Thursday • 11/25/2021
Thursday of the Twenty-sixth Week After Pentecost (Proper 29)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 131; Psalm 132; Psalm 133; Zephaniah 3:1–13; 1 Peter 2:11–25; Matthew 20:1–16
On 1 Peter 2:11–25, see also https://tinyurl.com/2htusat8, from 4/23/2020
On Matthew 20:1–16, see also https://tinyurl.com/2dmdzrzh, from 6/24/2020
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Beloved, I urge you as foreigners and exiles…
When Peter tells us in 1 Peter 2:11 that we are “foreigners” and “exiles” he means that we live by a completely different value system than the people around us. The two words in Greek (paroikoi and parepidēmoi) denote people who live “alongside” households and city populations, but do not fully belong to them. And for our outsider status, there will be a price to pay.
It’s not easy to translate across the 2 millennia and the cultural differences that separate Peter’s world from ours. But there are some hints as to the challenges we share with our 1st century Christian counterparts in their Roman world.
“Conduct yourselves honorably … though they malign you…” (1 Peter 2:12). There is a culture that stands outside us and makes us feel we are from another planet. We can capitulate and join the crowd. We can overreact and become jerks. Or we can strive to live wisely “in the world, but not of the world,” as some believers have summarized. The 2nd century Epistle to Diognetus elegantly sums our situation, calling us “this new race or way of life” (kainon touto genos ē epitēdeuma), neither Greek nor Jew (Epistle to Diognetus 1.1). Christians, as the Epistle explains very much in the spirit of 1 Peter, “live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents (paroikoi); they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign” (Epistle 5.5).
“…abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11). There are internal desires that wage war with our souls. Those desires would be tough enough to strive against if we were alone and living in a desert. The war becomes more desperate when we live in a world that glorifies materialism and appetite, and shouts “You can have it all!”
“…live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil” (1 Peter 2:16). We can strive for “freedom,” and abuse that freedom to cover evil. The world around us thinks of “freedom” as giving us the right to unbounded self-expression. There may be no greater challenge for believers in our world (and I am thinking primarily of believers in first-world democracies) than living with the benefits of political, economic, and social liberty. “Nobody can tell me what to do!” is a slogan of our time. There’s nothing more anti-Christian, nothing more contrary to the life Peter is exhorting. The freedom we have in Christ, is a freedom to serve.
“…accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor… or of governors…accept the authority of your masters with all deference…” (1 Peter 2:13). Lying politicians, abusive authority figures, and horrible bosses give us every reason to respond, “But, but…!” to Peter’s exhortation. And we (most of us who read these devotionals) live in a world, unlike Peter’s, in which we have a voice in who governs us and how they do so, and we are free to seek out better bosses. What Peter puts before us is the need to resist deep cynicism toward all authority, the obligation to reject an inclination to non-compliance whenever our convenience is infringed, and the imperative to say “No!” to a spirit of defiance that poisons every asymmetrical relationship. Like it or not, we all find ourselves in the “lesser” position of some asymmetrical relationships. Our job is to find Christ in those places.
“…Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you should follow in his footsteps” (1 Peter 2:21). To this very end, Peter, alone among New Testament writers, finds in Isaiah 53’s Song of the Suffering Servant a model for the Christian life. We bear witness to Christ’s way of life by living that same life. For Peter, we win the doubters by following Christ into “the valley of the shadow.” When doubters see our willingness to accept mistreatment, they may at last ask about “the hope that is within us” (1 Peter 3:15).
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). That’s when we have the chance to share the glorious good news about Christ’s atoning, forgiving, justifying, reconciling death for us, and his vivifying, sanctifying, transforming, righteousness-teaching presence among us by virtue of his resurrection and ascension.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Babyaimeesmom, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
