believers out in the everyday world living as foreigners because that’s where he wants to focus our attention. Rather than creating a misfit bubble and insulating ourselves from the world, he tells us our calling is to live in the world as misfits. He wants us to live out in the middle of everything going on; he calls us to live loud in the face of all the world’s messaging and all its demands. Our place is to actively live as strangers in strange lands.
One of the key concepts in family systems theory, the counseling approach in which I was trained, is self-differentiation. This is the ability to separate your own thoughts and feelings from the thoughts and feelings of others, and thus to act on the basis of what you think, feel, believe, and care about rather than being driven by the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and priorities of people around you, your community, or your society. As Christians, we need to practice self-differentiation with regard to the world around us. We need to stay connected to and engaged with the world; withdrawing from the world and isolating ourselves in a cozy little subculture does not fit with our calling as disciples of Jesus. At the same time, we need to remain separate and distinct from the world, neither conforming to its expectations nor assimilating to its practices. We need to be people who, in Karen Jobes’ words, “dwell respectfully in their host nation but participate in its culture only to the extent that its values and customs coincide with their own that they wish to preserve.”
This isn’t an easy or obvious balance. It’s not comfortable either, as it’s guaranteed to line you up for conflict at times. It is, however, worth it, because we have a hope that is not of this world, and which this world needs to see. Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are born anew as children of God. He paid the price for all this world’s sin and darkness, agony and grief, death and decay, by his death to buy us back for God. Then he broke the power of sin and death by rising again, leaving the Enemy with nothing. Our hope is living and alive because Jesus didn’t stay dead, he’s alive eternally.
Our hope is oriented toward an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. This would have been especially meaningful to people who were physically in exile, because for them, inheritance mostly consisted of and was based in land. If you likely would never see your home and your family’s land again, what would it matter if you inherited it? Even if it’s yours in some sense, it will never be yours in any way that matters. Our inheritance in Jesus is one we cannot lose or have taken away from us; nor can anything on earth mar it in any way. In the luminous words of the commentator Francis W. Beare, the inheritance we receive from God “is untouched by death, unstained by evil, unimpaired by time; it is compounded of immortality, purity, and beauty.” It is in keeping with Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:19-21, in the Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t store up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal; store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and thieves do not break in and steal—for wherever your treasure is, there is your heart.”
Our hope is sure because we’re guarded by God’s power through faith into salvation. God will not lose his own; he will neither drop us nor misplace us, and we cannot climb out of his hand. He will keep us all the way into the last time, when Jesus is at last fully revealed and all things are made new. In the coming kingdom of God, we will no longer be exiles, for we will at last be home from the far country. But even here in the far country, in our present reality, by the Spirit of God we participate in that kingdom even though to us it is still future.
Our hope is undefeated by suffering and trials; indeed, it can even grow stronger because of them. The disasters of the present can do no harm to our promised inheritance, and they cannot undo our salvation. They can and do test our faith, and it’s easy to take that as a negative—but it isn’t. Testing doesn’t mean our faith has failed, even though sometimes we fail the test. It also doesn’t mean we don’t have enough faith. In truth, I’m not sure that’s really a biblical concept.
Testing means we experience our faith. A faith that had never dealt with trials and suffering would be equivalent to having faith in your ability to walk when you’re lying flat on your back. If you never get out of bed, your faith is merely theoretical. It’s easy to talk about faith in God when everything in your life looks good, because you don’t need faith then. It’s when trials come and you’re hurting, when you have to hang on to Jesus for dear life, that you see what your faith is made of. But when you come through trials and you can look back and see Jesus was faithful, he hung on to you and you made it through by his power, you can rejoice in his faithfulness—and you can face the next trial with the assurance he’ll bring you through that one, because he brought you through this one. That’s a faith that’s being refined; it’s a faith more precious than gold because it can endure flames that even the purest gold could not survive. That’s a hope that’s worth the cost.
Photo taken 2012 by author.