But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
1 Peter 2:9 (NIV)
Made Into a People
The road past the grain elevator turns to soup after a rain, and by evening the ruts have set up enough to hold a boot and then let it go. A man is walking it with his shoes tied together over his shoulder and his pant legs rolled to the knee. Two cars have gone past him and neither one slowed down.
Peter writes to people he calls foreigners and exiles, and then he says what God has made them: chosen, royal, holy, his own. Once they were not a people, and now they are the people of God. Once they had not received mercy, and now they have received mercy.
God made a people out of people who weren’t one. They were foreigners and exiles in that place before Peter wrote to them and they were foreigners and exiles after, with the same neighbors and the same trouble. God gave them a name that didn’t come from anything they had.
And he gives them the point of it: so they’d tell people what God is like, the God who called them out of darkness into his wonderful light. A stranger asking what you are would get the job first, most days.
Those words came down on people who were still walking home in the dark. Peter says them as facts, over people with nothing in their pockets to back them up.
The man on the road is a mile out and the porch light is already on for him. He’ll come in filthy to the knee and they’ll put a plate down in front of him. What would you have to believe about yourself to come in that dirty and sit down?
A Prayer to Remember
For years I’ve carried a description of myself, and it isn’t the one you gave me. I can say mine from memory, and yours I have to go looking for. Change which one comes to me first when something goes wrong. Say the true one over me until it holds. I’ll need it said more than once.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
