Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
1 Peter 2:10 (NIV)
Made Into a People
Nine of them on the 5:04, most mornings, and not one of them chose any of the others. The driver holds the door about four seconds for the man who comes down the hill at a run, and has done for years, and neither of them has ever said anything about it.
They know whose stop is whose. When the woman who sits behind the wheel arch was off for three weeks in February, somebody bought a card at the shop by the depot and it went up and down that bus until it was full. Nobody on it has anybody’s phone number.
Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Peter wrote that to men and women he called foreigners and exiles, people whose neighbors accused them of doing wrong. God had brought a people into being where there hadn’t been one.
The mercy arrived the same way. God gave it to them, and God made them a people, and both of those happened to them while they stood there.
One of the nine came on drunk in October, badly, and said things to the woman behind the wheel arch. He was back on the 5:04 on the Monday and nobody had moved seats. That isn’t kindness. Kindness would have been a lift home. It’s a thing not counted, and it’s the half of Peter’s sentence that isn’t about belonging.
Nobody in that letter was the people of God by himself. The sentence is plural all the way through, and Peter doesn’t offer a version of it for one person. You are in it because God put you in it, along with whoever else he put in it, and none of you was consulted about the rest.
You can be one of these people and still stand in a full church on a Sunday feeling like a guest in the building. The feeling is worth telling the truth about, and it doesn’t settle anything. God gave those exiles mercy and gave them one another in the same act, and a thin morning takes nothing back from either gift.
The 5:04 goes out again on Monday. Nobody picked it and nobody can leave it without leaving the job, and at a quarter past the driver slows at the bottom of the hill whether anybody is running or not.
A Prayer to Remember
You made a people out of men and women who had none of their own, and you gave them mercy outright. Do that with me, Father, however long it takes. And make me easy to stand next to for whoever walks in alone.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
