I preached a sermon a couple of weeks ago at my church back home. You may have heard me stressing over it. For the people who couldn't be there, but wanted to hear it anyway, I've uploaded a recording of it (thanks, Daddy!) and I've included the text of the sermon that I preached off of below, because video content is overrated.
Hebrew Bible reading: Isaiah 43:1-7
Epistle reading: 1 Peter 2:9-10, 3:8-16
Epistle reading: 1 Peter 2:9-10, 3:8-16
I love the verses from 1 Peter that we just read. “But you
are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in
order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are
God’s people.”
I love the images in these verses, and the promises and the
challenges. It’s the last verse that always gets me thinking, though. “Once you
were not a people, but now you are God’s people.”
Who are God’s people? What does that even mean?
The Bible actually spends a lot of time trying to answer
this question, from the earliest books to the most recent letters and that’s
what I want to dig into today. But it’s a big question so let’s back down to
something more approachable.
Who are your people?
Take a few seconds and think about that question. Who are
your people?
Now turn to someone beside you and talk about that question.
Who are your people? What does that question mean? What’s your answer to that
question?
If I were answering these questions, I’d have to say that my
people are my family. They’re the first ones to name me and claim me and have
been there for me throughout my life. But they’re not my only people-- I have
lifelong friends who are always a message or a phone call away no matter where
in the world we are, and they’re my people too. As I’ve journeyed through life,
I’ve found more and more people to be my people, friends and coworkers and
colleagues who are excited about the same things I’m excited about and feel
similar calls on our hearts and lives.
And of course, y’all are my people. St. Luke’s is the place
where I was baptized, the community of love and forgiveness that helped raise
me to be a faithful disciple who walks in the way that leads to life. This is a
place that has been a waterfall of God’s prevenient grace in my life. Because
of my time here, I’ve always known in my being that the church is a
place I can belong, a place where I am loved and valued. That is one of the
most beautiful gifts we can give each other and I know not everybody has that
experience with church, so thank you for that, even if I don’t know you yet.
So. We know that people are important to us today. This
exercise of naming our people can be helpful for us in understanding ourselves.
As important as that is for us, though, it was even more so in the world of the
New Testament, the first century Roman Empire, but in a different way.
See, in first century Rome, who your people were defined you.
How you were related to other people defined who you were. It’s called a dyadic
personality. Who your people are is what sets others’ expectations for you. You
did what you family always did, or what your patron told you to do (or, if you were
a patron, what the people dependent on you needed you to do [or, if you were a
slave, what your master told you to do {or, if you were a wife, what your
husband told you to do}]). You defined yourself by your place in relation to
other people. You had to know your people, or you didn’t know yourself.
Take a second and put yourself in the shoes of a
first-century Christian. You’ve heard about Jesus of Nazareth from other
Christians, you’ve come to believe that he was the Son of God, and you’ve
allowed that belief to transform every part of your life. Maybe you’ve had to
leave your family and your community because they didn’t receive the Gospel the
same way you did. Because of Jesus, you’ve lost the very thing that defined
you. You don’t know who your people are anymore.
This is why we find the New Testament letter writers calling
their fellow Christians “brother” and “sister” left and right. For them, the
Church was their people. This radically redefined how they understood
themselves.
Now, the original hearers of the letter of 1 Peter would
have known all of this intuitively. They would have understood how being a
Christian redefined them. So when the writer calls them “a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” they would have received comfort
from that. These people, many of whom were already in poverty and had suffered
a second blow by losing a core part of their identity, were being given a new
identity. And not only that, they were called royal. Holy. God’s own. Words
reserved for people like the emperor.
Many of them also would have heard in these verses echoes of
the Exodus story, because, as you know, the early followers of Jesus and most
of members of the early church were Jewish. They would have known the story
that began with God’s promise to make a great nation of Abraham, carried
forward through Isaac, then Jacob and his twelve sons, who went to Egypt in a
time of famine. They would have remembered the stories of how the Hebrews were
slaves in Egypt and how God raised up Moses to demand their freedom from
Pharaoh. After the Passover, after crossing the Red Sea, after songs of
celebration led by Miriam, after water from a rock and manna from the sky,
Moses stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, about to receive the Torah from God,
and called those Israelites wandering in the desert God’s “treasured possession
out of all peoples” and “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” those that God
had borne “on eagles’ wings and brought to” God’s self. (Exodus 19) By using
the words he uses, the writer of 1 Peter reminds his listeners of these sacred
stories. He invites Christians into this larger story of who God’s people
are.
So that seems to answer the question. Who are God’s people?
The ones God called out of Egypt, redeemed from slavery, and brought to God’s
self. Biblical writers would have identified God’s people as Israel.
Except… the story is a little more complicated than that.
In the book of Joshua, almost soon as Israel emerges from
the wilderness and enters the land of Canaan, we get the story of Rahab, the
woman of Jericho who helped the Israelite spies. She and her household are
spared from the destruction of Jericho, and we are told “her family has lived
in Israel ever since.” (Josh 6:25) So apparently the people of God can include
Canaanites, not just Israelites.
We also find the story of Ruth, set in the time of the
Judges, before Israel had a king. Ruth is the
Moabite, not Israelite, daughter-in-law of Naomi. Naomi left Israel for Moab
when there was a famine and Ruth followed her home when she returned, but Ruth
is only related to the people of Israel by marriage. Yet at the end of the
book, we find that she's in the genealogy of David, the king whose rule defined
the glory days of Israel. It seems that Moabites can not only be among the
people of God, but even hold a place of honor in Israel.
Or what about Hagar? Long before Israel came to Canaan,
before there even was an Israel to
come to Canaan, Hagar was a slave belonging to Sarah, Abraham's wife. When she
flees because of Sarah's mistreatment, God appears to Hagar, the first woman in
the bible to receive a theophany. God promises to make a great nation out of
her son, Ishmael. If we count Abraham and Sarah’s descendants among God’s
people because God appeared to him and made him a promise, maybe we should be
counting the descendants of Abraham and Hagar, too.
It seems like maybe the definition of the people of God
could be wider than we thought (though some other books of the bible, like
Ezra-Nehemiah, would disagree with that). But even if we let some of these
outsiders in, the important thing is that they follow the Torah, the teaching
of Moses. That’s what sets the people of God apart from anyone else in the
Ancient Near East. It’s their covenant with God, the agreement between God and
Israel that determines what it means for Israel to be God’s people.
The prophets certainly had some thoughts about that. During
the time of each of the prophets, people in the two kingdoms of Israel and
Judah were disobeying the Torah, usually by oppressing the poor and aligning
themselves with foreign powers. The condemnation from the prophets could be
harsh. Take Hosea for example. Hosea, married to a faithless wife, named two of
the children Lo-ruh-a-mah and Lo-ammi, names meaning Not Pitied and Not My People.
He did this to show the elite of Israel how God felt about their abandonment of
God's ways. When they have turned back to God, it is then that God says, “I
will have pity on Lo-ruh-a-mah (not pitied), and I will say to Lo-ammi (not my people),
‘You are my people’; and Lo-ammi will say, ‘You are my God.’” (Hos. 3:23) The
writer of 1 Peter has Hosea in mind as he writes.
The Hebrew Bible takes so seriously the covenant between God
and God’s people that it understands world events as judgement for not honoring
that covenant and breaking God’s Torah. The most powerful example of this is
the way in which the Hebrew Bible talks about the Babylonian Exile. It impacts
many of the prophets and changes the course of their history. The prophet Ezekiel,
for example, sees a vision of God leaving the Holy of Holies of the Temple in
Jerusalem before the Babylonians strike, because of Israel’s faithlessness. The
entire book of Jeremiah responds to the trauma of this event. Psalm 137 says
“By the rivers of Babylon we hung up our lyres… for how can we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land?” God’s people were devastated by this loss of their
home and their sanctuary.
So it is after the fighting is over and the destruction has
come and many of the people of Israel are living in exile in Babylon that we
find these words from our passage from Isaiah.
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by
name, you are mine.
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; …
“When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, …
“For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your
Savior. …
“Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I
love you…
“I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the
west I will gather you…
“…bring my songs from far away and my daughters from the end
of the earth—everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”
Again, God calls to God’s people. God calls to the ones who
have broken God’s will and not obeyed God’s law, who have disregarded their
sacred covenant with God and who now, they believe, are suffering for that
disobedience. God sees their brokenness, just as God heard them in Egypt and
God calls them by name. You are mine. I will gather you to me, everyone who is
called by my name, whom I created for
my glory, whom I formed and made.
Do not be afraid. I have redeemed you, God says. My people,
in your exile, in your suffering, remember that I have called you by name and
you are precious in my sight.
Now, these words that Isaiah speaks to the Exiles, we tend
to read as being about us. Same with the words from Hosea. The New Testament
writers did that too. Why? Because a world-changing event had happened in the
time between the prophets and the New Testament letters.
Jesus.
When the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, how we
understood the universe changed. How we understood God changed. Jesus, by his life, death, and resurrection, tore the
curtain in the Temple in two and broke apart the separation sin had placed
between us and God. Jesus’ death and resurrection opens the gates for the
justifying grace that redeems even us, even me, and puts us back in right
relationship with God. He frees us from our slavery to sin and death. For the
people who lived closest in time to Jesus, he was new light by which everything
else was seen. The whole of scripture was opened up in a new way.
Jesus is the reason why the writer of 1 Peter is able to say
to us Christians, we who are the Gentiles of the Church, that we were once no
people but now we are God’s people. He’s the reason why the writer of Ephesians
says that in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor
Greek and why the writer of Colossians can say that all things are held together.
Through Jesus, Paul writes in Romans, we are given a spirit of adoption, made
co-heirs with Christ who is the end, the fulfillment, of the Torah. Again, the
circle of the people of God has been drawn wider. We who were no people are now
God’s people, through God’s redeeming act in Christ. Now these stories we’ve
been talking about, these stories of God and God’s people, they’re our stories
through Jesus.
It is in our redemption that 1 Peter tells us that we were
called and claimed “so that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called
you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
How do we even begin to do that?
Well, there’s a straightforward answer here. We proclaim. We
aren’t shy to talk about Jesus, to tell the stories of God and God’s people,
including our own stories from our lives of faith. We all have our own darkness
that God has called us out of. That is what God does for us through grace. Our
job is to proclaim the light we now live in. As 1 Peter says, “Always be ready
to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope
that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” Let that little light
of yours shine some.
The writer of 1 Peter has other work for us too, work that
we find throughout the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels and letters of the New
Testament. He tells us in 3:8 to have “love for one another.” If you read the
sections in between the verses we read today, you’ll find instructions for how
to live in Roman society but you’ll also find that that love is radical. 1
Peter tells its hearers to honor, to love one another without a regard for the
different statuses the world placed upon them. The expectations of the world do
not tell the Church how to love. Those hierarchical person-to-person
relationships that were so important to self-understanding in the Roman world,
the writer upends them, telling both
husband and wife to have regard for each other. He tells us to “live as free
people”, people who “have a unity of spirit… sympathy… a tender heart, and a
humble mind”. What matters is our life and hope in Christ, the grace transforming
us into loving people.
And love we should. The circle of God’s people only grows as
wide as we allow it to. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God
who saw and cared for Hagar, Rahab, and Ruth. This God is the one who calls to
the slave and the exile and knows their name. This same God calls to us in our
exile and our bondage. God knows our names and cares so deeply for us that God
couldn’t stay away and instead took the form of a servant so that all may be
free. The beautiful thing about our Bible is that it preserves these stories of
the ever-growing people of God, the story of God’s plan that has length and
width and depth enough to encompass all of us, every single person who has been
unexpectedly but undeniably called and claimed by God through Christ. It also
preserves the stories of all of the bumps along the way. May we learn, as God’s
people throughout history have learned, that God’s ways are bigger, bolder,
more loving and more marvelous than anything we can imagine.
May we hear the Word speaking to us so that God’s love and
grace may abound in the world.
Amen.
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