Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours:
2 Peter 1:1 (NIV)
The Same Faith Peter Had
The wheel spins in the stand and the man taps each spoke with a screwdriver shaft, listening for the one gone dull. A woman in office clothes has her shoes off on a folding chair by the door, reading.
Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours. He’s an apostle, and he tells the people he’s writing to that their faith is worth as much as his own, and the righteousness of Christ is the reason he can say it.
So the faith came to them, and it came through something Christ did. An apostle and a stranger at the other end of a letter are holding the same thing in their hands, and the same righteousness put it in both. He signs the letter apostle and calls them people who received what they have, and the difference between those two doesn’t get a mention. Peter doesn’t grade it on the way down.
The faith at the other end of that letter never did anything dramatic. It turns up in people who keep going to church when they’d rather sleep in and who couldn’t defend a single doctrine if an argument started at the table, and who would be the first to tell you so. Nothing in the letter asks them to get better at it first. Peter greets that kind of reader as an equal before he knows the first thing about them, and Christ’s righteousness is why he’s able to.
He’s been planning to put a new rim on that wheel since the spring. He spins it once more, watches the gap hold even all the way around, and decides it’ll do another year.
A Prayer to Remember
You gave this faith, and you gave it through your own righteousness, so it came out the same for an apostle and for a stranger who got the letter. Say that to me again on the mornings I can’t feel any of it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
